Garrison Keillor, Unitarian-Universalists, and Silent Night

[rivka]

(I should totally have a chalice-in-a-Santa-hat icon for this post, but I don't. Alas.)

So Garrison Keillor wrote a cranky and mean-spirited column for Salon in which, I guess, he tried to horn in on Bill O'Reilly's lucrative and attention-grabbing "War on Christmas" routine. Except that because Keillor operates in a different cultural millieu than O'Reilly does, he decides to call out Unitarian-Universalists and Jews:

You can blame Ralph Waldo Emerson for the brazen foolishness of the elite. He preached here at the First Church of Cambridge, a Unitarian outfit (where I discovered that "Silent Night" has been cleverly rewritten to make it more about silence and night and not so much about God) [...]

Unitarians listen to the Inner Voice and so they have no creed that they all stand up and recite in unison, and that's their perfect right, but it is wrong, wrong, wrong to rewrite "Silent Night." If you don't believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn "Silent Night" and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism and we Christians have stood for it long enough. And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write "Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we'll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah"? No, we didn't.

Christmas is a Christian holiday -- if you're not in the club, then buzz off.

As they say elsewhere on the web, in a turn of phrase so useful that it quickly became part of my regular vocabulary: "I wish I had a thousand eyes - I'd roll them all." Because let's take a look at the shocking way that UUs have butchered the carol "Silent Night." You might want to send small children out of the room for this one, and pregnant women and people with heart conditions should exercise caution before clicking this link to #251 in the UU hymnal.

The UU blogosphere has been all over this one, of course. I particularly like the thoughtful and comprehensive response by Rev. Cynthia Landrum, which sums it up thusly:

On the other hand, Keillor is falling prey to a major fallacy that says, "the way I remember things from my own childhood is the way things always have been and always should be." His personal history has become the authoritative version of what Christmas should be, and what hymns should be.

But, of course, neither Christmas nor hymnody is like that.

The funny thing is that the version of "Silent Night" Keillor is so vigorously defended is a not-very-faithful English translation of a German carol, "Stille Nacht." A UU musician posted a literal translation of the German carol. The scansion wouldn't work to actually sing it, but it has some beautifully intimate mother-infant imagery:

Silent night, holy night
All is sleeping, alone watches
Only the close, most holy couple.
Blessed boy in curly hair,
Sleep in heavenly peace!
Sleep in heavenly peace!

The literal translation from the German also has a fantastic line in the third verse: Son of God, oh how laughs Love out of your divine mouth.

Is Garrison Keillor singing about Love being laughed from the infant Jesus' mouth? No? Then he can shut the hell up about how awful it is when UUs change the words to hymns.

As far as Keillor's anti-Semitism: I don't even know where to start when it comes to those horrible Jews, ruining Christmas for the poor misunderstood outnumbered Christians by, I guess, holding a gun to their heads and forcing them to like "The Christmas Song." No, wait! No Christian likes that song, right? The reason it gets played ad nauseam during the Christmas season is because Jews control the media. Now it becomes clear to me. As I said: I wish I had a thousand eyes - I'd roll them all.

Comments

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Hymn book-less, I just started singing along... and then realized I was singing something different from the rest of the congregation.

Hee! Even now, this happens to me all the time. Albeit sometimes by choice - there's a hymn we do (I forget which) to the tune of "Holy, Holy, Holy," and I cannot resist singing the line "God in three persons, blessed Trinity" in the appropriate spot.

One of the things I like about the Rev. Cyn post I quote briefly above is that she goes into the whole question of hymn-changing in depth. I don't know if you've encountered the UU hymn that's to the tune of "Onward Christian Soldiers?" That would seem like a perfect example of oh-those-silly-UUs-appropriating-Christian-songs, except that it turns out that "Forward Through the Ages" is just as old as "Onward Christian Soldiers." I had no idea.

Reusing hymn tunes, and rewriting lyrics to suit your theology, is both older and more pervasive than UUism. It makes a lot of sense when you think about the centuries-old challenge of hauling a bunch of untrained singers, most of whom probably can't read music, through episodes of unrehearsed choral singing every week. It helps if they recognize the tune, so the same ones (or minor variations) appear again and again.

But yeah, I have to admit that I pretty much think the UU hymnal ruined "O Come, O Come Emmanuel.

[(Anonymous)]

Reusing hymn tunes, and rewriting lyrics to suit your theology, is both older and more pervasive than UUism.

No argument! What bugs me the most, though, are the "almost but not quite" adaptations. I like both "Greensleeves" and "What Child Is This?" and don't suffer cognitive dissonance when one or the other is played, I think mostly because the words and themes are totally different. Same with filk in the SCA - I'm more apt to like it if it uses the tune from some song but does *not* rip off close to half of the words.

So, if one wanted to do a Solstice carol to the tune of "Greensleeves," I would be more kindly inclined towards a refrain starting with:

"Come, dance on the darkest night
And welcome back the dying light"

than

"This, this is the sun, the king
On darkest night to him we sing"

[telerib.livejournal.com]

Er, that was me, if it wasn't obvious.