Reading the Old Books: Great Literature & the Life of Faith: Corporate Worship (GH Day 11)

Friday, August 24, 2012

Corporate Worship (GH Day 11)

I am blessed to be part of a university that is sincere about the Christian faith. This was powerfully demonstrated this week during the Fall Faculty Workshop, where all full-time faculty at the university assemble for 1-2 days prior to the start of the new school year. At one point during our gathering, we sang hymns and choruses together, declaring our common faith and praising our common Lord. Unlike my experience at most church services, the voices in this room of 200 disparate faculty lifted together into a full sound, filling the room. We come from several different denominations, but we serve one God.

George Herbert was a lover of music (see his poem "Church Music") and played at least one instrument, the lute. He set some of his poems to music during his lifetime, and many others of his poems have been set to music in the 4 centuries since. In fact, if you find a hymnal lying around and open it to the back index, you're likely to find at least one hymn whose lyrics are attributed to Mr. Herbert. The most common that I've seen is Herbert's poem "Antiphon (1)," also known by its first line, "Let all the world in every corner sing" (not that there are many hymnals around these days to glance through anymore, to the great detriment of sacred music, but that's a blog post for another day).

"Antiphon" is a poem of communal praise. As its title suggests, the verses are sung by two different choirs, who join together for the chorus. Here is the poem from luminarium.org:

Antiphon (I)

Cho. Let all the world in ev'ry corner sing,
                                    My God and King.
Vers.
The heav'ns are not too high,
His praise may thither flie:
The earth is not too low,
His praises there may grow.

Cho. Let all the world in ev'ry corner sing,
                                    My God and King.
Vers.
The church with psalms must shout,
No doore can keep them out:
But above all, the heart
Must bear the longest part.

Cho. Let all the world in ev'ry corner sing,
                                    My God and King.

It's a straightforward poem: praise God in heaven; praise God on earth. Then the poet narrows his focus to the church and finally to the human heart, while the chorus consistently reminds us that this praise should be coming from every part of the world. The last verse stresses that the heart is the most important part of worship. We can sing loudly, but it means little if the heart is not engaged.

Possibly my favorite version of this poem set to music is by the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (from his Five Mystical Songs).

May we be praising the Lord with our hearts and our songs today.

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Why Old Books?

C. S. Lewis wrote that old books, so often shunned by readers even of his era, might be able to teach us much wisdom and truth that our contemporary age has forgotten (at best) or ridicules (at worst). See, for instance, Lewis's essay "On the Reading of Old Books" (from which I've taken my blog title), where he states, "It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. . . . Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books."

How often does the average American (or insert English-speaking-person here) read something written by an old dead guy and consider that, as a result of what we've read, we should "possibly modify [our] thoughts or [our] behaviour" (Lewis, The Screwtape Letters)? I'm not striving for anything ambitious with this blog, but perhaps by sharing the tidbits from my reading of old books (typically works of early English literature) and highlighting a story element, a concept, a passage, a word, I can take part in the tradition of passing along to you the lessons of beauty, truth, and goodness conveyed by these works.

There's one more element to this exploration: the old books, at least those written in the English language, were written mostly by people of faith in a culture of faith--namely, the Christian faith. As a Christian myself, I find the old books present all kinds of lessons for a life of faith.

For those of you in the literary know, you'll find that my approach to literature has been influenced heavily by Sir Philip Sidney's Defense of Poesy, as well as by neo-formalist criticism and, as already demonstrated, the great Medieval & Renaissance scholar and man of faith, C. S. Lewis.