Speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and psalming with your heart to the Lord (Eph. 5: 19)

I grew up singing Christian hymns. In those days, of course, everyone sang hymns. The first Christian music scorebook I bought featured Whispering Hope which I would beat out laboriously and painfully on my wreck of a piano. At my school choir audition, I chose to sing Amazing Grace, which I had just discovered as a new Christian via Cliff Richard. I particularly loved Just as I am, without one plea and Take my life and let it be, singing and playing them ad nauseam ad infinitum at home when I should have been solving my Additional Math problems—and what problems they were!

Being fairly musical, and able to hold a note or two without making people cringe in despair, singing hymns was a major Christian preoccupation for me. I cannot even number the hymns I learned as a growing Christian. The lofty grandeur of hymns like Holy, Holy, Holy, and O for a thousand tongues to sing moved me for their greatness and expansiveness of the heavenly vision. The simple rusticity of hymns I learned later, like I sought the Lord, or the Celtic ethereality of Be Thou my vision, drew deep spiritual yearnings in me for the God they extolled as the Creator of the universe. In my twenties, I met O Sacred Head by Bernard of Clairvaux, and like Bach, was never the same again! Loved with everlasting love and George Matheson’s inspired O Love that wilt not let me go followed in quick succession, giving me to appreciate that in some subterranean way, hymns were a lifeline from God to me.

It was not till a while later that I woke to see the changed scene around! While I was carrying on with Lo, He comes with clouds descending, I suddenly realised that the meter had changed to favour David and Dale Garrett’s “scriptures in song”! Of course, these had been around since the late 60s, but it took a while to nudge hymns out from their central place in church music. From then on, it appeared that the New Kid on the Block (NKOTB) and its various permutations (now dubbed “contemporary Christian music”) made better music sense to many people who could barely hit the demanding highs of hymns, never mind understand the lyrics! Hymns just went away “to a far country.” So complete has the transition been that today, an entire generation of young worshippers falls asleep at the merest sound of a hymnal page being turned!

Like me, Christians have always been nourished by the singing of the church. Today’s church sings as much as yesterday’s, if not more. If today’s music appeals to today’s Christian, where is the problem? Old hymns used to be the NKOTB once upon a time too. We need only think of the resistance to Isaac Watts’ new-fangled songs to see that anything “contemporary” may be viewed with suspicion. However, Christians of the past never left the old behind so decidedly in favour of the new as we have in our time. Adding to the existing corpus is not the same as throwing out what is considered outdated. The danger of such an attitude must not be understressed. We have the heritage of more than 2000 years of hymns to boast: they represent an integral part of Christian culture and identity that must be remembered and honoured by those who sing today. New lamps for old? Not so.

Much is said of the value of hymns for the pure doctrine they contain. The didactic quality in hymns has never been doubted. For that reason, many people stay away! Better to say that it is the melody that first affects me and leads me to experience the significance of the words I sing. A hymn is, after all, words put to music. It must move our emotions. Hymns bring God close to us because they touch not only our minds, but draw upon our affection for our God, and open our human experience to his unimagined greatness and tenderness. The scriptural contemplation of this great love in life is enhanced by the melody that is its vehicle: before all else, a hymn is our love song to the Beloved.

But many songs today carry lines from scripture too. In fact, that is why the early contemporary choruses were called “scriptures in song.” Is contemporary music really lacking? My angst here—there is quite a bit—is that my personal experience of many contemporary music styles and arrangements tells me that they dissatisfy. Some songs I stubbornly do not sing, come hail or high water. In terms of attention to good style, musical harmony, neatness and melodic richness, I find them lacking, sometimes even appalling. At best, they are eminently forgettable, even where they toss in a scriptural phrase or two, much like tossed salad. Beautiful they are not. Often the lyrics are superficial, glib and easy phrases that slip off the tongue, with little care given to either the “pure doctrine” of more substantial hymns or the artistic development of the metaphor or idea of the stanza. It’s just bad music and very often bad theology.

What the church has lost is a vigorous faith, whether intellectually or emotionally. Let’s face it: we are a soppy people. We like soaps, casual romantic movies, popcorn and an easy life. Our music reflects what we are. More dangerously, it reflects the legacy we leave to the young. We are careless about the bad theology we carry, because doctrine is dull. In any case, “God loves me” is the only slogan we need to know. Contemporary life and contemporary music expose our spiritual flabbiness … We do not want hard, tough study in the same way we do not want demanding, tough music, old or new, that stretches our vocals as much as our souls. The church may well be just a candy store of spiritual goodies for a spiritually flaccid people.

We need to re-cultivate the psalms and hymns of old, for the simple reasons of teaching and nurturing our congregations’ worshipping love for God as well as reminding people what good music sounds like. One answer to our pathetic and lazy musical situation today is to bring back hymnody from its long exile. Some young, contemporary musicians are doing this very well. One of my all-time favourite hymns is the love song of the 1904 Welsh revival, Here is love, vast as the ocean (Dyma gariad …). The first two stanzas are the original hymn, written by William Rees, and bear an enduring beauty whether sung in Welsh or English. Recently, I “you-tubed” the hymn and came up with Welsh singers, Katherine Jenkins’ and Huw Priday’s respective renditions. I introduced Dyma gariad… to a younger friend of mine, and she was bowled over by Huw Priday’s beautiful tenor, though Jenkins’ soprano with choir engendered some soporific moments for her … But we both found something even more encouraging: popular English singer, Matt Redman features a contemporary version of Here is love. Do I really care that his voice does not quite match Priday’s wonderful vibratos? Not really. I do care that Matt Redman sings hymns to young audiences.  

