I’d never heard the above expression till I went to New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, New Mexico in 1975. It was used by a native New Mexican (if such an appellation is allowed). I can’t remember his name. He was a cowboy, good-natured type that I don’t recall using profanity at all just this mild vulgarity.
Well, it chapped my rear when a man, not even a member, chastised me each yea (for three years running) for having the versicle and response: “Christ is risen; He is risen indeed, Hallelujah!” First, he mentioned it after service; then he wrote me an email the next year, and finally the third year, a snail-mail letter!
What was the source of his displeasure, yea even righteous indignation? He would close each of his chastisements with a polite, but dismissive: “You’ll understand why my family will be silent if you persist on doing this.”
He traced the origin to the Eastern Orthodox Church whose people persecuted his people in WW II. Now if you Google this: you’ll find “everyone” else traces the origin of the versicle and response to Luke 24:34. Long before Russians or Germans even existed. It’s true that the Eastern Orthodox traced it to Mary Magdalene and early on used this call and response.
I never got a chance to ask this gentleman if he was in sympathy with the 1619 project, reparations for African American’s today whose great, great, great grandparents were enslaved, or La Raza’s quest to regain California (okay by me) and Texas.
Then in getting my notes from Klemet Preus’ The Fire and the Staff I ran across this. “Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken” is hymn number 469 in The Lutheran Hymnal. There the great hymnwriter John Newton’s 1779 hymn is sung to an 1883 tune, Galilean, which many will know form “Hark! The Voice of Jesus Crying.” I like the tune for the latter but thought it a bit jaunty for the former.
Well, Newton’s hymn wasn’t written with that tune originally, TLH changed it, and The Handbook to it, strangely doesn’t tell you, as it normally does, the background. That’s because the original tune Austria was “the tune for Adolph Hitler’s nationalistic song, a song that had cast fear into the hearts of many a murdered Jew and not a few Allied soldiers. The associations with Hitler’s terror were too strong” (Preus, 157).
When the 1982 Lutheran Worship was published, almost 40 years after Hitler, enough time had passed and it returned the hymn – sans the “Thee” in favor of the crude “you” – to Hitler’s tune. (Actually, Franz Joseph Hayden wrote it in 1797 which was about 20 years after Newton’s lyrics. I had an organist who said if a hymn’s author didn’t select the tune but someone later did you too had the liberty of choosing especially if it was after his death. Newton was still alive so perhaps he chose the tune which means we shouldn’t change it.)
Or does it? Preus, in masterfully setting forth how some contemporary tunes cannot be disassociated from their secular original setting, illustrates this by telling how one Sunday after singing “Glorious Things of You (sic or it might be sick) Are Spoken” out of Lutheran Worship a good member said, “’If Grandpa had been here today, he would have gotten up and walked out of church at the singing of that tune’” (Ibid.).
That I can understand. I would liken that to the best man at our wedding who I met in our junior year in college. He had just kicked heroin. When he went to church with me, when the acolyte snuffed the candles, he said that he because nauseous because that was the last smell you whiffed before shooting up. You cooked the heroin, snuffed the match, and after that smell came the heroin rush.
Two things to note: First, neither my friend nor my chastiser quit going to church for being offput by something in the Divine Service which would have been wrong and foolish. Second, both the grandpa that would have walked out of church and my friend who got nauseated had first-person experience with the “offensive” thing. My chastiser did not.
For the second note my rear is somewhat chapped. For first it is less than before. Perhaps chafed not chapped.
