Heaven and Hymnals are Temporary
The Rev. Bryan Wolfmueller made a video with the provocative title, “Heaven is Temporary.” Of course, he is explaining how Christian eschatology differs from Pagan, Gnostic, and Spiritualizing explanations of eternity. Christianity alone confesses a “resurrection of the body” and a new heaven and earth: the redemption and re-creation of the material world as opposed to the mere destruction of it. A lot of Christians don’t think in these terms, seeing the state of being disembodied in heaven as eternal rather than transitory.
Similarly, I believe hymnals should be temporary. And I’m not talking about in eternity. I mean that you should stop using your hymnal to follow the liturgy. Liturgy is meant to be lived, not read as a script. We treat our hymnals in the same way that many Christians treat heaven - as that which is permanent when it should really be a transitory state.
My first exposure to liturgical worship was in the Roman Catholic Church. I attended an all-boys Jesuit high school. I was amazed that my classmates - ordinary raucous boys in the classroom and on the athletic field - were pious in the chapel. They bowed their heads, they prayed with palms together, they crossed themselves, and they knew all of the liturgical responses. They did not have their heads buried in the hymnal. The Mass was a living dialogue between the celebrant and the people. The words of the hymns were either in the book or on printed sheets, but the liturgy itself was simply lived, spoken, chanted, and sung in real time.
When I became a Lutheran, I encountered the same ancient liturgy - only with much better theology and music. But nearly everyone clung to the hymnal like a crutch - including the pastors. It was like being at a play rehearsal in which the actors were still memorizing their lines and held onto their scripts, interacting with the book more than with each other. Why the Roman Catholics lived the liturgy, while our people always seemed to be learning it, was beyond me. And the endless “stage instructions” seemed to suck the oxygen out of the room: “And now we turn to page whatever in the front portion of your hymnal as we confess our faith,” blah, blah, blah..
Week after week, year after year, decade after decade - always rehearsing, never living.
A few years ago, I went to an installation of district officers. I was not a participant. All of the pastors and district officials who were participants were seated in the front row. Their heads were buried in their ordos - as was the celebrant. Many of these men had been pastors for decades.
They even read the Lord’s Prayer out of their ordos. Come on, guys! Do you mean to tell me that you don’t know it yet? You have to read it? And the Kyrie? You can’t remember “Lord, have mercy”? Don’t you know the music to the Kyrie and the Gloria yet?
I would like to challenge the clergy and the laity to wean themselves off the hymnal and start living the liturgy.
We do this with other “liturgical” actions in life. Nobody reads the Pledge of Allegiance off of a sheet of paper. Nobody has to crack open a hymnal to sing “Happy Birthday To You” or “The Star Spangled Banner.” Nobody has to pull up the lyrics on their phones when they attend a concert. Everyone knows the chants, fight songs, and accompanying gestures of their favorite college or pro teams without burying their heads in a script.
We did shoot ourselves in the foot by having multiple Divine Services. I have had to learn the creeds three different ways (TLH, LBW, LW/LSB). It took me a long time to be able to recite the Nicene and Apostles’ creeds without looking. But I forced myself to do it.
And that is how you do it. You train your mind to listen for spoken cues to trigger the next line. But you can’t make the leap without taking a leap of faith by ceasing to “read” the liturgy. By not reading the words out of the hymnal, I, as celebrant, can make eye contact with my parishioners. Many of them, I have noticed, are making eye contact back. A fair number aren’t using the hymnal at all, except to sing the hymns.
Plato records the argument of Socrates that writing things down would harm, not help, the memory. Becoming overly dependent on hymnals and printed bulletins for the ordinaries of the Mass is a case in point.
Memorizing a corpus of hymns is another topic for another day. But I will say this much: at a Ministry for the Armed Forces training session, one of the chaplains led us through Matins, and for whatever reason, there were no hymns printed out. Our officiant called for us spontaneously to sing "A Mighty Fortress.” I never memorized it. But, to my own pleasant surprise, I really knew it - especially as we were singing it together. We all cued off of one another, and we sang it perfectly, even in harmony. I think we all underestimate our ability to call liturgy and hymns to mind - especially when they are sung.
This is another argument against putting the words of the liturgy on jumbotrons in the chancel. It is simply impossible not to look. Our eyes are intuitively and inexorably drawn to the movement and the flashing lights. Screens dumb us down, and there is no option to close the book, put it down, and allow the liturgy to fill our minds and hearts, based on the sound of the words themselves, combined with ritual actions - simply becoming part of who we are. Can you imagine watching a play or movie and all of the actors were surrounded by visible screens feeding them their lines?
So indeed, to live the liturgy is to see the hymnal as a blessing, but also as a crutch. It should be considered an aid to memorization, not a replacement for it. The hymnal is a treasure, but our goal ought to be for it to decrease, so that the treasure of the liturgy itself should increase, and that it should be lived and not just read.