Morning Thanks--an old hymn

Horatius Bonar (1808-1889)

Old songs--old hymns--sling me back to my childhood like nothing else. Sometimes I find myself going over lines from the oldies without having called up titles or first lines--they're just there and I'm singing them. It's as if they've actually got their own channel or station or url, where they play 24/7, while I spend most of my time at other websites. They surprise me, as if I'm forever in a musical game of hide-and-seek.

Last week it was "Conquering Now and Still to Conquer" rising from back yard prairie grass. All of a sudden I'm singing "Not to the strong is the battle, not to the swift is the race" and thinking about a Lakota hide painting. Very strange--another mark of old age? Maybe I shouldn't be admitting these things publicly.

Sunday's transcendent moment was the shocking appearance of another oldie, this one in our worship service, "Not What My Hands Have Done." The moment the organist started in (we very rarely sing it anymore), some element of memory sang along. To say I remembered the text understates the experience. That old hymn put me into a state of mind I remembered. It wasn't as if I remembered a certain Sunday morning. I remembered the old hymn because I remembered something I thought I'd forgotten--how long ago I thought about the lyrics.

Not what my hands have done
can save my guilty soul,
not what my toiling flesh has borne
can make my spirit whole.
Not what I feel or do
can give me peace with God,
not all my prayers and sighs and tears
can bear my awful load.

The bare-bones confession of the first line suggests we're going straight to the confession booth: "now what these hands have done." I'll admit it today--there were sins aplenty in my early years, and the first line does a lot more than suggest that me and Lady Macbeth had some bloody hands in common.

But that's not the focus of the hymn. It's more than what I did wrong; it's what I can't do right. "Can save my guilty soul" blindsides you if you're expecting bald-faced confession. The line is confession, but it's not a confession of sin as it is an abject confession of helplessness, which is a good deal worse. What these hands have done is absolutely nothing, because there's nothing these hands can do to "bring me peace with God." Nothing. Zilch. Nada.

So I'm standing in church, and singing the old hymn, and suddenly I'm telling myself I was born and reared as an unrelenting Calvinist. The sorrow Horatius Bonar headlines in this old hymn is rather typical, I've read, of the man's "pensive reflection," of his pessimism. "Not What My Hands" is a praise song, but it's hardly jubilant, even though those opening lines are aimed at nothing less the beauty of grace. 

For me at least, something in the brooding darkness of the words was sad, wistful maybe. They brought me back to a time when I'd thought about them in exactly that way, fearfully: there's just nothing I can do to bring me peace with God, "not all my prayers and sighs and tears can bear my awful load." Yup. Amen to that.

And yet--I'm sitting there in church last Sunday, singing--I told myself I wouldn't trade my childhood for anyone's. Not that it was all peachy pleasant; I had good reason to believe I too, back then, carried an "awful load." 

But I couldn't help being thankful for picking up adult ideas from the lyrics of an old 19th century hymn: it's all about grace and "not what my hands have done"--or didn't do. 

I'm not sure I'm still fully capable of the promise of the last verse. At 75, I still haven't developed an "unfalt'ring lip and heart to call this Savior mine." That lip of mine is still faltering.

But I can't help but believe (a Calvinist phrase really, don't you think?) that I'm getting there, thanks, in no small part, to childhood hymns that pushed me to be an adult about what amounts to the central questions of our existence here on earth and in what the Lakota call "the Spirit world" to come.

I don't know how to put a handle on all of that other than to say this morning I'm thankful for having, once again, sung an old hymn I wouldn't call my favorite, but would claim to have formed me, maybe more than I can even explain.