Hymnody

For some 19 years Maureen Garing has run a half-hour programme on Radio NZ, early Sunday mornings, called Hymns for Sunday Morning. Well, I imagine it was never intended to appeal to our country’s growing throngs of unchurched and agnostic, most of whom would be profoundly unconscious anyway at 7 am on a Sunday. Hymns for Sunday Morning is for memories and nostalgia chiefly among my generation perhaps.

But to get to the point… Last Sunday Maureen Garing presented her final programme. And to mark this she played a selection of her own favourite hymns. They were all wonderful -- George Herbert, Purcell, Handel… The best of all for me was the one she chose as the representative Scottish Metrical Psalm, the end of Psalm 72, His name for ever shall endure. I am unable to find words to describe why, with all that has happened over the years, I still respond immediately and instinctively to this spirituality, its robust faith, the songs arising from mists and hardship.

I am well aware that this selection of hymns would have been largely incomprehensible to most of the contemporary church, or what’s left of it. What we have now is the generation that arises inchoately to How great thou art, or plays the bagpipe version of Amazing Grace whenever possible. The only psalm they know is The Lord’s my shepherd, but they don’t know it’s a psalm. They don’t know what a psalm is. Maureen Garing’s selection moreover included not one Colin Gibson or Shirley Murray. So of course it was archaic -- and I loved every note of it.

Then I came across another reaction, to a previous hymn selection by Maureen Garing. This is by some Methodist bloke in his parish newsletter:

Not known for her innovative choice of hymnody to greet our waking hours, Ms Garing excelled herself by announcing she was planning to play the hymn without which, in her words, the Advent/Christmas season would not be complete. The hymn? Ding Dong Merrily on High!! As I headed for the shower, I wondered, troubled, what possible relevance such a song might have for bereft families in the mining communities of the West Coast, or the farming communities of Northland facing the arid realities of drought. Not that the rest of the programme had been much better. There had been but one solitary indigenous carol, one in ten maybe. The rest was meringue stuff - light and fluffy, beautifully articulated and modulated by some of the best cathedral choirs in England, but engaging at what point in the cares and struggles of listeners dealing with the sharp and wounding realities of today's New Zealand?

Well, OK. Ding Dong, Merrily on High, if you trouble to read the rest of it, is actually a song of high Trinitarian doctrine. But never mind. This bloke calls it meringue stuff, light and fluffy. He prefers something like that silly NZ carol, Upside Down Christmas.

The church which inspired and motivated me simply isn’t here any more. I love and celebrate its memory. I grieve at its passing, but of course all things pass. Perhaps I romanticize it. Hearing its echoes, however, stirs me still.