rivka

I was flipping through the hymnal today at church (boring sermon), and was utterly charmed to find that mixed in with the paeans to the fellowship of humankind was a hymn celebrating potential fellowship with extraterrestrials.

No, really:

#302, Children Of The Human Race

Children of the human race
Offspring of our Mother Earth
Not alone in endless space
Has our planet given birth
For across the cosmic skies
Countless suns in glory blaze
And from untold planets rise
Endless canticles of praise.

Should some sign of others reach
This, our lonely planet Earth
Differences in form and speech
Must not hide our common worth
When at length our minds are free
And the clouds of fear disperse
Then at last we'll learn to be
Children of the Universe.

I had previously spotted another stfnal reference in the hymnal, a hymn called "For the Earth, Forever Turning" which has as its last verse:

For the world, we raise our voices
For the home that gave us birth
In our joy we sing, returning home
To the blue-green hills of earth.

I particularly like the idealism of #302. It's very Unitarian-Universalist to be concerned about fostering acceptance of outsiders even before those outsiders have been proven to exist. And "For the Earth, Forever Turning" seems perfectly suited to be a lovely traditional hymn for a spacefaring people nostalgic for their ancestral planet.

I wonder who was responsible for putting these in the hymnal. I wonder whether #302 ever gets sung in church.