Category Archives: Religion

Music, Religion

“Den Himmelske Lovsang”

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Tonight, as is so often my lazy wont, I share with you a Norwegian hymn, performed here by a volunteer pietist men’s choir. But this hymn is different, in a highly insignificant way.

The hymn is called “Den Himmelske Lovsang,” which translates, “The Heavenly Song of Praise.” (“Lovsang” does not mean “love song,” however much you might want it to. “Lov” is Norwegian for “praise.”)

I can’t find an English translation, and that’s kind of the point of this post. The gist of the lyrics is that it’s all about the joy of Heaven, embodied in music. The idea that all nature and the heavenly host are having a wonderful time singing God’s praise, and that through Christ we can hope to join in the fun ourselves someday.

Once a month I get together with a small clutch of old men, most of whom are retired pastors from my church body. At the last meeting, one of them mentioned this hymn, commenting that it’s the most popular hymn among the Lutherans of Madagascar.

(The reason for this goes back to the 19th Century, when international mission organizers “assigned” part of the Madagascar mission field to the Norwegians. These missionaries came not only from Norway, but from the Norwegian-American immigrant church.)

In our gathering, we noted that the hymn has never caught on in the US. Nobody was sure why. I thought it might be because no one had ever done a satisfactory English translation.

You can guess what came next. I decided to give it a go myself.

I’m not working at it full-time; I’ve got several other projects demanding my attention. But I’ve been noodling with it in odd moments, and I’m generally pleased with my progress.

Translating verse is a particular challenge. The only way I can figure out to do it is to first study the text closely, trying to figure out what the poet is attempting to convey, and how. Then I proceed to do my own original poem on the same theme, in the same meter, touching base with the original text whenever I can.

I have no idea where it’s all going.

Anyway, do you think this hymn would be interesting to American Christians?

Music, Religion

‘This Ole House’

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Tonight, for no particular reason, Stuart Hamblen’s “This Ole House.” Probably his biggest hit.

This clip comes from the long-running Country & Western comedy show, “Hee-Haw.” I think I actually saw this episode, which surprises me a little, because I wasn’t a regular viewer. I was too snobbish about “hillbilly” music.

As I recall, Hamblen introduced this performance by recounting how he’d come to write it. He was on a hunting trip with a friend in the mountains when they found an abandoned hunting lodge with a man’s body in it (dead, apparently, by natural causes). As they rode back down the mountain, he meditated on mortality and composed the lyrics.

“I hated, Rosemary Clooney’s performance,” he said (as I remember it), “because she speeded it up to a sort of a schottische rhythm. Then it sold a hundred-thousand copies… and I came to love Rosey’s version.”

I was reminded of this song tonight by association. My dad, when he was milking cows out in the barn, used to sing the first couple lines of another of Hamblen’s songs: “I Won’t Go Huntin’ With You, Jake (But I’ll Go Chasin’ Women).” This was a big hit of Hamblen’s before he was born again.

He had a crazy American Christian story. A preacher’s kid, son of the founder of the Evangelical Methodist Church denomination in Texas, he got into music and became a popular singer and recording artist, with his own radio program. He also acted – if you watch old B westerns, you’ll often see Hamblen – not as a hero, but as the bad guy who leads the outlaws or the evil posse. He dealt with the pressures of fame by drinking, and became an alcoholic. Whenever he got arrested for brawling or public intoxication, his radio sponsors would pay his bail and get it covered up.

Then he attended a Billy Graham crusade in Los Angeles in 1949, and surrendered his life to Christ. He stopped doing beer advertisements on his radio show, and got fired for it. But by then he’d given his testimony on the air, and it boosted Billy’s public profile immensely (though Randolph Hearst’s instructions to his editors to “Puff Graham” certainly had plenty to do with it too).

