NEW HYMN TEXT - I Scan the Mountains for a Sign
Hi friends! It’s my second installment of this Substack experiment, and it seems to be going fairly well so far? Amazingly, a couple of you have signed up for a paid subscription, and that’s such an unexpected gift! Thank you. If you do want to support this work without paying anything (like I would!), the best way you can do it is by sharing the posts with anyone you think might be interested. Thanks!
When I was a kid, me and my three siblings were all in the Hermantown Youth Chorus (now Lake Superior Youth Chorus), a 4th-8th grade children’s choir in our local community. In addition to giving me the confidence to sing in public and the ear for finding harmony parts (though once my voice broke, it took many years before I could pick out the tenor part before the alto!), one of the greatest gifts that experience gave me was a rich depository of sacred song. It was a gift that, like the savings bonds my Grandma Esther gave me each Christmas around that same time, only has grown more valuable with time. We sang English carols (John Rutter’s “Angels’ Choir”), South African freedom songs (“Siyahamba/We Are Marching” or “Asikhatali/It Doesn’t Matter if You Should Jail Us”), Jewish prayers for peace (“Al Shlosha D’varim”), or allusive and illusive songs that were awash in biblical language, but would not be contained by tenet or creed (“River in Judea”)—and these songs resonating in my body at such a young age has proven to be an elemental and formative grace. Two of the most memorable were different versions of Psalm 121: an arrangement of Mendelssohn’s “Lift Thine Eyes” from Elijah and Paul Bouman’s “I Lift Up My Eyes to the Hills.”
Bouman’s arrangement especially has remained near to me. One particularly vivid memory (which no doubt means much of it is constructed) finds me fully decked out in our choir uniforms—including forest green (it was the 90s!) bow ties and cummerbunds—singing the song from the choir loft centered around a massive organ in a beautiful stone church. Needless to say, it was quite the contrast from the music I was accustomed to in the Pentecostal services at Duluth Gospel Tabernacle! The song has remained a sonic friend, deeply indwelt, that has accompanied me over the last thirty years and unconsciously returned to my lips at unlikely and unbidden times.
So, though I don’t tend to write many Psalm paraphrases (there seems to be so many excellent ones already), I decided to attempt it with one whose various paraphrases hve already meant so much to me. Psalm 121 is part of a group of psalms known as Psalms of Ascent, so many scholars believe these psalms would have been sung as Jewish pilgrims made their way up to Jerusalem. Perhaps unconsciously inspired by The Sound of Music (the part when the Von Trapps find out they will have to hike over the mountains and the Mother Superior reminds Maria, “You will not be alone. Remember: ‘I lift up mine eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help’” [and the part where I’m crying]), I pictured a person on a journey through the mountains who needs to remember and feel God’s fidelity and care.
I scan the mountains for a sign:
will granite gods come to my aid?
No, you, their Maker, are divine,
outshining all that you have made.
You will not let my foothold fail
when easy paths turn rough and steep;
though I grow weary on the trail
my keeper will not fall asleep.
When sunlight’s rays burn hot and bright
or guiding stars begin to fade,
Creator of the day and night,
you are my shepherd and my shade.
You keep my life from evil’s way,
yet give me courage to explore;
for if I choose to go or stay,
you guard me now and evermore.
© 2024 GIA, Inc.
I originally wrote the text in four stanzas, but when it came time to find a tune, nothing quite worked in that meter (Long Meter - 8.8.8.8.). However, when I combined the four stanzas into two, I found that the Scottish folk tune YE BANKS AND YE BRAES fit perfectly, giving the text the sense of movement and build up that best reflects the movement and build up of the text itself. Also, please note in the demo below my complete lack of breath control. It takes years of lazy singing to perfect this art.
As usual, you can purchase the music through GIA Unbound here.
Wonder-ings
In a couple weeks, a colleague and I will be starting up a small group at my church on reconstructing faith. It seems like important work because many of us who have discarded large and problematic chunks of the evangelical tradition have grown too adept at tearing down during our (absolutely necessary) deconstruction phase, but we often lack the vision or the tools to build something new. We know what we don’t want to be, but do we have the courage to imagine what we might yet be? To do so is difficult because it requires leaving our havens of cynicism and risking vulnerability once more, and there is always the danger of being burned again. That initial and essential deconstruction work always brings to mind a part of Mexican poet Octavio Paz’s “Arenas Movedizas/The Poet’s Work”:
“With great difficulty advancing by millimeters each year, I carve a road out of the rock. For millenniums my teeth have wasted and my nails broken to get there, to the other side, to the light and the open air. And now that my hands bleed and my teeth tremble, unsure in a cavity cracked by thirst and dust, I pause and contemplate my work. I have spent the second part of my life breaking the stones, drilling the walls, smashing the doors, removing the obstacles I placed between the light and myself in the first part of my life” (tr. Eliot Weinberger).
Yesterday, though, I was reading early church historian Roberta Bondi’s memoir Memories of God, and she too described theological deconstruction as important work, but suggested that theology can also give us the redemptive tools toward a new and liberative view of God and ourselves:
“Theology, I would now say, is about saving lives, and the work of theology…is saving work. First, it involves learning to see the ways in which false images of God, ourselves, and the world have bound us and taken away the life God intends for us. Second, it involves learning to know God as God is, as a healing God, and learning to know ourselves, individually and communally, as people who correspond with that God in whose image we are made. Third, it involves imaging a future that is consistent with the God we come to now.”
That seems to about sum up the work I am interested in.
Some other quotes that seem to relate to this theological work:
“The answer is in the story, / and the story isn’t finished.”
-Padraig O'Tuoma, “Narrative Theology #1”“If there’s anything worth calling theology, it is listening to people’s stories—listening to them and honoring and cherishing them.”
-Mary Pellauer“To know a primrose is a higher thing than to know all the botany of it—just as to know Christ is an infinitely higher thing than to know all theology, all that is said about his person, or babbled about his work.”
-George MacDonald
May you experience the God of love, from whence cometh our help.
Peace,
Dave