NEW HYMN TEXT - When Our Faith Has Lost Its Feeling
Hi friends! Thanks you for reading my reflections on hymns, worship, and whatever else I’m thinking about lately. As always, the best way to support Lost in Wonder is to share with friends who might be interested. I appreciate the gift of your attention.
This past fall, I had the immense privilege of traveling to France with a group of seminary students for a class on arts and mission. We first spent five packed days in Paris and its environs listening to local artists reflect on their faith and craft, visiting museums and other cultural sites of interest (D’Orsay, the Louvre, the Rodin Museum [my new favorite—perhaps more on the last one in a post to come], Chartres Cathedral, Versailles), and enjoying the conviviality that only comes from sitting for hours at long tables sharing fresh-baked bread and dry red wine. (Oh, the delightfully slow pace of a French dinner!)
We then left the moveable feast that is Paris and headed for the French countryside to the monastery of Taizé. Coming from this almost Dionysian Parisian experience, arriving at Taizé was what might best be described as cultural whiplash. Taizé, for those who might not be familiar, is an ecumenical monastic community in the Burgundy countryside begun by Brother Roger Schütz in 1940 with the vision of fostering reconciliation, unity, and peace. The community has become a pilgrimage for young people in part due to its unique style of contemplative worship that combines terse scripture readings, prayer, silence, and—what they’re best-known for—short cyclical songs like “Wait for the Lord,” “Jesus, Remember Me,” and “O Lord, Hear My Prayer.” These mantra-like songs are repeated over and over again so that with each repetition the simple message can sink deeper and deeper into one’s being.
With this style of worship three times a day, it is no doubt understandable why the juxtaposition between Paris and Taizé was initially so jarring, but it went beyond the new liturgical rhythms. Instead of days crammed from morning to night with excursions, we had long stretches of empty time for prayer, contemplation, and reflection; instead of a hotel (albeit a simple one), we had rustic (euphemism) barracks replete with ancient metal bunks (or a single-person tent in my case); instead of three-course meals, we had very simple (mostly) vegetarian fare with instant coffee. It took a day or two to adjust to these more ascetic environs and patterns (as one student quipped, only half joking, “I’ve grown accustomed to a certain lifestyle!”), yet the slow and simple rhythms gradually took hold.
Once they did, I began to realize how much expectation I held for this time. I came to Taizé burnt out and spiritually dry. Those practices that once gave me life—prayer, journaling, corporate worship, and congregational song—now were more often than not leaving me unmoved. Yet, with this intentional time of prayer, contemplation, and worship in a place hallowed by these sacred rhythms for almost a century, I felt almost certain that I would hear God and experience that Divine Presence that had lately felt distant. And I didn’t. I sung, I prayed, I meditated, I talked to a spiritual director…but nothing happened. My anxiety and frustration continued to grow as the departure date grew nearer (which always puts you in a good posture to hear from God!), until at noonday prayer, a short passage from Isaiah 42 was read in multiple languages: “by unknown paths I will guide them” (vs. 16). Maybe the way I had encountered God up to this point were my known paths, the well-traveled routes that were comforting but couldn’t take me to the new places God would have me go. Perhaps I was now being led by an unknown path toward uncharted spiritual territories where God was waiting (and yes, there is a paradox in God both guiding me and waiting for me—a paradox that feels truer than the one-or-the-other binary).
This idea made me reflect on the limits of our sensory experience when it comes to Divine encounter. If we can’t see God, are we claiming God is not present? If we can’t sense God’s guidance, do we think we must be abandoned? If we can’t hear God, do we believe that God has stopped speaking? If we can’t feel God holding us, does that mean God has withdrawn care? In this hymn text I tried to express the ways God is holding us, speaking to us, and caring for us even when we cannot experience it.
Each stanza, then, explores one of these different images—holding, hearing, and guiding. The aforementioned verse from Isaiah forms the basis for the last stanza, since it seemed right to end with God’s guidance and provision as we journey into the future. The first stanza was inspired by a favorite poem of one of my favorite poets: Denise Levertov’s “Suspended”:
I had grasped God's garment in the void
but my hand slipped
on the rich silk of it.
The 'everlasting arms' my sister loved to remember
must have upheld my leaden weight
from falling, even so,
for though I claw at empty air and feel
nothing, no embrace,
I have not plummeted.
How often are we carried even when we seem to be clawing at empty air in a void?
In the second stanza, I used the story of Elijah hearing God not in the whirlwind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire but in the (depending upon your translation) “sheer silence,” the “still, small voice,” the “gentle whisper.” Maybe I’m still expecting to hear God in the swirl of awe-inspiring music and worship, the ground-shaking moments of insight, the fiery preaching of the charismatic pastor, and it is that very expectation that God is only present in the cacophony that has kept me from hearing God in the whispered voice, even the absolutely silence (not to mention the deafening noise I invite into my life through the megaphones of social media, snarky podcasts and reels that reinforce my certainty in my own enlightenment and the benighted stupidity of those that disagree with me, the 24-hour news cycle that produces more heat than light. A topic for another newsletter). Using all these ideas and images, this is what I came up with:
When our faith has lost its feeling
and our prayers are choked by fears;
when our wounds have found no healing
and our offering is tears;
in your loving arms you hold us,
though we sense no help at all,
and in mercy you enfold us;
though we flail, we do not fall.