He remained an outspoken Evangelical the rest of his life, composing such songs as “It Is No Secret What God Can Do” (title suggested by his friend John Wayne) and “Open Up Your Heart and Let the Sunshine In.” He also ran for office, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, on the Prohibition ticket.

The main thing I love about “This Old House” is the line, “Now it trembles in the darkness / When the lightning walks about.”

That’s genuine poetry.

Music, Religion

‘Built On a Rock, the Church Shall Stand’

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I thought to myself, “Hey! I haven’t posted “Built On the Rock the Church Shall Stand” yet. That’s an important Scandinavian hymn I haven’t done here before!”

Checked our search utility. No, I posted about it – and as recently as last year.

Chalk it up to old age. Old men tell the same stories over and over, and old bloggers blog the same material under and under.

I’ll post it anyway, because I’ve got nothing else.

The lyrics were composed by Nikolai F. S. Grundtvig, the eccentric Danish clergyman who made the first translation of Beowulf into a modern language and started the Folk High School movement.

My people (the Norwegian Haugeans) did not like Grundtvig much, but we sang his hymn. This rendition is done by the Luther College Cathedral Choir, Decorah, Iowa. My people didn’t like Luther College much either, and the one year I spent studying there didn’t leave me with a lot of good memories. The arrangement is by F. Melius Christiansen, who conducted the choir of St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota – which I never attended, but still dislike on principle.

The English translation is pretty faithful, but the opening line takes an interesting tack. The original Danish says, “The church, it is an ancient house,” but goes on to say that it keeps standing anyway, upheld by God. Our English version, as you’ll notice, kicks off in a more upbeat, defiant vein.

Danes, generally speaking, don’t do audacity.

Reading, Religion, Writing

Chronicle of a writer’s day

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“Daffodils and Glastonbury Tor.” Photo credit: Glastomichelle. Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons license.

What’s on tonight? Hey, how about a pointless account of my day? What could be more fun than that?

Last night my men’s Bible study group re-convened after several weeks of preemptions. I continue to be astonished how much these meetings nourish and uplift me. I feel an actual physical easing. I’ve been a solitary for so many years, getting by without close Christian fellowship. I knew that was the wrong way to do it, but I was hemmed in by… well, fear, to be honest.

I don’t think these guys will ever realize what they’re doing for me.

This morning I drove to the gym, and while I was inside, beavering away at my Sysiphian labors, a freezing rain came down, which covered my car windows in a matrix of icy pearls and made the road treacherous going home.

I worried about driving this afternoon, as I had a doctor’s appointment. But by the time I had to pull out again, the moisture had all melted and (mostly) dried off. I was able to reassure a technician, who took samples of my blood, on that point.

(No big deal on the doctor’s appointment, by the way. I wanted him to check something out, and he ordered tests, but didn’t seem greatly concerned. This stuff is just S.O.P. when you achieve venerability.)

Right now I’m re-reading two different books I read as a teenager, both of which deal with medieval Glastonbury. Because I’m writing a book about King Haakon the Good, and he grew up in England, and there’s good reason to think he might have spent time at that ancient site of monasticism and pilgrimage.

The first book is The Hidden Treasure of Glaston, by Eleanore M. Jewett. This is a book aimed at teenagers, and I remember that it surprised me when I read it (as a teenager), since I had known nothing about Glastonbury or the grave of King Arthur up to then. So far, I think it stands up pretty well. Entirely credulous about the legends, but well done withal. I’ll review it when I finish it.

The other book is Avalon, by Anya Seton, which I’ll also review. I read this as a Reader’s Digest Condensed Book (remember those?) back when it was new. It was quite a thrill for me, back in 1965 or 66, to discover any novel involving Vikings. I’m enjoying this book too, though I detect some historical errors. It’s set slightly before my Erling books.

What do I envy most in other historical writers’ works? The ability to describe geography, plants, and wildlife. I struggle with that stuff. “What kind of flowers would be blooming in an English marsh in Somerset in April, 980 AD, and how would they smell?” Would it be the same varieties they have now? How much have things changed in a thousand years? How much guessing do the authors do? Sigrid Undset was great at that stuff, but she was an amateur expert in botany.

