H(y)m(n)

I am not a traditionalist by trade. So why am I so bothered by the recent experience of singing a familiar hymn that – surprise! – the words on the printed page did not match the lyrics coming out of my mouth? My first reflex was to shift into inclusive mode whereby God really is just God and not him or he or any other identifiable masculine pronoun. I looked again at the hymn. My reflex was not wrong; it just wasn't fully right. Not only was he not present, but gone was Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Damn. I made another quick adjustment. God was now economic only, so: creator, sustainer and sanctifier.  The organ played on, my colleagues sung with intent, and I just kept invoking a different language.

The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously quipped that to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life. A familiar hymn wrung through the processes of modern sensibilities doesn’t qualify for an entire language, but the idea that a form of life (i.e. the system of reference by means of which we see and come to understand our world) results from a language is suggestive when considering something as ordinary as changing the words of a hymn. Like the general mood in most churches to ‘clean up’ the remains of unhelpful images or gender bias in our liturgies and songs, the whole point of adjusting our language is precisely to allow our form of life to be different from our predecessors. We don’t want to see or understand the world in the same way as some before us, so we tweak a title here, and adjust an image there. The result is something entirely the same, just a little more proper or appropriate.

It is an open question to what degree the re-imagined rites and music of the church help promote something like a form of life that avoids the pitfalls of former generations. Thomas Aquinas argued that we need to have lots of images and metaphors for God, lest we begin to believe that any one image or metaphor captures the mystery of God. Can God be angry? Yes. Can God be a rock? Sure. Is God by nature angry or a rock? No. God is by nature, unknowable. Scripture and the tradition of the church provide us with language that allows us to speak with confidence about God and God’s ways (e.g. God is good, God is love, God is just), but we should not think that in doing so, we are somehow naming the very essence of God. In any case, our ‘God talk’ is analogical, meaning that when we speak of God as, say, good, we are using a word familiar to us and its use in our grammar, but when applied to God we mean more than we can possible say. Aquinas said we can’t even grasp the essence of a fly. To think we are capturing God with our images or metaphors is like throwing a rock into the ocean; no matter how good our aim is or how true our intent is, the rock will simply be absorbed by the waters and sink.  Our language about God is like the rock: it never stays put or in place. This doesn’t make our language about God worthless; rather, it means that our language about God doesn’t do anything to God. Instead, we are shaped by what we say; it is our form of life that results from our language about the divine.

In the end it does seem to come down to the kind of life we seek through the language that we use. Language is not simply words and grammar; language is to human community what the soul is to the body: it animates us (i.e. is life giving) and is the way we have life with others. Change the language and we begin to notice that the way we relate is also adjusted. To tweak our words is to begin to imagine a particular vision of our world.

Staring at the bulletin, I was struggling to share my life with others as I continued to trip over the words of the hymn. I didn’t care for the tweaks that removed the familiar cadence that comes with certain words sung in certain order. The whole experience left me wondering if I had become part of the scorned minority who refuse to say or sing anything other than what’s ‘traditional’. But questions rattled in my empty head: what form of life was being sought in changing the hymn? What did we wish to accomplish in shifting from one set of images and metaphors about God to another set of images and metaphors?  The field of language in worship is some of our better fought territory. Bodies from the left and right are strewn on the fields of decades of grammatical battle. Has it been worth it? Do we now embody a form of life more faithful to the Gospel than before? I’m not really sure. I’m still getting over the trauma of singing the wrong (right?) hymn.