We sang this song in church yesterday, and when we did I was reminded of a time when I spent a ton of time with the lyrics. I was doing a book of meditations for teenagers, something eventually titled Someone's Singing, Lord, thirty years ago. So this morning I went to the library and hunted that little book up--and found it. I looked at the first little meditation and still liked it. Hope you do too.
If you've got three minutes, have a listen to a couple of thousand Welsh folks. Don't miss it. It's down at the bottom of the page.
Be blessed.
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Turning a double play is an art.
A runner's on first when a ground ball is hit to second. The shortstop has to make split-second decisions--how to get to the bag at the exact moment the throw does, which side of the bag to hit, and how to get his own throw over or around the runner.
But that's not all. To work smoothly, the second basemen has to know what decisions the shortstop is making. The two need to work in harmony. That's the art of the double play: two players thinking--playing--as if they were one.
Dancers need to work in harmony too. A long time ago, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced their way through a shelf full of movies. Together though a moonlit garden, their bodies moved in perfect harmony.
Our word harmony comes from the old Greek word harmos, meaning "a joining or a fitting." Whether you see it or hear it in singing or dancing or making double plays, harmony happens when two or more things fit together, agree.
A woman I know who grew up in a church where the people sang psalms without an organ claims that sometimes today she misses the old way of singing because, she says, in her old church people learned to harmonize, to fit together.
There is something great about harmony, something haunting. You can feel it when you sing a round in church, each side's notes turning and spinning through each other to make the sound deeper and richer, transforming it into something almost alive.
My mother's family used to sit around our living room and sing together--sometimes happy little verses and silly songs. But the songs you couldn't laugh about were the ones I remember best, songs such as my grandpa's favorite, "Beautiful Savior." My family would sing those special songs in harmony. After the last note drifted away, no one would speak. They they'd sit there for a second in silence, as if there were no words at all.
The Welsh have the grandest tradition of harmony I know. Sometimes ten thousand Welsh people get together to make music, to harmonize, in a gathering they call a Cymanfu Ganu. Even in North America great armies of Welsh still gather to sing.
"Guide Me, 0 My Great Redeemer" was written by a Welshman for a Cymanfu Ganu. Its melody, a tune called CWM RHONDDA, is named after the the Rhondda river valley in the coal mining district of Wales--a place where a great singing festival took place in the early part of 20th century.
In two thousand years of Christendom, people have created lots of dreams of heaven--streets paved with gold, fat little angels winging around with harps and flutes, all kinds of folks in white robes singing, hours on end. Maybe there will be more than that. Maybe not. Maybe there will be dancing. Maybe some ballplayers will be turning double plays.
My guess is, one way or another, we'll harmonize, fit together like we've never fit before.
That hymn is a rouser. That many singing at a time, puts any old double play to shame.
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