What comforts me most? Finding mistakes. If successful novelists can screw up on details, maybe I can get away with a few howlers too. Because I know they’re there, like Communists under the beds (who were also actually there, as it happened).

Music, Religion

‘Behold a Host, Arrayed in White’

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I recall sitting in my office one day (I think it was a Saturday; I had to work Saturdays at the time) back when I lived in Florida, listening to the local Christian station on my radio. Suddenly I heard the strains of “Behold a Host, Arrayed in White,” (an English translation is at this link) and was astonished. This is not a hymn much known outside Scandinavian Lutheran circles, and down among the gators a lot of people had no idea what a Lutheran was, let alone a Scandinavian Lutheran.

The reason the radio station had that song, I later learned, was that they leased music from the University of Northwestern (St. Paul) radio network’s licensing library, and Scandinavian Lutheranism is pretty well known up in these parts.

In my mind, at least, “Behold a Host” is the preeminent Scandinavian choral hymn. My dad and my grandparents loved it. This recording has the Norwegian lyrics, whose first lines actually go “This great, white host we see, like a thousand mountains full of snow, before the Throne – who are they?”

It’s a reference to Revelation 7:13-17:

 13Then one of the elders answered, saying to me, “These who are clothed in the white robes, who are they, and where have they come from?” 14I said to him, “My lord, you know.” And he said to me, “These are the ones who come out of the great tribulation, and they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. 15“For this reason, they are before the throne of God; and they serve Him day and night in His temple; and He who sits on the throne will spread His tabernacle over them. 16“They will hunger no longer, nor thirst anymore; nor will the sun beat down on them, nor any heat; 17for the Lamb in the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and will guide them to springs of the water of life; and God will wipe every tear from their eyes.”

The text was written by Hans Adolph Brorson, a much-loved Danish pastor and hymn writer. The tune is, I believe, traditional, but this arrangement is by none other than Edvard Grieg.

This particular recording is of the choir of Augsburg College, Minneapolis, which happens to be my alma mater, though this performance was around 1945, somewhat before my time.

Music, Religion

‘O Love That Will Not Let Me Go”

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A hymn tonight, as is so often my lazy default on Fridays. I’ve posted a different version of the one before, but it never gets old. I can’t find a composition or publication date for “O Love That Will Not Let Me Go, ” but Wikipedia reports that its author, Rev. George Matheson, wrote it on the evening of his sister’s wedding.  It must have been a poignant moment for him, as he’d gone blind as a young man, and his sister had been his caretaker since then.

He wrote, “I am quite sure that the whole work was completed in five minutes, and equally sure that it never received at my hands any retouching or correction. I have no natural gift of rhythm. All the other verses I have ever written are manufactured articles; this came like a dayspring from on high.”

He himself had been engaged to be married once, but his fiancée broke it off when she learned he was losing his sight. In spite of his handicap, he became a very successful minister in the Scottish Presbyterian Church and a respected scholar, publishing several books and earning an LL.D. degree.

Matheson is also the author of my favorite hymn, “Make Me a Captive, Lord,” which I hardly ever sing anymore, because my church doesn’t seem to know about it, and everybody but me sings it wrong anyway.

Have a blessed weekend.

Religion

Inanities of mortality

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Photo credit: Fey Marin. Unsplash license.

Somebody said that we don’t know what we’re thinking until we write it down. Like most aphorisms, it’s probably only true in limited cases. But I want to think this thing through, and you’re my designated victims audience.

What I’ve had on my mind of late is death.

This is not, I hasten to add, my way of easing into grave news. There is no grave news. I’m doing okay, health-wise, for an old fat man, as my doctor told me a few weeks ago (I think those were his exact words).

