New Hymn Text - We Will Rejoice in Love
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Is there any more complicated word than love? The word can somehow be both hopelessly cheap and impossibly costly, completely selfish and wholly selfless, hackneyed and holy. It’s used to sell deodorant and dismantle empires of injustice, recruit people to war or woo people to peace. “Love,” Dante diagnosed, “the seed within yourself of every virtue and every act that merits punishment.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about love lately, especially as it relates to motivation. As someone who imperfectly follows a God who is love, I believe love is not only the ends toward which I strive, but also the means I must employ to accomplish that end. Love is both summit and source, and to attempt to arrive at the summit by another means is a fool’s errand.
And yet. And yet, I’m all too ready to believe I can reach loving or just or beautiful ends by hateful or unjust or ugly means. Say I want to be a more loving individual who engages in beneficial spiritual and physical practices and helps others (which I do!). My go-to motivators are often guilt and shame, which I deftly employ with sledgehammer-like precision to browbeat myself into submission.
“Fine, I’ll do centering prayer!”
“Okay, okay, I’ll volunteer at the warming center!”
Unsurprisingly, any progress tends to be short-lived, requiring larger and larger doses of guilt and shame.
The same seems to often hold true for political movements. We want a more just and loving world, so we motivate ourselves and our neighbors by stoking our hatred against the enemies we see holding back progress. I go to the protest or the march when I am good and angry, and then slowly drift back into my comfortable routine until a new enraging story hits my newsfeed.
Rage, however, can become addictive and corrosive, eating away at our selves and relationships until our movements reflect the same injustice and infighting as the unjust systems we sought to reform (activist adrienne marie brown has written eloquently about this in We Will Not Cancel Us). As Thich Nhat Hanh wrote in his spiritual classic Being Peace, “The peace movement can write very good protest letters, but they are not yet able to write a love letter.”
A few weeks ago, I preached on that passage from Ephesians 3:14-21, a paean to the vast dimensions—the breadth, length, height, and depth—of Christ’s love that surpasses knowledge. But the part of the passage I focused on was that evocative image: “being rooted and grounded in love.” The metaphor of rootedness suggests that what fruits we produce depends on what soil we are rooted in. As I reflected,
Too often our communities are rooted in a shared ideology, a common enemy, or even a mutual fear or shame of the same threat. And while this may be a powerful tool for group cohesion, there’s a couple fundamental problems with such an approach. First, what happens when we lose that ideology or enemy or fear? What then holds us together? As Mahatma Gandhi wisely remarked, “What is gained through fear only lasts while the fear lasts,” and the same could be said for guilt or shame or a common enemy. Love, on the other hand, is inexhaustible, and only flows all the more freely when it is drawn upon and shared.
If we want our fruits to be loving, we must root ourselves in love. For in the still prophetic words of Óscar Romero,
“Let me not tire of preaching love;
it is the force that will overcome the world.
Let me not tire of preaching love,
Though we sees the waves of violence
succeed in drowning the fires of Christian love,
love must win out; it is the only thing that can.”
In this hymn text, I tried to sing myself toward what I want to embody: a life motivated by and enfolded in love.
We will rejoice in love,
lift up our voice in love,
make every choice in love,
we will uphold your world in love.
We will delight in love,
share and invite in love,
till all unite in love,
we will enfold your world in love.
We will repent in love,
raise our lament in love,
dare to dissent in love,
we will uphold your world in love.
We will persist in love,
choose to resist in love,
and coexist in love,
we will enfold your world in love.
© 2022 GIA, Inc.
When I finished the text, I sent it over to the incomparable Mark Miller who wrote a gentle but stirring tune that so perfectly fits the thrust of the text (and his recording of it will be available soon on his upcoming album!). Here’s my demo where I had to persist after flubbing the word “persist.”
You can purchase the music here through GIA Unbound.
Wonder-ings
Okay, this isn’t really something that brought me wonder, but something I’ve been wondering about lately. I wrote an article, “Consuming Worship,” for my denomination’s magazine. I’m arguing that the planned obsolescence of consumerism has malformed the way we sing and steward songs in the church.
“I do not believe we should be treating congregational song—this medium we have been given to praise God—like another product to be used up and discarded. This constant consumption suggests that ‘good’ worship music requires both constant innovation and constant disposal to make room for the continually new. That cuts many congregations off from continuity with the rich musical tradition of our forebears (besides the occasional “Be Thou My Vision” or “Come, Thou Fount”—those hymns that can be played in a contemporary style). The saints before us have given us a depository of riches, a storehouse of spirituals, hymns, coritos, and 1970s and ’80s praise songs (or, as one friend jokingly refers to them, “traditional contemporary songs!”) that engender a longer view of faith and, hopefully, historical humility. Though we often believe that our contemporary age is “unprecedented,” we could receive comfort, challenge, and guidance from the saints who have gone before us if we were to listen for their voice.”
You know that feeling when it’s about 3:30 in the afternoon and you know you’re not going to do any more actual work, but you feel like you should at least pretend to be busy? Sometimes I play out the clock, sending a few work-related emails between finishing a crossword or mindlessly scrolling through one feed or another. But when I admit to myself that I’m not actually going to do any more work, my favorite thing to do is to walk over to Music Box Theater, an almost 100-year-old independent cinema showing a delightful mix of interesting new releases and classics, for their weekday 4 p.m. showing. On this particular trip, I settled in for Sean Wang’s Dìdi.
Yes, it’s catnip for children of the 90s-early 2000s, and not just because the movie begins with the Belle and Sebastian’s plaintively joyful (joyfully plaintive?) “I’m a Cuckoo.” Flip phones and T9 texting abound; digital cameras and desktops are employed to load homemade skateboarding videos onto YouTube; and teens connect online and do reconnaissance on their secret crushes using that convoluted mix of MySpace, Facebook (in its halcyon days before The Algorithm), and AIM (the *door opening* sound felt like mainlining nostalgia).
But it’s not just nostalgia. Dìdi is a darkly funny coming-of-age story of a second-generation Taiwanese 13-year-old trying to figure out how to live in a liminal space: between a three-generation Taiwanese home and the surrounding U.S. teen culture, between childhood and adulthood, between friendships and flirting, between the life you expected and the life you are given. If you don’t shed a few tears at the end, join the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion, and go beg the Wizard for a heart.
And I simply enjoy the audacity of this story of a Sufi mystic as relayed by Huston Smith:
”We are told that Allah once addressed the Sufi Abu ‘I-Hasan al-Kharraqani saying, ‘Shall I tell the people of thy spiritual drunkenness [a degree of spiritual realization which involved relinquishing outward forms] so that, being scandalized, they will stone thee?’ So established was the Sufi in his advanced state that he answered instantly: ‘Shall I tell the people of thine infinite Mercy [which, being infinite, will redeem everyone eventually] so that they will never again bow down to thee in prayer?’”
May you be upheld and enfolded in the love of God, and in that love find the source of all you do in this world.
Peace,
Dave