New Hymn Text - Can Anything Anywhere Hinder God's Love

Oct 16, 2024

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Friends! It’s been too long! Combine the beginning of the semester with the end of a pastoral call at my beloved church of fourteen (!) years and an upcoming move (my last Sunday is Nov. 3 at 10:30 if you’re in the Chicago area! I’m not leaving Chicago, just relocating), and you get a perfect recipe for a writing drought. But I am finishing up the final edits on my latest book of hymns, Hope Will Not Fail, and hopefully I can give you more information on the release date when that’s finalized in the next few weeks. Now to the hymn.

Every year in July I head to the annual conference of The Hymn Society in the United States and Canada. Now the name might make it sound stuffy, but it’s really an inclusive conference for all people who are passionate about congregational song in its many forms. On top of a wonderful conference this year in Atlanta, my friend and fellow hymnwriter Chris Shelton had a sabbatical grant that enabled several of us to stay a couple extra days, rent a house, and talk all things hymnic (jealous?!) over good food and drink. As part of this colloquy, Chris invited each of us to write a text based on Romans 8:35-39 so we could compare our different takes on the same passage.

The passage from Romans is Paul at his most poetic and powerful, when he moves on from refereeing church divisions or engaging in theological polemics and harnesses all of his rhetorical prowess and fervor to convince people that they are loved by God. In her poem “Magnum Mysterium,” the poet Lucie Brock-Broido , “If I have some important thing to say / I hope I live here long enough / To say it gracefully.” Here Paul says the most important thing he has to say, and he does it with unparalleled grace. What could be a more worthy task in a life?

In repeatedly reading over the passage, the structure that struck me was the rhetorical question, “What can separate us from the love of God?” that begins the passage, and the answer, “[no]thing else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord,” that ends it. So, I decided to start with a question, end with the answering statement, and use the middle section to paraphrase Paul’s list of all the things that try, but fail, to separate us from God’s love.

Can anything anywhere hinder God’s love?
Can anything anywhere hinder God’s love?
Can famine or drought?
Can hardship or doubt?
Can anguish or shame?
Can sword or the flame?
No, nothing can hinder God’s love!
No, nothing can hinder God’s love!

Can anything anywhere hinder God’s love?
Can anything anywhere hinder God’s love?
Can slander or threats?
Can loss or regrets?
Can wars that draw near?
Can futures we fear?
No, nothing can hinder God’s love!
No, nothing can hinder God’s love!

Can anything anywhere hinder God’s love?
Can anything anywhere hinder God’s love?
Can violence or pain?
Can dread or disdain?
Can powers we crave?
Can grief or the grave?
No, nothing can hinder God’s love!
No, nothing can hinder God’s love!

I finished the text right before arriving at the annual conference, and after one of the plenaries, I ran into my dear friend and collaborator Mark Miller. I showed him the text and asked if he was interested in setting it, and about an hour later he texted and told me to meet him in a nearby practice room. He had already composed the tune! Here’s my demo, with my own intro and turnaround because I couldn’t play his four times in a row while filming.

You can purchase the music through GIA Unbound here.

Wonder-ings

I already loved Kathy Bates, but then she went on Colbert and mused on a quote from Dune that helps her face her own fears. I’m holding up the “10” scorecard already. But it gets better! She then went on to say that she keeps a list of quotes in her Notes app on her phone, and her favorite is from Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire when Blanche Dubois declares, “Sometimes—there’s God—so quickly.” When Colbert asks what that means to her, she responds, “It’s grace—a moment of grace you least expect. Usually when two people experience a moment that is healing, that is something they didn’t expect that comes out of where? We don’t know—but it fills us with hope and inspiration and togetherness.” Amen.
While I think the Tortured Artist trope isn’t helpful, and can even be extremely damaging, a friend sent this quote from the psychologist Rollo May, and I can’t help but give thanks for those people who do wrestle with meaninglessness until they create meaning, and even wonder and beauty:
”Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of ‘divine madness,’ to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and werstling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.”
Finally, a little of Origen’s hopeful vision of God’s complete redemption of the world to get you through your day: “Because God himself has sowed and planted and given life to this seed, even though it may be overgrown and hidden, it will never be destroyed and extinguished completely; it will glow and shine, gleam and burn, and it will never cease to turn toward God.”