The church needs to encourage and nurture musical talent to ensure that good contemporary music is produced as part of the continuing church tradition and heritage of worship. Providing thorough immersion through a proper spiritual atmosphere of church song and music that encompasses the centuries of great Christian culture is the best way to do this. Steeped in the richness of their musical past, anchored in the vibrant life of their musical present, and reaching forward towards the luminous vision of their musical future, no young generation of musical Christians could possibly fail to set their world on fire for God.  

This was first published as a Kairos monograph entitled, The Church’s Neglected Treasures, pp. 6-7, 14, December 2008.

Shopping. That onerous word. It is one cause of agony to me, personally, mainly because I can never “shop till you drop” without being pricked by irritating and annoying twinges of conscience that I call “compunction of soul’: Compunction of soul overtakes me annually around the Malaysian Mega Sale season and frankly spoils my fun. My conversation with myself, as I’m traipsing up and down the shopping malls, often begins this way: “If you didn’t buy this and gave the money away, how many people would have food to eat today?” I trace this particular guilt trip back to my childhood, when my parents would throw more or less that same line at me over unfinished dinners:

“How many people (usually in India/ Bangladesh) would be grateful for this food that you’re throwing away!” My standard reply was a rude one, as I recall, but it was borne out of great frustration: “Why don’t you send it to them, then!”

In spite of all the finger-wagging and guilt trips of my traumatised youth, however, I managed to gain something of a reputation among my friends and cohorts as the Queen of Shopping. The way I deal with guilt these days is to go into automatic mode and fish out my credit cards in protest! There are places where the salesgirls perk up at the sight of me and my shopping bags. I am not alone in this, either. I have one or two par­ticular shopping pals, kindred souls, and we scour the town together. What is it about this activity, so often maligned by militant budgeters and “good Christian men’; that pulls one and drives the other mall-wards? Well, being so involved in the enterprise, I have deliberated long and hard on it, as I’m, again, traipsing up and down the malls. I think it provides, first of all, a context for socialising. My friends and I don’t only or necessarily shop, we do the Coffee Bean rounds too. Our conversations range from how many day purses a woman should own to the miserable state of (usually) man-kind, and what we would do if we held the reins of world leadership, or at the least, department headship. In between much colour and spicy lines, we discuss tea, coffee and the differ­ent types of cinnamon rolls available. All very exhilarating and worlds away from the straitjacket of the routine.

Then, too, don’t forget, is the whole elusive (not illusive) ideal of beauty, which is, incidentally, not necessarily the same thing as vanity. Beauty is essential to the health of the human spirit. There is something in us that responds to a thing well-made, well-crafted or designed. Speaking as someone for whom plastic chairs are hard to sit on because they aren’t nice, I think that the appreciation of beauty is as legitimate a preoccupation as any other preoccupation, within the bounds of reasonable limits. Do we not get really bored with people who, because of a misguided frugality, tend to equate dullness and ugliness with true spirituality? Every work of art requires some extravagance of spirit, of physical resources, of time. Ask Van Gogh that, and he will confirm it by demonstrating how much paint he “wasted” on his “useless” paintings, paint which his brother, Auguste, would scrimp and save to buy him. I take my cue from Van Gogh, though I seem to recall that he did shoot himself in the end … In any case, I put it to you, members of the jury, is the spare and plain, therefore, the deliberately cheap and dowdy, preferable just because they are more economical? If we think that, we have made our faith very utilitarian and merely functional in its outworkings, and I disagree. There was an occasion, at least, when Christ himself said, “The poor you will always have with you;” not that I wish to have divine endorsement of my mall crawling, of course. But we know the rest of the story. Some of us are impressed, others made uneasy, by the generosity of the woman and her alabaster jar. Nevertheless, her story outlives her.

This is not to suggest that I am propagating a remorseless and relentless self-indulgence visible in much of our shopping mania! This is where people get it wrong. Shopping is an enjoyable activity we invariably engage in, at some time or other. But that’s all it is. It is not the source of life; it is not even paramount in life. Keeping some sense of balance with regard to the way we live our lives seems to be of great importance in our age. There are so many options and extremes to run to that it is a bewildering exercise to negotiate our way through the choppy waters of life in the twenty-first century.

Perhaps it’s good to go back to the beginning to reiterate my point. Compunction of soul is needed sometimes to remind ourselves that beautiful externals are tag-ons and bonuses in the enterprise of Christian living, that true beauty after all is in the modest and quiet spirit so valuable to God. Compunction of soul is good and useful to create an atmosphere of empathy with those who suffer and have not enough for daily survival. It is the best leveller of economic resources, I think, because empathy generates generosity of heart and is a check to our propensities for indulgence and vanity that so often are synonymous with (sigh!) shopping. To that extent, Christians must be counter-cultural. I guess that means I have to lose my cherished title (Q. of S.) after all. But I have to say this in closing and sotto voce: it would be a hard day indeed to live a life where the only worthy goal is a checkbook that balances. My conviction of life is that it must be a goodly balance of celebration and denial. So you see, friends, sometimes our checkbooks don’t have to balance …

This was first published in a Kairos monograph entitled, Whither Malaysia?, pp. 28-29, August 2008.