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STLT#167, Nothing but Peace Is Enough
Today we get to the first of several pieces by Jim Scott, a prolific UU songwriter and performer. It’s interesting to me that while some of his songs are full on hymns (Gather the Spirit, The Oneness of Everything, etc.) we also get some short pieces that are the choruses of longer songs. That’s the… Continue reading
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STLT#166, Years Are Coming
Yesterday (and elsewhere) I talked about how the first line of a song wasn’t always or necessarily the title of a song, and the use of such can be frustrating or misleading. I’m thinking it may be a good thing that the original title of this piece, by Universalist minister Adin Ballou, “Reign of Christian… Continue reading
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STLT#165, When Windows That Are Black and Cold
1:52pm: Cool update at the end of this post. One of my regular readers, Kaye, regularly points out in comments the titles that don’t make sense because they aren’t titles at all but rather first lines. I know from experience that if the first line doesn’t grab me, I don’t look further, and sometimes I… Continue reading
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STLT#164, The Peace Not Past Our Understanding
This tune is apparently a magnet for messed up rhymes. Now to John Holmes’ credit, his lyrics generally rhyme in a comfortable ABAB structure, but goodness, we got off to a rocky start, as ‘tablecloth’ does not rhyme with ‘truth’ … and while we’re at it, the tune does not support the correct pronunciation of the… Continue reading
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STLT#163, For the Earth Forever Turning
I am a little bit excited to get to this hymn today. First, because it’s just so beautiful. It’s sweeping and lush in its composition, and similarly sweeping and lush in its lyric. Written for Paul Winter’s Missa Gaia, Kim Oler captured something here that is a bit ineffable even as it is grounded and… Continue reading
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STLT#162, Gonna Lay Down My Sword and Shield
Ear worm in three.. two… one…. As an American growing up in the 1970s, I learned this in elementary school, and I associated it with Vietnam War protests. This might even have been the first African American spiritual I learned, and I didn’t even know at the time it was one. In fact, I don’t… Continue reading
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STLT#161, Peace! The Perfect Word
Remember when I was eyeballs deep in those aspirational hymns in the In Time To Come section? And how wearing, given our current political crisis, I found them? Yeah. Here we are again. I am worn out by these hymns, barreling down, calling us over and over and over again to remain hopeful and energized.… Continue reading
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STLT#160, Far Too Long, by Fear Divided
It’s non sequitur day here on the Far Fringe – I have several utterly unrelated thoughts, so I’m just going to write them and let you make up the transitions in your head. I would love to know exactly what English pronunciations were like in previous centuries that allowed ‘sword’ to be rhymed with ‘word’… Continue reading
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STLT#159, This Is My Song
This hymn, y’all. First – we’re already into the Peace section; Labor and Learning was short, sweet, and to the point. Second – I am not Finnish. Nowhere in my family’s known genealogy is there any Scandinavian blood; we’re all German and English, with a dollop of Dutch and a dash of Irish. Yet this… Continue reading
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STLT#158, Praise the Source of Faith and Learning
I’m a little more in love with this hymn today than I was yesterday. I’ve used it several times – often with services about the arts or knowledge and reason. But even then, I don’t know that I actually meditated on the lyrics, written by Thomas Troeger, now a professor of preaching at Yale (officially… Continue reading
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links
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