Church Music

The Wedding Feast

Here's something from Assistant Village Idiot that reminded me of what we were talking about the other day, the metaphor of music or dance as Heaven:

One of my repeated themes of the last year is that worship is not something we create on Sunday mornings. Worship is going on all the time in heaven, and our worship is an attempt to connect with that - to become part of it, learn the steps and the songs. If you remember the descriptions of heaven as a wedding feast, then the idea of learning all those line dances, preparing for the songs that have special meanings at various parts of the ceremony, and looking forward to drinking almost too much except now you actually have good judgment, can begin to see how the combination of pentecostal enthusiasm and liturgical familiarity might work.

The Anchoress (h/t Little Miss Atilla) hosted a long discussion the other day about the role of music in church services, during which lots of people got to air their frustrations with the trend in hymns in the last forty years or so. The point of the article was to ask readers to identify their ten most-hated hymns, but a lot of the discussion was equally about why some music works better than others. (I was surprised to hear that even what I think of as traditional old Episcopal hymns were a hotbed of heresy from the point of view of Catholics, but there you are! My education in most of what separates Catholics from Episcopalians is spotty, aside from obvious things like the authority of the Pope.)