Worship, Music, and Spirituality: A Complex Task
My mom loves to recount the story of a little Alydia in a very cute dress with matching hat, gloves, purse, and frilly socks, climbing over the pew to tell the very proper church women singing behind us to “shut up because my mom says so” during the singing of a hymn. I don’t remember this, but I often imagine that I did it during “Amazing grace.” I inherited my mother’s dislike of the hymn. She would always mumble “I ain’t no wretch” in protest as we begrudgingly stood to join in the song. While I didn’t understand her disdain, I knew that I had not put on my cutest outfit and spent the morning packing my purse with my favourite Care Bear sticker books to be called a wretch! If my mom wanted to shut that hymn down, I would do my part to help!
The writer of the hymn, John Newton, however, was a wretch. John Newton was a captain of transatlantic slave ships, who, by the grace of God, became a staunch abolitionist, helping to end the slave trade among British colonies and writing several beloved hymns, including, “How sweet the name of Jesus sounds” (VU 344), “May the grace of Christ” (VU 419), and, most famously, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound” (VU 266). While I appreciate John Newton’s beloved redemption story as told through that famed hymn, my dislike for it has only ripened over the years (even when the word wretch is changed to soul). I have difficulty celebrating John Newton’s redemption arc while people of African descent are still fighting for liberation and while our North American society continues to struggle through the harmful legacy of the horrific transatlantic slave trade. Emancipation, celebrated on Emancipation Day in the British Commonwealth on August 1, is one step of many on the long path to true liberation, emancipation, and redemption.
Until then, every time “Amazing grace” is suggested at a worship committee or is the next hymn in a worship service, I need to have a conversation with the little girl who wants to tell everyone to just stop singing! As worship leaders, we are familiar with this dialogue. It is the tension of curating worshipful experiences for diverse communities. The more we get to know the communities that we are serving, the more stories we gather of beloved hymns, sacred traditions, and meaningful words, often contrasted with stories of despised hymns, rootless traditions, and shallow words. And as worship leaders, the tools that we have to craft liturgy are subjective and complex. Beloved hymns are also hated; stories filled with hope are also stories filled with longing.
I am grateful for spaces that force me to have such conversations within a community. As a result of community, there are hymns I will not sing because of our shared moral and ethical boundaries, for I know that the singing of them can cause pain to others. And then there are hymns like “Amazing grace” that I am deeply uncomfortable with, but that, despite my inner protest, I will sing because of my desire to be in solidarity with fellow sojourners who need the hope that this hymn offers. If I was not in community, I wouldn’t choose to sing this hymn. Yet, worshipping in community, I have come to discover that if I forgo the deep longing and anticipation that “Amazing grace” invokes in me, I will also miss the opportunity to one day sing the hymn with the same vigour and joy with which we will also sing “We shall overcome.”
In solidarity,
Alydia
Alydia Smith, Program Coordinator, Worship, Music, and Spirituality
