It's almost Thanksgiving...so naturally, it's time to talk neutered patriotism!

The "Finlandia Hymn", by Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, was written to be a moving, patriotic anthem for Finland, and the original lyrical setting (here given not to meter but in literal translation) is quite powerful in its frank joy:

O, Finland, behold, your day is dawning,
The threat of night has been banished away,
And the lark of morning in the brightness sings,
As though the very firmament would sing.
The powers of the night are vanquished by the morning light,
Your day is dawning, O land of birth.

O, rise, Finland, raise up high
Your head, wreathed with great memories.
O, rise, Finland, you showed to the world
That you drove away the slavery,
And that you did not bend under oppression,
Your day has come, O land of birth.

Here you have a dynamic, powerful, meaningful celebration of Finland's national identity, one well adaptable to her needs in triumph and suffering alike.  That's what a national anthem does; it reminds the people of some nation, in particular form and style characteristic of the nation itself, of the good which that nation is.  In suffering, it gives hope; in joy, it amplifies and redounds to the glory of the nation's common good.  It is in this sense the finality of music which can only come to be in a polis; and the Church, as the ultimate polis which assures the good of every true polis, likewise encourages such anthems and even sings them from time to time, because the local Church is as local as the local populace, while as universal as the love of God.

Unfortunately, this ecclesiology is a bit too involved for the modern Christian.  Modern Christianity is thoroughly occupied (even obsessed!) with the private good within the spiritual life.  Politicians are not considered to be people whose religious views are of any concern; thus the Church is separated from politics.  Communities are seen as mere accidental collections of similar individuals, or clubs; thus parish life ceases to reflect the essential union of the body of Christ, but rather reflects baptism into the political establishment.  The common good is either viewed as that which absorbs the private good, as in the socialist view of "The People", irrespective of any individuality, or that which is a non-existent fiction, as in the consumerist notion that "self-fulfillment" is something that must come at expense to others and can be procured in an exclusive manner.  Person is separated from community, and since personhood is fundamentally matured in relationality, the person is separated from him- or herself.  One loses the reality of what it is to be human.  Community, moreover, is separated from that which the community is for "commonly"; thus one cannot speak about the ultimate end of things.

Alas!  If you wish to see where this castrated identity reflects itself (and often in music probably designed more for castrati) look to the music written by modern composers of liturgical music!  Or, if they do not write the music, they are not content; they also look to ruin the hymns that are approved by imposing ridiculous lyrics.

I feel sad, because the Finlandia hymn is a lovely piece of music, and can be very powerful when sung by tenors, but so many of the lyrical settings to it are such nonsense.  How, realistically, can one picture a bunch of young patriotic men singing this drivel (thank you, United Methodists):

"This is my song, oh God of all the nations,
a song of peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;
but other hearts in other lands are beating
with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,
and sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight too and clover,
and skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
This is my song, thou God of all the nations;
a song of peace for their land and for mine."

I mean, okay, I get it, you want to fight prejudice, and the Church shares a common end.  But if you think I'm going to say that, say, Detroit has anything as beautiful as the canyon that houses my alma mater, by God, I will FIGHT you.  And there is no way in hell that I am going to say that the notoriously gray skies in Detroit are "blue as mine."  My skies are pretty darned blue.  And pretty much anywhere has bluer skies than Detroit.  And if I were IN Detroit, patriotism would demand that I take ownership of those gray skies as gray, and stand for them unless it were actually vicious.  Patriotism is not about affirmation of the good generally; it is about the active profession of the common possession of the good one has as a member of the polis, and the healthy joy and zeal one must have from defending its reputation.

The Methodists, far from being finished with their rejection of the common good, have developed an additional verse to lampshade it:

When nations rage, and fears erupt coercive,
The drumbeats sound, invoking pious cause.
My neighbors rise, their stalwart hearts they offer,
The gavels drop, suspending rights and laws.
While others wield their swords with blind devotion;
For peace I'll stand, my true and steadfast cause.