But there’s been a lot of death in my life of late. I lost a friend in December, and another in January. Now one of the men in my Bible study group at church is in hospice; we went to see him Monday night. We’ll likely never see him again.

Also I lost an uncle last month. And another friend died earlier last year. (That one was complicated. We’d been very close at one time, but over the years he changed his opinions, and I felt he was using me more and more as an ideological punching bag. So I broke it off. Then word came that he was dying, and I agreed to one last phone call. It was civil, I left him with God’s blessing, and a couple days later he was gone. I’m sure I could have handled it better, but handling things badly is sort of my personal style.)

So it’s probably not surprising that I’ve had death on my mind. I’m disappointed to find that I’m not properly resigned yet to my mortality. I honestly thought I was. I assumed (perhaps judgmentally) that those intense people who live their lives with gusto were probably in denial. But I’ve always lived carefully. Measured out my life in coffee spoons. I have looked on the dark side. Gazed into the abyss. The Roman emperors, I seem to recall, had a slave who followed them about, muttering, “Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.” I fulfilled that function for myself. “Remember, it can always get worse, and probably will,” has been my slogan.

And yet I find myself resistant to assimilating the fact that I’m in my 70s, approaching the actuarial horizon for most of my family. I had a vague idea, I think, that I’d probably drop dead after I finished the Erling books, like Pres. Grant, who finished his autobiography (which paid off his debts) just days before dying of cancer. (It’s a good book, too. Very succinct and efficient in style. He wrote like he fought. You’d almost think it was written post-Hemingway.)

But here I am, my great project completed, trying to find a way forward with an even more ambitious (but hopefully shorter) work. I’m planning as if I’ll live forever. Caesar’s slave whispers to me, and I give him an elbow in the gut.

I am, in short, in denial. That offends my sense of myself.

On the one hand, the Bible tells us to number our days. On the other, we’re told to cast no thought on the morrow. Am I living my best life, looking on the bright side? Or am I deluding myself?

I have no internal instrument for judging this.

I suppose I could pray about it, but that sounds kind of extreme.

Music, Religion

How not to be a child

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Thing noticed this morning in devotions, as I work my way through Luke 18:

Surprise, surprise. The next section carries on the same theme (asking boldly vs. humility) developed in the previous sections:

The Rich Ruler

18And a ruler asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 19And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. 20You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery, Do not murder, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honor your father and mother.’” 21And he said, “All these I have kept from my youth.” 22When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” 23But when he heard these things, he became very sad, for he was extremely rich. 24Jesus, seeing that he had become sad, said, “How difficult it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! 25For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” 26Those who heard it said, “Then who can be saved?” 27But he said, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.” 28And Peter said, “See, we have left our homes and followed you.” 29And he said to them, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothersb or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, 30who will not receive many times more in this time, and in the age to come eternal life.”

What have we learned up to now?

That Christianity calls for a) boldness, but b) humility.

We further established that this pattern is embodied in children. Nobody will enter the Kingdom of God unless they become like children.

Now in comes the Rich Ruler (they always called him the Rich Young Ruler when I was a kid, but maybe that was in one of the synoptics).

The Rich Ruler is the opposite of a child. He thinks he’s got it all together. Has he kept the Law? You bet. Been there, done that, got the tee-shirt.  What else do I need?

Jesus tells him he needs to sell everything he owns, give it to the poor, and follow Him.

The point, I’m convinced, is not that we earn salvation through poverty (though some Christian socialists seem to think so). It’s that the Rich Ruler needs to become a child again. He needs to put himself in a helpless, dependent position where Christ is all he has.

Which he can’t bring himself to do.

The answer he should have given was to say, “I can’t do that! Help me!”

Then he’d be a child. Then he’d be saved. We can hope he reached that point, later on.

Above, Sissel Kyrkjebø with the Oslo Gospel Choir, in a fairly awesome arrangement of a song appropriate to the topic.

