Our Father is Younger than We

The novelty of routine...

Jonathon (my husband) and I were discussing a piano rendition of “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence,” he was practicing up for church a few weeks ago, and marveling at how old the words and tune are. It was written just shortly after the Bible was completed. I think that qualifies it as an ancient hymn.

We marveled over the fact that it has been sung over and over again throughout the centuries by nearly every denomination in existence. It was an awe-inspiring thought.

And then our faces collectively fell as we reflected on what so many Christians think of music like that. Old. Dry. Stuffy. Boring. Like the liturgy, or anything predictable in worship.

We know plenty of folks whose eyes glaze over at any hymn written before 1980. Anything else, they’ve got their hands in the air, eyes closed, swaying.

If you asked them why the newer hymns are better, you’d get a variety of responses:

“They feel more worshipful.”

“They just minister to me better.”

“They have more emotion.”

Which is perplexing to me because something like “O Sacred Head Now Wounded” or “Let all Mortal Flesh Keep Silence,” is drenched in emotion, mystery, solemnity and beauty, matched only by the truth of the words sung.

As with so many things, I think it’s a case of in with the new and out with the old. As if old or familiar and routine is less spiritual than new and spontaneous.

I have attended churches, for instance, where the pastors insisted on changing the order of worship unexpectedly and at random because they believed people got too comfortable and were going through the motions rather than genuinely worshiping. This, mind you, in a denomination that doesn’t even use the liturgy.

A horror of the same old thing.

Uncle Screwtape wrote of this to his nephew, Wormwood, in Chapter 25 of one of my favorite books of CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters. The Screwtape character is an elder devil counseling a young tempter in training in the best methods of spoiling a young convert to Christianity, the patient.

He writes:

My dear Wormwood,

…What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call ‘Christianity And.’ You know—-Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing… If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian coloring. Work on their horror of the Same Old Thing.

The horror of the same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart—an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship. The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme. He gives them in His Church a spiritual year; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before.

Now just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty…

This demand is valuable in various ways. In the first place it diminishes pleasure while increasing desire. The pleasure of novelty is by its very nature more subject than any other to the law of diminishing returns. And continued novelty costs money, so that the desire for it spells avarice or unhappiness or both. And again, the more rapacious this desire, the sooner it must eat up all the innocent sources of pleasure and pass on to those the Enemy forbids. Thus by inflaming the horror of the Same Old Thing we have recently made the Arts, for example, less dangerous to us than perhaps, they have ever been, ‘low-brow’ and ‘high-brow’ artists alike being now daily drawn in to fresh, and still fresh, excesses of lasciviousness, unreason, cruelty, and pride.

I could go on and just quote the entire chapter it’s so insightful, but you get the idea. Just get yourself a copy of The Screwtape Letters and read it for yourself.

Of course, I’m not saying that we must never sing new hymns. My dad wrote new hymns. My brother writes new hymns. New hymns are great.

But I have noticed that those denominations that succumb to the siren song of “progress” and throw out old traditions in favor of the next new thing, tend to do it entirely. They often don’t include the old thing alongside the new. If it’s included at all, it’s the old thing but with the newer twist. It’s Amazing Grace but with drums and keyboard and electric guitars and a bridge and a soloist that no one in the congregation can sing with because of riffs and ad-libbing. Those who put the worship team front and center I think genuinely mean to make worship more accessible to younger generations. But they usually throw out the hymn books altogether. And we all suffer a great loss. Because ironically, worship becomes less accessible. It’s hard to sing with soloists. It’s much easier to sing hymns.

Congregational singing, raise the roof kind of congregational singing, in most churches is almost a thing entirely of the past now.

So, does this tossing out the old thing in horror lead in every case to “lasciviousness, unreason, cruelty, and pride” as was Screwtape’s assertion and design? Probably not. But maybe, too. I don’t know. Look around at the western church and make your own assessment.

Certain mega churches in my state continuously rocked by scandal are included in mine. From one of these, I am expecting news of an arrest and possibly a murder trial or worse sometime in the next year. (I only mention mega churches because they have perfected the ambiance of the modern worship style.)

I think that there is a good bit of strength in not needing the next new thing all the time. There is strength in enjoying the nuances, of seeing in a new light, the same old thing as it comes around again.

GK Chesterton masterfully described this in his book Orthodoxy.

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

I aspire to be like my Father. For He is younger than me.

So, it’s only fitting that I conclude by singing the song that began this whole train of thought. A very, very old thing, indeed. To hear me singing this song, you can click the “play” button at the top of this page.

Let all Mortal Flesh Keep Silence

Let all mortal flesh keep silence,
and with fear and trembling stand;
ponder nothing earthly minded,
for, with blessing in His hand,
Christ our God to earth descendeth,
our full homage to demand.

King of kings, yet born of Mary,
as of old on earth He stood,
Lord of lords, in human vesture,
in the body and the blood.
He will give to all the faithful
His own self for heav'nly food.

Rank on rank the host of heaven
spreads its vanguard on the way,
as the Light of light descendeth
from the realms of endless day,
that the pow'rs of hell may vanish
as the darkness clears away.

At His feet the six-winged seraph,
cherubim with sleepless eye,
veil their faces to the Presence,
as with ceaseless voice they cry,
“Alleluia, alleluia,
alleluia, Lord Most High!”

That’s all for now. Until next time, folks…

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