Least Favorite Hymns

[sixpence]

i happen to like some of these songs.. they remind me of being a kid.

[vee]

[quote name='DiscerningCatholic' timestamp='1351369588' post='2498768']


"One Bread, One Body"

[/quote]


my parish has this hymn stuck on repeat

[dominicansoul]

"They will know we are Christians By Our Love" youth choir bongo drum remix

[vee]

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

[ChrisInMI]

Dominicansoul - that's one I forgot to mention... I knew there were some I was missing. Sadly, when many people think of Christianity these days, love is not the first emotion that comes to mind.

Another stinker I almost forgot is Ricky Manalo's "In These Days of Lenten Journey" - which thankfully comes up only during Lent. For some strange reason, last year my music director scheduled this on Ash Wednesday, which is odd when you consider that the lyrics read, "In these days of Lenten journey we [i]have seen[/i] and we [i]have heard[/i]..." Excuse me, the Lenten journey has barely begun! As for the song itself, it sounds like a ripoff of Bobby Darin's "If I Were a Carpenter" and the Brotherhood of Man's "United We Stand" at the same time.

Speaking of hymns that bear a suspicious resemblance to secular oldies... we had "Gather Us In" as the opening hymn this weekend (minus the heretical verse four, thank you Jesus), and our substitute music director remarked how much he thought it sounded like Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." I can definitely hear that. Others have remarked about "We Are Called" sounding a lot like Styx's "Come Sail Away," and "Here I Am, Lord"'s resemblance to the theme from "The Brady Bunch." And then of course, there's "Morning Has Broken," which actually WAS a hit (for Cat Stevens of course), but the extra music that Cat Stevens added to the arrangement on his own really added something special to the song that you don't get from the version in the hymnals.

I actually don't mind "Gift of Finest Wheat," but "O Sacrum Convivium" blows it out of the water. I wonder if my music director has even heard of it, or if I would have heard of it had I not attended AQUINAS College (Grand Rapids, MI). Of course, in Campus Ministry chorus, I was exposed to the bad stuff more often than the good in the pretense of "wanting something more college-student-friendly," I suppose, particularly "Walk in the Reign" and "Voices that Challenge." I only got to sing the good stuff as part of the actual college chorale.

Songs like "On Eagle's Wings," "Eye Has Not Seen," and so on I don't really object to because of the hymns themselves, but because they're so overused. The Gather hymnal is like most churches' versions of Top 40 radio - the same songs over and over and over, and they get played over and over and over because they're familiar and safe. I'm not saying cut them out entirely, because a lot of people do happen to like those songs; but variety is the spice of life, and it's been my experience that an out-of-the-ordinary piece can really create a worshipful atmosphere for the assembly.

African-American spirituals are always fun to do, though the arrangements in the Gather hymnal are generally substandard (often because of the bastardized lyrics). Under my old music director, we did several, including "Plenty Good Room," "Don't Be Weary, Traveler," and "Hush, Somebody's Callin' My Name." They were quite well received.