Religion

Of death, and of children

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Image credit: Royal Academy

Bad and good things today. The good came first, but I’ll discuss it last.

Today, in the course of carrying out a routine task, I learned that a friend of mine had died last month. He was a member of my Viking group – not one of the regulars, but he showed up from time to time, and the two of us generally talked. But it was only at our last event, Viking Fest Minnesota last fall, that we discovered we shared very similar religious and social views. It may seem strange to know a guy for years and never learn that, but we generally keep off such topics at our events. Try to avoid kicking up divisions in the group. But lo and behold, Paul turned out to be One of Us. So we had a good talk. I looked forward to having more such talks.

Now that won’t happen.

He was almost two decades younger than me.

Receive him into glory immortal, O Lord.

Now to the positive stuff.

If you scroll down this page a few inches, you’ll see my meditation from the other day on some verses from Luke 18. I was pondering the contrast between the parable of the Importunate Widow and the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector.

I saw the point of the first parable as encouraging chutzpah – ask boldly; don’t be shy.

And I saw the point of the second as calling for humility.

Which seemed contradictory to me. I don’t know how to reconcile the two things in my own life.

This morning (having been kept from my devotions yesterday) I came to the passage that follows. And once again, context matters. Jesus Himself answers the conundrum he posed. It goes on like this, Luke 18:15-17:

Let the Children Come to Me

15Now they were bringing even infants to him that he might touch them. And when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. 16But Jesus called them to him, saying, “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. 17Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.”

And there, I think, is the answer, the truth that squares the circle. Who can be importunate like the Widow, and humble like the Tax Collector, all at the same time?

A child. Children ask without shame, and are humble by necessity. “Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.”

So all I need to do is become like a child.

The actual problem remains as difficult as it was before, but at least I can articulate it now.

Religion

Of tax collectors and widows

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Photo credit: Getty Images. Unsplash license.

Today the sun shone most of the time, and temperatures moderated in my embattled town. I went to the eye surgeon for a follow-up examination, and everything looked good. I also did not encounter any neo-secessionist rioters en route, which pleased me.

In my morning devotions, I read the passage below from Luke 18. Actually, just verses 9-14. I did 1-8 last Friday. But, in considering the context, I noticed for the first time that Luke jams two very contrasting parables right next to each other, thus:

The Parable of the Persistent Widow

1And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart. 2He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man. 3And there was a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Give me justice against my adversary.’ 4For a while he refused, but afterward he said to himself, ‘Though I neither fear God nor respect man, 5yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.’” 6And the Lord said, “Hear what the unrighteous judge says. 7And will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? 8I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

The Pharisee and the Tax Collector

9He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt: 10“Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayeda thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. 12I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ 13But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ 14I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

I’ve always been fond of the Tax Collector in the temple. In fact, my personal “conversion” (we Lutherans believe we’re converted at baptism, but some of us also believe you can have a renewal of your baptism when you’re old enough to understand the life of faith) followed a sermon on this parable. I was about 12 year old. As a guy who suffered from “low self-esteem” (a concept not yet invented at the time), I could identify with that beaten-down guy.

But just before that parable (I noticed today), you’ve got the outrageous story of the Persistent Widow (or the Unjust Judge). This is one of those parables that confounds our left-brain impulse to make every parable an allegory. Jesus is absolutely not saying that God is like an unjust judge. He’s just practicing hyperbole, telling an exaggerated story to make a point. You might call it a kind of a joke – “Even a crooked judge can be worn down by constant petitions. Certainly our good Heavenly Father will respond much faster than that!”

In other words, this parable commands us to approach God with what the Jews call “chutzpah.” Jewish people are famous for being bold askers. Their parents (generally) raise them to be like this. “What can it hurt to ask?” they say. “The worst they can do is say no.”

This is not something I learned in my Norwegian home. Precisely the opposite, in fact. It’s something I need to ponder, tax collector in the temple that I am.