Church Music

by Bob Millard

It's Not What You Hear, But How You Listen

It has been an unusually warm winter in the Mid-South, at the map-top of the Synod.

Imagine: in January I wear a light jacket and motor scooter to work! At 70 miles to the gallon I'm saving money while reducing my contribution to global warming.

In the mid-1950s through the early 1970s the Mid-South enjoyed a period when snowstorms came regular and heavy. Blizzards buried Kentucky in the early 1950s, or so I'm told. Dad's 1958 Plymouth, with ski boat tailfins, was never without greased snow chains in the trunk. Those have disappeared, along with phonographs, rotary dial phones, and rear-wheel drive: relics of a bygone day.

In the early 1960s we moved to Nashville from Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. We lit in a relatively sparsely populated suburb known as Green Hills because when you looked south that's what you saw: the green hills of large decaying farms.

A freight line rail bed ran east and west a couple of miles from our home marking the boundary between city and county. On February nights when the day's four-inch snow crackled, forming an icy crust, only the foolhardy were on the roads. In such profound silence sound carried a long way. Echoes of a randy yearling bull bellowing a couple miles further rippled across the eerie silver-lit snowscape.

Since then a great paved sluice was dug deep and wide along the old railroad right of way, where traffic now hums day and night along I-440, four-to-six lanes across.

I tell my kids, who doubt the old man could ever have been their age, that "back then," I once walked out to the far reaches of our long backyard one winter's night and heard snow falling. No night jets flew overhead; no high tide of homogenizing highway roar baffled such subtle sounds.

The sound of snow falling was a rarity of miraculous proportions, barely audible but surrounding and all-encompassing pff and tsts of thick, weightless, fluffy white flakes sticking to bare tree limbs, alighting in their singularity by the millions on ankle deep snow pack dropped only that morning. It was quiet percussion, with a single, uninterrupted beat. In my flashlight beam it seemed manna, or the softly chanted prayers of angels drifting down from a heaven of unknowable distance.

If the delicate music of snowfall was spiritual, you should know the 'me' who interpreted it thus was a 12-year-old top student in his Catechism class. My mind naturally turned that way. And, of course, by that time I was beginning to imagine music in everything. It's not what you hear, but how you listen, that matters.

Angel prayers and manna from heaven; even then these were metaphors, poetic imagery lending meaning to the awe-inspiring. Then, as now, I have friends who, if told, would have understood as literal physical fact what I meant as metaphor.

Heaven, in hymn titles and lyrics, is a key to understanding the shape of a person's hope. Sacred songs speak to God in worship, praise and confession, to us for inspiration, hope and teaching. For teaching especially, because we elder folk sing what we believe, and mean for the younger to believe what we sing.

Searching the index of themes in our Presbyterian Hymnal I found no entry for the word 'heaven.' As articles of faith go, I surmised, it is not an issue we emphasize. Paging through I found "heaven" and "heavenly" in places, especially among adapted Psalms. But even Isaac Watts uses them in the Old Testament sense of 'from the sky' or, vaguely, 'of God' as in "Come, Holy Spirit, Heavenly Dove."

Here in the South we have plenty of denominations, including the so-called non-denominations, for whom the literal and immanent fiery lakes of Hell requires a physical Heaven, if only as a lifeboat for the theologically terrorized. Their Heaven seems a lot smaller than their Hell. The point of many TV preachers' rant is the selfish individual avoidance of a bad afterlife, religiosity as a hedging of bets. Justice and compassion weigh less in this view than judgment and the almighty Me.

As for Southern pictures of heaven, I do enjoy the pietistic comforts of the old Southern working men and women's heaven, as painted in historic four-part regional singing traditions such as Southern Harmony and Sacred Harp. In these a welcoming, avuncular Savior pulls to his bosom the downtrodden and long-suffering, in a heaven with pastoral geographic features.

For example, in Southern Harmony, the third verse of "The Christian Warfare." (Christian war, surely a topic for another column, someday.) "And when I must cross the cold stream of Jordan, I'll bid my sorrows a final adieu, And hasten away to the land of sweet Canaan, Where, Christians, I hope I shall meet with you."

The hope traditions of the Southern Christian poor are encapsulated in early commercial black gospel and country sacred songs of 70 and 80 years ago. They are found, as sung a century before that, in slave traditions and in "Union," from Southern Harmony: "Where Jesus is gone we shall be, In yonder blest mansions above." It's the 23rd Psalm translated to rural Alabama in the 1840s, a worthy hope, indeed.

Do I think there is a physical, literal heaven? I don't know, but I doubt it. It isn't a salvatory issue and so doesn't matter to me. I'll find out when I find out.

Here and now I pray the God whose mercy is from everlasting will lead my steps. I need to be as forgiving and compassionate to others as God through Christ has been to me. I think that's a big part of what life is for.

My thoughts on heaven have changed through time, but my hope remains in the Lord. Whatever He deems fit for me in this life and after — something or nothing — that's God's call.