As a musician of faith, I have been discovering as I get on in years that the proverbial “Great American Song Book” is much more than a collection of great tunes and snappy lyrics. It also has some wonderfully wise lyrics — words that resonate in both the secular and the sacred spheres. In fact, quite a few of these classic songs have become an important source of “holy wisdom” for me, and I am still discovering more.
Consider these examples:
» 1. “Try to Remember” is a timeless song from The Fantasticks, a hugely popular musical of 1960. Do you remember this line?
Deep in December it’s nice to remember
Without a hurt, the heart is hollow.
“Without a hurt … without a scar … .” People of faith are among the first to understand how suffering enables us to feel compassion in our lives. The suffering of childbirth unleashes a special measure of compassion in every mother’s heart for her new baby.
It’s such a fundamental bond that God’s love for us is likened to it in Isaiah 49: “Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.”
» 2. The decade of the 1920s, when Gus Kahn and Isham Jones published “It Had to Be You,” was wild and crazy. It was the dawn of Prohibition. There were speakeasies and talking movies. J. Edgar Hoover was rising, and Wall Street was on its way to the great crash of 1929. What intrigues me about the lyric of “It Had to Be You” (1924) is this couplet:
For nobody else gave me a thrill,
With all your faults, I love you still!
These are the kinds of words that a loving deity, especially the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, could be singing to us on any day of any year in all of history. “With all your faults, dear humans, I love you still!”
As a scriptural equivalent, a passage in Psalm 145 comes to mind. It reminds us of God’s enduring love for humankind: “The Lord is gracious and compassionate; slow to anger and rich in love. The Lord is good to all; having compassion on all he has made.”
» 3. Paradoxes can be wonderful seeds for contemplation. Turning conventional wisdom on its head, which is what a paradox often does, occurs in many passages of Scripture, for example in Luke 14: “For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”
And in Matthew 7: “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured out to you.”
The Beatitudes themselves — blessed are the meek, blessed are the merciful — in Matthew 5, are nothing if not paradoxes!
How lovely it is to find the same kind of topsy-turvy wisdom in a popular ballad — Amanda McBroom’s hit song of 1979, “The Rose” — especially in these lines:
It’s the one who won’t be taken, who cannot seem to give.
And the soul, afraid of dyin’, that never learns to live.
» 4. One of the great paradoxes that we humans have to contend with is the question, “Why do failure and suffering happen to those who don’t deserve it?” Wouldn’t we all like God or some benevolent force greater than ourselves to intervene when we are desperate for a fix or a cure? Here’s an episode from the Hebrew Bible (the Book of Job) that speaks to that quandary:
“When Job’s three friends … heard about all the troubles that had come upon him, they set out from their homes and met together … to go and sympathize with him and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they could hardly recognize him; they began to weep aloud, and they tore their robes … . Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights.”
Job’s friends gathered around him in his time of need just to “be there” with him. What a marvelous gesture of solidarity!
In Irving Berlin’s wonderful song about enduring love, “Always,” the lyricist says something very similar: Days may not be fair always; that’s when I’ll be there … !
Later in the song we hear these words:
When the things you’ve planned need a helping hand,
I will understand — always, always!
To understand is not just about “getting it.” It also may mean to “stand under,” as William Shakespeare used the term: to support, but not necessarily to intervene — not necessarily to fix a problem. There is wisdom in recognizing when a problem can’t be fixed. And there is love in knowing how to be there anyway.
» 5. After the dark days of World War II, in 1947, Lerner and Loewe helped revive the battered spirit of Great Britain with their musical Brigadoon. It’s remembered for its great love song, “Almost Like Being in Love.” One of its lines expresses a wonderfully universal sentiment — a largesse that’s quite beyond the reach of most mortals most of the time:
There’s a smile on my face
For the whole human race,
There are echoes of this breadth of love in Scripture, of course. We read in Isaiah 30, for instance: “But the Lord longs to show you his favor. He wants to give you his tender love.”
Perhaps the most classic expression of God’s love for the “whole human race” is in John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but have everlasting life.”
» 6. When Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein teamed up on a song, wonderful things happened. One good example of their collaboration is this “over the top” song about just how fabulous the significant other in our lives can be. “All the Things You Are” is a declaration of love so rich in superlatives and so flattering to the beloved that it almost takes our breath away. It ends with these lines of impatient expectation:
Some day my happy arms will hold you,
And some day I’ll know that moment divine,
When all the things you are, are mine!
There are some good examples of God as a lover yearning for us in Scripture, too. In the Song of Solomon, for instance, we read in the fourth chapter, poetry that says, in effect: “You have stolen my heart, my sister, my bride; you have stolen my heart with one glance of your eyes. … How delightful is your love, my sister, my bride! How much more pleasing is your love than wine, and the fragrance of your perfume than any spice!”
What’s not to love about a lover, whether human or divine, who is as passionate as this?
— Thomas Heck is a member of and music minister for the Catholic Church of the Beatitudes, which celebrates Mass at 5:30 p.m. Saturdays at First Congregational Church of Santa Barbara, 2101 State St. Click here for more information, or call 805.252.4105. Click here for previous columns. The opinions expressed are those of the author.