Feeling thrinchy

It sounds a little Scroogey or Grinchy to post Thanksgiving caveats - (thrinchy?), but the holiday is so bound up with national history and pride that it would be a healthy thing, I think, to throw a little humility and atonement into the mix. Those Pilgrim forefathers and foremothers, after all, were an early warning of a tidal wave of misery and genocide for Native Americans. I think it's possible to be both proud of your history and ashamed of it at the same time.

For an interesting Catholic take on the spirit of thrinchiness, see Michael J. Iafrate's post, "Are you pro-life? Resist or subvert Thanksgiving," at his blog,  catholicanarchy.org.

We Gather Together

So of course we sang We Gather Together in church this week, and I noticed again how wonderfully rhymey this song is: 6 lines with internal rhyme (chastens/hastens; ordaining/maintaining, etc.) and 8 with end rhyme, and several with both: an astonishing total of 11 out of 12 lines that have at least one kind of rhyme! I can’t think of another hymn that is so amazingly chock-full of rhyme – this hymn rivals Edgar Allen Poe (and Dr. Seuss) in that respect.

But I also saw that it is a Dutch hymn, dating back to the end of the 16th century, and realized that I didn’t have any idea about who the “wicked oppressing” were, what fight was being won from the beginning, or what tribulation the congregation was escaping. I had a vague idea that the hymn is about the Pilgrims, but I suddenly realized that this notion was probably based more on the fact that we sing this hymn on Thanksgiving than on history. So I looked it up.

Interesting stuff. Like many hymns, the melody comes from a folk song, "Wilder dan wilt, wie sal mij temmen." Translated, this is "Wilder than wild, who will tame me?" I wish I could find the translation of the rest of those lyrics, because the first line is terrific!

An unknown Dutchman wrote new lyrics to the folk melody after the 1597 Battle of Turnhout, which was the first time the Dutch had defeated their Spanish conquerors, who forbad Protestant gatherings -- so the first three words celebrate a very subversive activity. It must have been something of a thrill just to get together and sing the first line.
Did American Pilgrims know this song? There’s no proof that they did, but many people think it is probable, given their close ties to the Dutch community. If they did sing it, though, they would not have done so in church. Both in the Netherlands and in the New World, their congregations were strict Psalm-singers; that is, they sang only Psalms, without instrumental accompaniment.

We Gather Together first appeared in an American hymnal in 1903, and then showed up in various hymnals and school songbooks (it used to be taught in public school music classes) in the Northeast and Midwest. According to Carl Daw, executive director of the Hymn Society, this hymn’s "big break" came in 1935, when it was added to the national hymnal of the Methodist-Episcopal Church. (I love the concept of a hymn getting a “big break.” Perhaps Morning Has Broken got its big break when Cat Stevens recorded it. Related joke: Morning has broken. I think Dawn had something to do with it. Make her clean it up.)

The Dutch-American community was late to adopt this most famous Dutch hymn for their services, due to their tradition of Psalm-singing only. Finally, in 1937, 340 years after We Gather Together had been penned, the Christian Reformed Church in North America decided to allow hymns to be sung in worship services – a controversial decision at the time. We Gather Together was chosen as the opening hymn in the denomination’s first hymnal.

We Gather Together became increasingly popular in the United States, especially during the two World Wars. “The wicked oppressing” were often associated with the Germans and the Japanese in the popular mind, and that final heartfelt “O Lord, make us free!” resonated with the national mood.
My haphazard researches into the churches I visited during my church visiting project continually reminded me of how thoroughly religious identity and national identity are mingled. Nothing is more like hymn singing than patriotic song singing. Almost every denomination has a national or ethnic component that is either overt (Greek Orthodox; Dutch Reformed; African Methodist; Anglican) or understood (Lutheran churches almost always began as German/Scandinavian congregations; Roman Catholic parishes, at least in Philadelphia, are often identified ethnically, as a Polish parish, an Italian parish, a Czech parish, etc.). Each denomination faces the challenge of honoring and remaining true to their national/ethnic roots while at the same time welcoming newcomers and outsiders. The history of We Gather Together is a little microcosm of how a song that expresses an intensely nationalistic/religious struggle can morph over the centuries into an expression of the national/religious pride of an entirely different people, a nation that didn’t even exist when the song was first written.

We Gather Together

We gather together to ask the Lord's blessing;
He chastens and hastens His will to make known;
The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing,
Sing praises to His name: He forgets not his own.

Beside us to guide us, our God with us joining,
Ordaining, maintaining His kingdom divine
So from the beginning the fight we were winning;
Thou, Lord, wast at our side, All glory be thine!

We all do extol thee, thou leader triumphant,
And pray that thou still our defender wilt be.
Let thy congregation escape tribulation;
Thy name be ever praised! O Lord, make us free!

Sources for this post include Melanie Kirkpatrick’s article in the Wall Street Journal, “The surprising origins of 'We Gather Together,' a Thanksgiving standard."


