Confessions of a crusty hymn purist

The first time someone told me I sang beautifully, I was standing in my parents’ kitchen washing dishes and caroling an 80-year-old tune over the sink suds. The song had transmitted to me, a tiny but vigorous soprano, via the bouncing lines of our family’s red hymnal:

I was sinking deep in sin, far from the peaceful shore, Very deeply stained within, sinking to rise no more; But the master of the sea heard my despairing cry, From the waters lifted me, now safe am I!

“You sing beautifully,” said a woman who was visiting at the time. “You should sing in church.”

No little girl forgets a compliment like that. I tucked it into my heart. And with time, hymns became more than recreation to me. Hymnody became one of the deepest loves of my life, and one of my quickest routes to God.

Throughout my New York childhood and adolescence, hymns accumulated in my brain faster than snow did in our arctic backyard. I memorized them by accident and on purpose. Over the phone, my best friend Kayla taught me “Sweet Hour of Prayer” because she knew it and I didn’t. While I cleaned the bathroom, I memorized verse after verse of “From Every Stormy Wind that Blows” and “My Faith Has Found a Resting Place.” On long car trips, I sat in the backseat looking out the window singing hymns, my parents wondering from where on earth this endless canticle supply had come.

For the most part, it came from the congregation. Nothing stirs me like a gathering of saints who have joined their jubilating sets of lungs to common and aging melodies. I found the love of hymns in the generations that came before me. My mother recalls going to bed in the upstairs of a neighbor’s house while her parents stayed up nightlong singing hymns with friends. What would I give to be there, drifting to sleep with those strains seeping through the floor grate? I would give you a hundred new-fangled worship choruses, and you could keep them.

That, of course, is the problem. I am too young to be a crusty hymn purist. I am also too much of a Christian.

In Ephesians 5, the Apostle Paul dooms musical exclusivity with a small, piercing line. He tells us to address one another “in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.” The trifecta, in my view, forbids my snobbery. It also lends balance to the wrangling over whether church songs should be sung to God or to other members of the congregation. Paul tells us to “address one another.” He also tells us to sing and make “melody to the Lord.” Psalms, hymns, or spiritual songs? To others, or to God? The answer is always all, because all things are ours in Christ.

In our new Pennsylvania house, I still sing hymns over the sink. I also sing them to our little baby, still in the womb. In church I sing other songs: the praise-choruses that still have to grow on me. Because singing to Jesus and His people is not about me. It’s about Him, and them.