THE P RTAL
March 2017 Page 24
In Quires and places where they sing ...
It is said , “ You are what you eat ”, Geoffrey Kirk believes “ You are what you sing ”
Do you remember , in the days before political correctness , the songs we used to sing at school ? Apart from good tunes they taught values which have long been anathema : duty and patriotism (‘ The minstrel boy to the war is gone ’); domestic contentment (‘ There ’ s no place like home ’); loving fidelity (‘ Maxwelton braies are bonnie ’); innocent love (‘ Drink to me onlie with thine eyes ’).
Such , too , is the nature of good hymns : they affirm in the worshipping community ( and not simply in the homily of the paid professional ) the essential dogmas of the faith .
And just as the songs of virtue which we learned as children are being drowned out by the adolescent repetitions of pop and rap , so those dogmas are being slowly eliminated by the incessant drip of the modern ‘ worship song ’. literature it could be reconstituted from Dent . I will be bolder – destroy the theology of the last thousand years and it could be recovered from the pages of the English Hymnal ( though perhaps not in the version edited by George Timms !)
So – uncatholic though some may think it - sing your hearts out . It is our way of keeping alive the rumour of angels .
Like the ‘ post-Vatican II ’ attitude to the Eucharist (‘ our family meal ’ rather than the Holy Sacrifice ) these largely dogma-free ditties are strong on ‘ community ’ (‘ When I needed a neighbour were you there ?’) but curiously faith neutral . It is as though they were designed to be sung ( if agnostics had anything to sing about ) by well-meaning agnostics .
One of the charisms of the Ordinariates must surely be to bring back to Catholic worship high octane Catholic dogma . This may be through the glorious translations from the Latin of John Mason Neale , or through nineteenth and twentieth century hymns of sound teaching .
Let rip with the merry organ : for the doctrine of the Incarnation (‘ Behold the great Creator makes Himself a house of clay ’), for the Atonement (‘ Glory be to Jesus , who in bitter pains , poured for me the lifeblood from his scared veins ’); the Real Presence (‘ Godhead here in hiding ’); and plain unadulterated adoration (‘ Holy Holy Holy ’).
It was once said of Dent ’ s Everyman ’ s Library that if a cataclysm swept away the entire canon of western