I grew up going to a megachurch where the traditions were all very untraditional: Saturday night services, a cafeteria where you could eat and watch the sermon at the same time, and virtually no hymns.  Like, ever.  The only way I knew what hymns even were was because of Adventures in Odyssey.   I knew some popular hymns, like “Be Thou My Vision,” “How Great Thou Art,” and, of course, “Amazing Grace,” because my mother and grandmother sang them occasionally, in the whistle-while-you-work spirit. 

When I came to Calvin, it felt like, in comparison to the majority of students, I had never even been to church.  The peace-be-with-you-and-also-with-you thing threw me off and that semi-truck-sized pipe organ in the FAC stopped my heart during Convocation my first year.  The sudden onset of hymns, though, had the most noticeable emotional and spiritual consequences.

For those of you who grew up with hymns, it may never have seemed odd to you that you could have a room filled with 200 unrelated, untrained singers who know the melodies and harmonies to dozens of songs that each have at least four unique verses.  Imagine, then, for me, an 18-year-old girl whose closest similar experience was her entire extended family stuttering out “Silent Night” at Christmas.

I don’t remember if it was a chapel service or a Sunday LOFT service where everyone whipped out those gray hymnals and then didn’t have to look at them, and I don’t remember what song they sang, but I do remember that I didn’t participate.  I couldn’t participate.  I was too busy staring around, utterly shocked and confused, and wondering why the words weren’t coming up on any screens for me to see.  And then I heard the baseline, and even some arpeggios.  At some point, early in that first song, I attempted to cover my ignorance by whispering “watermelon watermelon watermelon watermelon,” over and over, which was a liturgical trick some of my high school Catholic friends had shared with me at a wedding once.

For the better part of my first two years at Calvin, I resented hymns.  I resented the way they made me feel like an outsider.  I resented the way they made me question my childhood church and had me wondering what else about my faith and worship had been done differently than seemingly everyone else’s.  After a few tries at the gray book, I defiantly stopped pulling it out at all during Chapel or LOFT, and just sort of guessed at the words and the melody.  (I don’t know why I did that; in retrospect it seems just stupid, not rebellious.)  The presence of unfamiliar hymns in an already unfamiliar spiritual landscape—I don’t know if I ever mastered the art of saying the “And also with you” on time, and it took a while for me to figure out what I was supposed to do during the blessing—brought to the forefront all of my insecurities as a Christian.

Maybe it sounds overdramatic, or maybe it’s a megachurch thing.  While my childhood church made considerable efforts to connect itself to churches across the country and world, and while its membership was as diverse as Chicagoland itself, I somehow missed out on the concept of a universal Church.  My church is not even fifty years old; The Church is over 2000.  My church has websites and blogs; The Church has sustained itself by training scribes to keep its histories and holy books.  My church strives to stay fresh to engage the continually changing body of Christ; The Church has its worship history in oral traditions where it was easier to memorize songs than to learn new ones, and congregants would be lucky if they had any instrumentalists.

I stopped resenting hymns about the same time I decided in my heart to be a history minor.  When I started studying the past, I quickly developed an involuntary joy in feeling connected to that past.  I can’t prove it Biblically, but I feel something distinctly divine in the ability of an auditorium full of unrelated people all lending different harmonies to the same words, sometimes with “thee”s and “betwixt”s thrown in.  I think there is something of the glory of Eden in the way we can all come from different places in the Church, and still all experience worship together in a truly connecting event.

There are still times now and then when I don’t participate in the hymn sings in church.  Of course, my silence comes for a different reason these days.  If you’ve ever felt the deep-in-your-gut beauty of The Kingdom that comes when the instruments fall away and all that are left are the voices of God’s children, then you probably know what I mean.  Sometimes, you can’t help but smile and listen.

Mary Margaret Healy

Mary Margaret is a 2013 English, history, and secondary education grad who went rogue and became a Social Worker in Pennsylvania’s Child Welfare system. Specifically, she works as a caseworker in the Statewide Adoption and Permanency Network finding families for children and educating the masses about foster care, adoption, and permanency planning. She made it over the grad-school hurdle with gold stars and warm fuzzies and is on to the next big adventure: the unknown of adulthood. Her major writing dream right now is to finish her science fiction novel that explores the concurrent futures of child welfare and artificial intelligence.