Note the picture we have here.  Nations?  Angry.  Fears?  Omnipresent.  Pious cause (presumably OF said nations and fears)?  Causes war.  Neighbors?  Involved in said war voluntarily.  Justice?  Completely gone.  Literally everyone but the one singing? "Wielding swords with blind devotion."  What do we get from this?  Oh, right; it is never just to engage in war, the people who do so do so out of "blind devotion" (something which simply makes no sense in light of the real character of the wars we see every day) and the singer resolves to stay home and presumably smoke weed in protest.  Or if not that, perhaps they protest that they are the only sane ones, and that all who fight are deluded.  Now, I don't know about them, but I would be hesitant to make such a claim, because it requires a complete breakdown of the common good and a near total pride on the part of literally ninety percent of the populace.  Yet this is a normative verse "for difficult times."  I suspect that what this verse really is is the final exultation of the private good over the common, sung in a masturbatory (that is, designed for the excitation of the passions based on a reflexive action, potentially performed in company but not comunally, that only goes out for the purpose of returning into oneself) ritual of pride, designed to convince the desperate singer that what is really required of them is anything but the difficulty of acknowledging that they may be the cause of some of the evils about which they complain.  Whatever the case, it fits the "everyone is equal and equally right or wrong" attitude of much of the modern United Methodist Church.  I know of a few exceptions, but I also know of quite a few people who prove my point.  Protestant congregations, even "United" ones, tend to vary in character.


The Unitarian Universalist version MUST be some kind of cruel joke:

"We would be one as now we join in singing,
Our hymn of love, to pledge ourselves anew.
To that high cause of greater understanding
Of who we are, and what in us is true.
We would be one in living for each other,
to show to all a new community."

Ladies and gentlemen, Unitarianism!  It's not surprising that a unitary view of the Trinity involves a denial of the notion of the common good which reduces back to a stupid and dissonant over-emphasis on the individual.  I mean, to say that this is masturbatory is just a factual observation, but what's really funny is that it doesn't even end on a rhyme (much like Unitarianism, which can not reach closure on anything; as a result, they identify themselves by a lack of closure.)  And they aren't even able to pledge to love "who we are" and "what in us is true"; that requires a bit of cojones which Nietzche would at least consider worthy of comment.  But since they don't know what it is they fancy, they have to commit themselves to loving the "cause" of (potential) "greater understanding"; it cannot be said that they HAVE said understanding without offending anyone.  This is also the direction of lots of Catholic liturgical music, in which the notion of patriotism is something which simply passes along unnoticed, far from the parish.  I sometimes suspect that the field of liturgical music is dominated by folks who have no interest in sports, nor can recognize why people in fact would have such an interest.

The Calvinists are starting to get warmer, in that Calvinism is all about the dependence of the individual upon something that is not oneself:

I sought the Lord, and afterward I knew,
He moved my soul to seek him, seeking me;
it was not I that found, O Savior true,
no, I was found, was found of thee.
It was not I that found, O Savior true;
no, I was found, was found of thee.

But because Calvinists focus so much on the individual in predestination, and not upon the Church as an institution of the Mystical Body of Christ, it is still private.  In a sense, it provides an incomplete picture of the common good, not a missing one; the private good of the soul is fulfilled by the common good that is God acting as principle of its pilgrimage.  Very Dantesque or Augustinian.  And yet, again, it is missing something Dante did see, namely, the role that the participating soul does have in seeking God, according to its servant's merit.  One needn't thus set the primary cause of God's love against the secondary cause of the servant participating in that love freely. And that participation is not immediately the participation of the one saved, but rather mediately, through the ministry of the Church; otherwise the Sacraments, the visible and ordinary mode of salvation, would be pointless.  Since this is in fact being used as liturgical music, that is a horrifying omission; particularly because it is for the Sacraments which we must pre-eminently give thanks!  So out goes the Calvinist verse.