When we cannot hear you speaking
in the bustle and the blare;
when the echo chamber’s shrieking
draws us closer to despair:
in a quiet voice you call us
with a gentle, whispered word.
In your stillness you enthrall us,
and in silence, you are heard.
When we journey through confusion
and we cannot find a trail;
when our hopes are a delusion
and our dreams are bound to fail;
by an unknown path you lead us
through a new and foreign land,
and you guide our feet and feed us
with your holy, hidden hand.
©2024 GIA, Inc.
And here’s a demo where I again show off my inability to play anything with more than two accidentals for more than one stanza:
Wouldn’t that be a lovely Gaelic tune if it was played properly? As always, you can purchase the music here through GIA Unbound.
Wonder-ings
Last week I finally had the opportunity to sit down and watch Wim Wenders’s Academy-Award-nominated film Perfect Days. It follows the daily routine of Hirayama (played to perfection by Kōji Yakusho), an aging Tokyo janitor who makes his living cleaning public toilets. While this might seem to be a recipe for a depressing meditation on ennui or despair, Wenders instead makes it a study of finding beauty in the commonplace: the comfort of ritual, the play of light through tree canopies, the delightful eccentricities of our fellow human beings, the sacramental character of used books, old cassettes, and our daily vending machine coffee. Yes, the movie does occasionally veer into the idealized (the “dirty” public toilets of Tokyo are a little too clean) and sometimes the soundtrack plays like fan service for a particular type of music buff (Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day,” the Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes,” Patti Smith’s “Redondo Beach,” and Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good”), but it helped attune me to wonder in the quotidian, and I recommend it for anyone who needs the reminder.
“I remember the rehearsal when we had our first audience,” Arthur Miller recalled before Death of a Salesman officially opened,
“Six or seven friends. The play working itself out under the single bulb overhead I think that was the first and only time I saw it as others see it. Then it seemed to me that we must be a terribly lonely people, cut off from each other by such massive pretense of self-sufficiency, machined down so fine we hardly touch any more. We are trying to save ourselves separately, and that is immoral, that is the corrosive among us.”
As philosopher Charles Taylor notes, Western modernity has made many of us “buffered selves,” people whose boundaries are so well-defined and imporous that we close ourselves off from the enchantment of the transcendent. Maybe these walls we have built also keep us from encountering one another as fellow vulnerable and porous people (walls, after all, don’t discriminate). Instead, we too often choose to encounter others by catapulting our communications (often incendiary) and our projections of ourselves from behind our defenses, hoping for safety and ensuring existential loneliness. We are all trying to save ourselves separately (which is perhaps one of the besetting sins of evangelicalism). Yes, he later renounced the sentiment of the poem, but I still think the end of W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1935” sounds a pithy truth:
“There is no such thing as the state
And no one exists alone.Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.”
Perhaps what is killing us is our unwillingness to admit our loneliness and come out from behind our defenses, that terrifying and thrilling act of vulnerability that opens up the possibility of encounter—human and divine.
Some more lush and seasonally-appropriate prose from Ali Smith (Spring):
March. It can be pretty hard going.
Lion and lamb. The cold shoulder of spring.
Month of the kind of blossom that could still be snow, month of the papery unsheathing of the heads of the daffodils. The soldiers’ month, it takes its name from Mars, the Roman war god; in Gaelic it’s the winter-spring, and in Old Saxon the rough month, because of the roughness of its winds.
But it’s also the lengthening-month, the one when the day begins to stretch. Month of madnesses and unexpected mellownesses, month of new life. Before the Gregorian calendar the new year started not in January but in March, to celebrate both the vernal equinox with its tilt of the North towards the sun again, and the Feast of the Annunciation, the day the angel appears to the Virgin Mary and announces that even though she’s a virgin she’ll conceive, and by good Spirit.
Surprise. Happy new year. Everything impossible is possible.
The air lifts. It’s the scent of commencement, initiation, threshold. The air lets you know quite ceremonially that something has changed. Primroses deep in the ivy throw wide the arms of their leaves. Colour slashes across the everyday. The deep blue of grape hyacinths, the bright yellows in wastelands catching the eyes of the people on trains. Birds visit the leafless trees, but not leafless like in winter; now the branches stiffen, the ends of the twigs glow like low-burning candles.
Then the rain, and the first sign of hte branch splitting open to blossom on the old tree, the light inside visible in the wood, you can see it even at night under the streetlamp.
This Holy Week if you are struggling to feel God, hear God, or see God, may you find comfort in the truth that God’s presence and love does not depend on our experience of it, and just maybe in what seems like a dying faith, we are being led to a truer and lasting resurrection.
Peace,
Dave