Sing unto the Lord a postmodern song

When after many happy years as a member of a parish church in New Brunswick I recently found myself looking for a new place of worship, I decided to try out the University Chapel. I had very often been in the chapel, of course, for a wedding here and a funeral there, for lots of concerts, for at least one mass revolutionary meeting, for nocturnal sectarian mysteries and, of course, for numerous official University convocations at the beginning and end of each academic year.

What I found in ordinary Sunday morning worship was most pleasing. There is awe-inspiring architectural beauty. There is consistent high-quality preaching by a rota of three dynamic deans. Perhaps above all, there is a wonderful music program directed by the excellent Penna Rose and featuring a huge orange-and-black choir of undergraduates, graduates, faculty and loyal townies. There's a fabulous new organist playing a fabulous renewed organ. I soon discovered, however, one small fly in the musicological spikenard, and it is called the "New Century Hymnal." You are undoubtedly familiar with the Bachs — J.A., J.B., J.S., PDQ? Well, the hymnal in common use in the Chapel appears to be the work of P.C. Bach. It guards you from lapsing into patriarchy while singing about the Patriarchs.

My first Sunday there we sang that splendid hymn by Isaac Watts, a metrical paraphrase of the already splendid 90th psalm, which contrasts the eternity of God with the paltry and fugitive span of human life:

Time, like an ever-rolling stream, Bears all its sons away; They fly, forgotten, as a dream Dies at the op'ning day.

Except that what everybody was singing in the second line was:

Soon bears us all away — "us all," not "its sons".

Isaac Watts is not quite John Donne, but he's a great deal more than chopped liver. He should not be messed with gratuitously. When he writes a really good line and "New Century" replaces it with a lame one, we need to know why. The reason, of course, is that Watts's line is politically incorrect, speaking as it does of "sons." When the topic is the catastrophic destruction of the human race, the "New Century Hymnal" demands gender equity.

Next I noticed that the intimate archaisms of the second person pronoun (thou, thy) have been suppressed so that we might address God on equal footing with our insurance agents. What they do to one of the verses of James Weldon Johnson's classic "Lift Every Voice and Sing," not infrequently called the "Black National Anthem," shouldn't happen to the doggerel rhyming of a Hallmark card.

Despite the fact that their imposition runs counter to the grammatical conventions of the sacred and modern tongues, the "New Century" has unilaterally abolished the third person pronoun lest it threaten to refer to God. If "thy kingdom come" is a misdemeanor, "His Kingdom" is a statutory felony. Since "his/her kingdom" generally fails on metrical grounds, the result is a superabundance of what has to be called "God talk."

Take the following sentence: "I went over to Lee's room to ask her whether I could borrow her book and her class notes." (Or since some Lees are guys, it could also be, "I went over to Lee's room to ask him ... ") Now the way the "New Century Hymnal" would handle this is as follows: "I went over to Lee's house to ask Lee whether I could borrow Lee's book and Lee's class notes." Perhaps that sentence lacks something of the idiomatic? Somewhat, as English, strange do you find it, not?

To strive for perfection through asceticism is an ancient Christian practice. Yet whether God actually wills for us a life without pronouns is a question of a theological profundity beyond my pay grade. Pronoun-deprivation may not foster spirituality, but after two or three hymns, it certainly induces a slight hallucinogenic effect possibly suggestive of the alterity of the Divine Being. The "New Century Hymnal" speaks English approximately the way I speak French or German. In French, I have always found such fine points as the subjunctive mood a kind of gaudy and superfluous affectation. In German, I have decreed that "duh" generally suggests some form of the definite article without having to wallow in worldly pomps such as all those pettifogging fine points of gender and case. We are all pilgrims and strangers, to be sure, but the "New Century Hymnal" makes us speak like immigrants who just got off the boat. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu. His column appears on Mondays.