Reflection on Like as the Hart
Today choir members form 10 different congregations gathered at Trinity Cathedral to sing in the 28 annual diocesan choir festival. Under the direction of guest conduction Dr. Jeffery Benson, we preformed Like as the Hart by Herbert Howells. If you are not familiar with this piece, please go listen to it.
I find this piece a deep and deeply moving anthem that captures some of the very essence of what it means to be human and in relation with God. Not everyone there today shares my opinion. I must admit I was surprised to have a number of brief exchanged with people who found Howles (and the Stanford Canticle settings in G which we also sang) to be stodgy and uninspiring. They suggested that something newer, peppier and more exciting would have been more to there liking. Fine, I cannot argue with taste, and not everything my choir sings speaks to me. I sing it anyway because that is part of what one signs up for when you agree to lead congregational singing. I suffer through the works of Gerald Neer and even Jan Michael Jonca on occasion.
What bothered me was not that someone might not find this piece moving, but instead that even though they found it moving, they thought such sentimentality was destructive to the Church. This bothers me and as it is a general trend in my church I want to spend just a few minutes to call the truly destructive misconception: That some mode or feeling should dominate Christian worship, and even more disturbing that by having such a monochromatic “happy cheery praisy” mood in the church that we will somehow save the institution from its eminent demise.
Lets start with a simple but ignored truth. It is not possibly either physically or emotionally to be bouncing-off-the-ceiling happy all the time. People are just not wired this way, nor is this world a place which know neither sorrow nor pain. A life fully lived will ebb and flow through many emotions and shade of those emotions. So it is with our relationship with God, which if it is healthy will not be static and unvaried. And so it should also be with our worship.
For too many people emotions like longing, desperation, introspectiveness, penitence and sorrow are unfortunate historic baggage that the church carries around in its traditions. Where possible these people try to expunge such traditions, and where they cannot be completely removed then they are diminished or glassed over. When Howles asks in strident discord “Where is now thy God?” those who are embarrassed by such a plaintive though will rush to the final Major chord and seek to hang out there instead. What they don’t see is how one sets up the other. One who has not sought in vane for assurance of God’s presence can never quite understand how beautiful is the moment when it is finally found.
It is not that there is no basis for this trend. There was a time in the recent history of the church where Joy and wonder, praise and whimsy were absent from the majority of its work. God was a high and serious matter. A relationship that should only be approached with somber humility. It is not at all surprising to me, that after a few generations of this monochromatic solemnity, (an era of which Howells and Stanford were certainly a prominent part) that the dam would burst and joy and praise would come forth. The problem is that the ensuing flood is threatening to wash out everything else covering the world of worship in a oily rainbow sheen of forced smiles and the same three power chords repeated over and over.
There was certainly a time when the image of a person in clerical holding a guitar would have been a subversion of the dower and serious minded stereotype of a man of the cloth. But this is not 1950 or even 1980. The ideas and music that were then so alluringly subversive have today become cliché.
There is a thing that new pilots do called Pilot Induced Osculation. It is a phenomena where in an attempt to correct a slight error in the flight the pilot makes an overly aggressive correction. The plain lurches off in the opposite direction forcing the pilot to make an even bigger reversal then the first. This pattern continues until either the pilot realizes what is happening or the plane has a sudden encounter with the world. It is caused by the pilot over reaction to where the plane has been rather then planing for where it is about to go. Members of the church are in such a situation. They are still trying to pull up from the descent into solemn navel gazing while the plane is on the edge of stalling out at the apex of an unmaintainable climb into unreflective praise. When all the energy is finally gone there may not be enough left to keep the plane in the air.
As we approach Lent, a season placed in the church calendar with the intent of a special focus on penitence and reflection, let us not try to rush through this “unhappy” season in order to “get to the good stuff.” The good stuff is earned. Like as the Hart is not going to kill the church and maybe a little more time spent asking “Where is now our God” would be good for all of us.