Our Love, Crucified
I've told my students that if they hear me singing a hymn in Welsh as I walk down the street, they are to consider it within the bounds of possibility, but if they see me walking into a museum of modern art, they should call for an ambulance, because something must be terribly wrong.
Yet I think there is something worse than modern art with all its obtuseness, ugliness, and offense to the human and the divine. It is the sacred, vandalized. Which would you find less tolerable? A gallery of Picasso's paintings in his cubist stage, or a modernized Sistine Chapel, with smiles painted in on all the faces of Michelangelo's Last Judgment, and the devils and the damned whited out?
Most current Christian hymnals are like that, alas. It is by no means easy to uncover exactly what a badly vandalized or abbreviated hymn once said. I understand editors are sometimes squeezed for space, so they choose to omit stanzas that can be left out without doing violence to the whole. Still, that should be a last resort. As for revision, everything that editors have done since 1965, almost without exception, has been stupid, ungrammatical, sloppy, vague, or treacherous. Thus, most Christians in English-speaking nations do not know what they are—and are not—singing.
Call to Calvary
Let me take for instance the powerful Passiontide hymn, "O Come and Mourn with Me Awhile," by Frederick Faber (1814–1863). Faber originally wrote twelve stanzas, and even my text, The English Hymnal with Tunes (1933), always generous, can squeeze only eight onto a single page. The hymn can be found in many a current hymnal, but much abbreviated and mangled, and with certain strikingly direct confessions of sin omitted.
Faber begins with a Calvary-call:
O come and mourn with me awhile;
See, Mary calls us to her side;
O come and let us mourn with her:
Jesus, our Love, is crucified.
The D-minor melody Saint Cross, with its stark four notes of unison that begin each final line for the name Jesus, our Love, is simple but subtly intricate, as each line is a variation on the others, always ending on three consecutive whole notes, which for each stanza will be the dread and solemn verb: cru-ci-fied.
Many Protestant hymnals alter that line about Mary, but I see no strong reason for it, since Mary does nothing but point to Jesus: "Do whatever he tells you to do," she says to the servants at Cana. Faber wants to make the Cross immediately present to us. We are at Calvary in one guise or another. Thus the second stanza:
Have we no tears to shed for him,
While soldiers scoff and Jews deride?
Ah, look how patiently he hangs:
Jesus, our Love, is crucified.
Hymnals now replace Jews with foes, and I understand the delicacy. But they were Jesus' own people who nailed him to the tree. The soldiers and the Jews thus comprehend mankind: Gentile and Jew.
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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