God’s blessings to you on this the seventh day of February in the year of our Lord’s incarnation 2017.

I got in a conversation about church hymns today. For anyone who doesn’t know, after the switch from Latin to the customary vernacular which happened in the 1960s, the Catholic Church in America was in great need of English language hymns, and the hymnal which was put together very quickly, well, sounds like it was. There are some really good songs in the hymnal—in the sense of both having beautiful music as well as having theological content in the words—but then there are also some songs whose inclusion is hard to understand apart from the poor judgment which goes along with desperation and lack of sleep. Or possibly very weird taste born of living in a very strange time, which the 1960s in America certainly seems to have been. I do think that people get too worked up over this; if the worst cross one has to bear is singing some bad hymns while getting to celebrate our salvation by eating the body and drinking the blood of God, one has very little to complain about. And I expect that better hymnals will be produced within a few decades; on the scale of a 2000 year old church that’s nearly the blink of an eye. Still, that’s not quite so fast by the standards of a human life, and while Marty Haugen wrote some competent melodies it seems that anything to which he wrote the words is a penance to sing. So, for anyone who’s suffered through the hymns of Marty Haugen and his similarly-talented contemporaries, take solace with me in this fun parody (no idea who to attribute it to):

Glory to God in the highest.