Including tradition.

So many things I could have blogged about this week. 

But I'm going to take on something that I should have written last week that is still bugging me.

I haven't been to church in over a year.  Part of that is that I've been very, very hurt by a church in the past, part of that is that I've moved 3 times and I'm not in a place with weak public transportation, and part of it is that I don't really know how to go to church anymore if I'm not staff.  And yet one more factor is that I am, as my blog says, quite eclectic in my theology, and it's hard to find a place where I'm comfortable. 

One of those eclecticisms is that I'm both traditionalist and progressive.  I love a lot of the classic hymns of Christianity, but I don't love a lot of the masculine language they contain.  Last week, I woke up from a dream with the hymn "Be Thou My Vision" stuck in my head.  This is a lovely hymn with 2 quite problematic lines.  The first appears in the second verse:

Thou my true Father and I thy true son

And the second is the first line of the third verse:

Riches I heed not nor man's empty praise

 The last church I attended was a moderately conservative Episcopal church, and I remembered that in the hymnal, that second line had been changed to

Riches I heed not nor vain, empty praise

which I think is nice, and works.  But I couldn't remember what the other line had been.

And that line has bothered me for a long time.  I know "man" has been used for "human" for a long time, and while I don't like it, I can kind of at least slide myself into it when I sing a traditional hymn.  But I can't be a son.  "Sons" maybe I can sort of include myself in because I know it's a clumsy translation in the Bible from בני b'nei or παιδός paidos (both of which, yes, can mean "sons" but they also stand in those languages generally for "children" especially in Hebrew which doesn't have another word for "children").  But "I thy true son" just doesn't work in my head.  And it was driven home strongly several years ago when the hymn was sung as a solo by one of the women on our music team.  She had a gorgeous voice, mezzo-soprano-ish, and that line just sounded utterly ludicrous when she sang it.  And it's funny because that community usually changed the pointless masculine language to inclusive language when it could.

I think the problem is the next line.  You see, the usual arrangement of this hymn is in rhyming couplets.  So it goes:

Thou my true Father and I thy true son
Thou with me dwelling and I with thee one

This also makes sense in the context of the original hymn, which was composed and sung by Irish monks.  They were all male, and they had dedicated their lives to a kind of life that centers around God and worship.  But as much as I might long for unity with God, I'm not a monk and I cannot really be a "true son."  I'm not so great with rhyme and rhythm language, and I couldn't think of a way to alter those two lines to keep the meter and rhyme.  "Child" really doesn't work - what in the world could it rhyme with?

So, as we do, I turned to the internet.  Googling "be thou my vision inclusive" doesn't, helpfully, bring up an inclusive version of the hymn, but instead a lot of people bitching about changing hymn lyrics.  Which, just, ugh. 

I don't mind traditional masculine language for God, as long as it's properly balanced by acknowledging that there is plenty of traditional feminine language for God and I do prefer if people avoid pronouns generally.  And I don't mind the "king" language, because that is rather part of God's character and what makes God God.  If God isn't ruler, no one is, and we are God's creation, so God has authority over us and the rest of creation.  I'm as pacifist as anyone, and I'm all for the church avoiding taking power and authority, but I don't mind if God has it.

But there are people out there who bitch about any change to any masculine language.  Including that referring to people.  Sometimes they claim it's about translation and respecting the original grammar, but somehow they're ok with never referring to the Spirit of God as feminine the way it is in Hebrew grammar.  So basically that argument is intellectually bankrupt.  Appeals to "original language" are just appeals to keep women from being fully included, and are no better than the Victorians leaving obscene bits untranslated "in the modesty of the original language" (which was, of course, perfectly understood by women in ancient Greece or Rome). 

One of the things that drove me away from the fringes of evangelicalism where I was and to the Episcopal Church was that I am just sick of fighting about gender.  I'm a woman (more or less), God called me to teach.  I'm not going to fight about it.  I'm just tired.  Other women are called to, and I'm glad for them.  But I'd rather be part of a community that lets me get on with doing what I'm called to do and not interested in deciding if it's ok first or not.  It reminds me of one of my professors at JTS.  He is orthodox, and JTS is conservative (which is to say, less observant and slightly more liberal).  I once asked him why he was at JTS and not YU and he said at YU, he would say something, and the class had to spend 20 minutes discussing whether what he said was heretical or not.  At JTS, they just engage in what he actually said.  I'm not interested in people debating whether I can talk or not.

It took me a while of slogging and fine-tuning the Google search, but I finally found a lovely inclusive re-phrasing:

Thou my true Father, thine own may I beThou with me dwelling and I one with thee

 Keeps the same theme and sentiment, just re-works the word order for a nice couplet.  So now I can sing this hymn again.  Thank God for community.