Photo courtesy Flickruser maveric2003.

God said it; I interpreted it . . . .

That doesn't exactly settle it.


I agree with Brant Hansen: this may be the best Christian tee-shirt ever.

What do we do with the fraud lasting for 28 years now?

Byzantine Rambler has a post on something that hasn't been well covered in the mainstream press, the Medjugorge Marian apparitions. I'm glad to see that the Pope has spoken out on this. The political ramifications are complex and fascinating; I had no idea that massacres of Jews, Gypsies, Serbs, and Croats were so closely connected to the area of the so-called apparition. This reminds me a bit of George Fox's "Woe to bloody Litchfield" vision, which I wrote about in this post. Perhaps there is a connection between "supernatural" phenomena and unresolved guilt and anger. I cannot presume to understand the complex interactions of sorrow, guilt, and spiritual desire involved. This Pope is courageous in addressing the issue.

Photo courtesy Flickruser C1ssou

Some people fit more into a day than others

1903 in the life of erratic pitcher Rube Waddell, cataloged by Cooperstown historian Lee Allen:


“He began that year sleeping in a firehouse in Camden, New Jersey, and ended it tending bar in a saloon in Wheeling, West Virginia. In between those events he won 22 games for the Philadelphia Athletics, played left end for the Business Men’s Rugby Football Club of Grand Rapids, Michigan, toured the nation in a melodrama called The Stain of Guilt, courted, married and became separated from May Wynne Skinner of Lynn, Massachusetts, saved a woman from drowning, accidentally shot a friend through the hand, and was bitten by a lion.”

It's the Michigan business men playing rugby in 1903 that's so hard to figure.


Photo courtesy Flickuser Wigstruck

Being a pastor — a high-profile, high-stress job with nearly impossible expectations for success — can send one down the road to depression, according to pastoral counselors.

Article on pastors commiting suicide, in USA Today.

:"Those who counsel pastors say Christian culture, especially Southern evangelicalism, creates the perfect environment for depression. Pastors suffer in silence, unwilling or unable to seek help or even talk about it. Sometimes they leave the ministry. Occasionally the result is the unthinkable."

And:

"You can't talk about it before it happens and you can't talk about it after it happens," said Monty Hale, director of pastoral ministries for the South Carolina Baptist Convention.

Very sad.

Pew etiquette

I often mused on the subject of pew etiquette during my year of visiting churches, partly because I was consciously trying to observe how people in various congregations “did church,” and partly because, as a constant newcomer, I was a little worried about violating unknown rules.

I’m not talking about sitting in the wrong pew. Everyone has heard jokes about that – visitors sit in the fourth pew from the front on the left, and the family that usually sits there every week is offended and discombobulated – someone is sitting in OUR pew! Oh no - what should we do? I suspect that I was guilty of usurping someone’s accustomed seat on one or two occasions during my year of visiting, but it couldn’t have been much of a problem in most churches, since almost all of them had plenty of empty pews to spare. But some churches had a healthy number of folks sitting in the pews, and those are the occasions when I observed the kind of bad pew etiquette that bothers me.

Ten minutes before the service begins, most churches have a seating pattern that looks like the diagram above.

Everyone who arrives after this must either sit in the three empty pews at the front (which no one wants to do), or petition the Defenders of the Aisle Seats for admittance. Most pews are placed so close together that you can’t walk past the people on the ends to get to the middle. The Defenders sometimes get up and stand on the side, enabling newcomers to walk to the middle. More polite folks don’t force the newcomers to the middle of the pew -- they slide toward the middle themselves.

Then there is the problem of inadequate pew-sliding. How many times have I witnessed this ridiculous pantomime! For example, say there is a family of three sitting on the aisle, and another family of three comes along and begs permission to please sit down. The first family politely scootches over to give the second family a place to sit.

Only – and this seems to happen EVERY SINGLE TIME – they never scootch over enough. The person farthest from the aisle moves over about the distance of one and one half butt cheeks, and the next person follows suit, except a little less, and so forth. The first member of the second family then tries to sit down, but it’s a tight fit, and then the first family begins another round of unsatisfactory scootching, and this is followed by a third or fourth round, until finally both families are seated. They are usually still too close to each other, and as soon as everyone rises for the first hymn, the whole gaggle takes another step to the left or right, depending on which side of the aisle they are on, and finally everyone is sitting in some semblance of comfort. AND THEN THIS HAPPENS AGAIN NEXT WEEK.

Therefore, I have advice for churches that would like to be more visitor-friendly, from the perspective of a constant visitor.

Unless you know perfectly well that you will have plenty of empty pews available at every service, why not ask people to scootch over toward the middle of the pew if they arrive first? Make it easy for people to find a seat, visitors and members alike. Don’t have every pew blocked on both ends by the Defenders of the Aisle Seats. It’s discouraging, and unfriendly, and really, really unnecessary.

And, of course, it will never change.