EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 HYMNS

 Still thinking about the little white church as I remember as child. Actually I don’t remember much about it. When I was just getting old enough to remember things, all the young adults who had grown up with the church, and moved to the city, started their own church. It will warrant its own time later.

What I do remember, and treasure to this day, is the music.

There is something unexplainable about those songs that leapt from the pages of the Baptist Hymnal.

Something so primal and emotional they seem to me more spiritual that many of the passages in the Bible.

There was so much joy unbridled in the likes of I’ll Fly Away that it makes a mockery of the hateful, venom-spewing tirades of modern TV evangelists. No matter if one has suffered greatly in life, or has enjoyed its many blessings, “Like a bird from prison bars has flown, I’ll fly away” can, depending upon the singer, voice freedom from an unkind world or the promise of continued happiness in another.

Among the hymns was one written by an African American after he learned that he just lost his wife and unborn child, who met the tragedy with Precious Lord take my hand.

They don’t write them like that anymore. As a speaker whose name I can’t remember once said, the likes of “Just as I am without one plea” type offerings has given way to “Jesus is my boyfriend” babblings. Another said that “Comparing the old hymns to the modern ‘praise music’ is like comparing a Shakespearean sonnet to a Halmark greeting card.”

I’ve made a long journey intellectually from that little white church to a life of secular humanism. I deplore the hatred and divisiveness that erupt from so many modern evangelical meetings. I can’t reconcile the screeching of a Kenneth Copeland with the Sermon on the Mount. I’ve lost friends over the misanthropic shrieks of so-called Christian Nationalism.

I still like those old hymns, though.