Now, the Salvation Army also has their own verse.  (One might gather it is quite the popular tune.)  Its verse is quite different from the others:

Thou art the way, none other dare I follow...
Thou art the truth, and thou hast made me free.
Thou art the life, the hope of my tomorrow
Thou art the Christ who died for me.
This is my creed, that 'mid Earth's sin and sorrow
My life may guide men unto thee.

Initially, this is quite nice.  A repeated affirmation of the necessity of the Incarnation; an affirmation of God's theological perfection as the Way, the Truth, and the Life; a degree of thanksgiving, because "he has made me free"; and finally a profession of love of God which prompts the desire to serve others in bringing them to Him.  Pleasant, good as far as it goes, and even communal at the end, in the sense of reminding someone of their duties.  The problem is that it is no longer an anthem.  It is, perhaps, an encomium and a personal statement of thanksgiving, which is quite beautiful; but it is not communal in principle, only in end.  If I say to myself that I should better serve the common good, that can be an act either private or common.  I might say it as a public act (to provide an example for others and to myself) or as a private one (for my own sake.)  Anthems are not ever thus ambiguous.  They do not look to one's own good, as devotional hymns do, although these are quite laudable in their own setting.  They do not look directly to the duty of others as such, as hymns which inspire to service do; although these are also highly laudable.  Rather, they look to the good of a polis. They are the song of a community, as a community.  Each person has something to give in their experience thereof; picture a veteran who cries as he or she salutes the flag, inspired by their long and painful service to his country; or a mother, who weeps at the children she has lost; or a child, awestruck by the service of their parents.  (As it is a fact that women now serve in the military, I make a point of using "or she" here, because I want to honor not just their service indefinitely but also their individual service.)

The Salvation Army thus does not really get the point, although the point they see is good.  An anthem has a place.  And I would like Finlandia to maintain its dignity of purpose even in translation.  There are a few other translations:

We have the idyllic but generic and thus indeterminately patriotic "Cedar Grace":

The pleasant trees and silver, ripling waters,
the flow'rs and clouds, the un-dimmed, sunlit sky
and bread by thee, our gracious Father, given,
We thankful take of thy so rich supply.
And bread by thee, our gracious Father, given,
We thankful take from thy so rich supply.

and while the trees might indeed be "pleasant", I have yet to locate "silver" waters while at the same time under an "undimmed, sunlit" and presumably cloudless sky; fortunately, the last part is at least an act of communal thanksgiving.

We have (at last, something really dignified!) the beautiful but still private "Be Still, My Soul":

Be still, my soul, the Lord is on thy side;
Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain.
Leave to thy God to order and provide;
In every change He, faithful, will remain.
Be still, my soul, thy best, thy heavenly friend
Through thorny ways leads to a joyful end.

But none of these are anthems!  Where, outside Finland, would we find an anthem lyric suited to this?  (It is not actually the official national anthem of Finland.)  After looking a long time, one finally locates it in...

WALES?!

Well, I'll be.

Gweddi Dros Gymru, in translation:

For Wales our land, our Father hear our prayer.
The blessed vineyard entrusted to our care.
With mighty shield, guard us, defend our faith.
Make Wales a haven for truth and loyalty.
For the sake of the Son who died upon the cross,
create a land worthy of His name.
O blessed day when holy breezes blow across withered acres, breathing life again.
Heavenly raindrops fall on arid desert, turning it into a sacred garden where young saplings thrive.

Wales?!


Well! Okay, then!  We have the common good: "Wales our land", under God our Father, seeking the political good of being a haven for truth and loyalty as a nation, directly connected to the Incarnation, and concluding in an aesthetic contemplation of the resurrection.  Sounds to me like an anthem!  Of course, because the Finnish people claimed the hymn, maybe this is all just an exercise in criticism.  But hey!  I guess this makes Wales the best at appropriating other people's hymns.

Wales.  Wow.