Stuff I learned on Sunday
We sang a hymn in worship yesterday with this verse:
Proudly rise our modern cities,
stately buildings, row on row;
yet their windows, blank, unfeeling,
stare on canyoned streets below,
where the lonely drift unnoticed
in the city’s ebb and flow,
lost to purpose and to meaning,
scarcely caring where they go.
I’ve sung this hymn at least half a dozen times, but I didn’t notice until yesterday how far off its depiction of modern city life is from my experience. “Blank, unfeeling?” “Lost to purpose and to meaning?” “Scarcely caring where they go?”
Is there anything to be gained for our witness to the gospel by characterizing our neighbors like this? I don’t think so.
I decided early in my adulthood that the happiness of people who aren’t Christians did not pose a threat to my Christian faith. The stock portrayal I was fed in the conservative evangelical church of my childhood was of non-believers who were depressed or depraved. If they were happy, it was surely because they were doing drugs of having premarital sex and would be duly punished in the fires of Hell.
Yet lots of my adolescent peers were neither churchgoers nor oversexed druggies (some were–both), and yet were nonetheless happy. Then my Aunt married a jolly little Irish-Catholic-turned-honest-to-God-Buddhist, and I knew the Miserable Heathen was a fiction for sure.
The vast majority of people I interact with lead lives full of purpose and meaning, and only a few of them claim any kind of religious faith. And I know a lot of miserable Christians. Neither the former’s happiness nor the latter’s misery affect my trust in God, as if faith has happiness as its object. It doesn’t.
YoRocko! 
Good thoughts, Rocky. I to was stuck by the bleakness of this hymn. Quite a contrast to “Clap Your Hands” , our Sang , by our choir, at the beginning of our service.
too
I loved that introit
That hymn was in the old blue hymnal–but the version in the blue hymnal didn’t have that verse. I had the same experience that Rocky did while we were singing it–“Wait, what?” So I went back and looked. Check #268 in the Blue Hymnal–no verse about the cities. I was going on memory.
I guess that explains why the verse never caught my attention before. Good to know I wasn’t just spacing out all those other times
Say it again, Rocky!!! You’re right on —–
Carolyn
So–I got curious and look what I discovered about the author:
Catherine Cameron Born: March 27, 1927, St. John, New Brunswick, Canada. Daughter of Presbyterian minister John Sutherland Bonnell, Catherine attended McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. After marrying minister Robert Arnott, she moved to Claremont, California, and in 1971, earned a PhD in sociology from the University of California. Specializing in family problems, she lectured for some years at the University of La Verne, California, as Dr. Catherine Cameron. Lyrics: “O Christ, Who Came to Share Our Human Life” –
http://www.gbod.org/resources/history-of-hymns-god-who-stretched-the-spangled-heavens