Choir and Transcendentalist Hymns

Choir is incredible on Thursdays now. The new director is actually teaching us sight-singing skills. And part of the warmup involves two-voice harmonization. I hereby recant any complaining I have indulged in concerning this semester's choir.

Anyhow. The real reason I'm writing this entry is to hash out a bit of a dilemma.

We were assigned a song entitled "Turn Back O Man" a week or so ago. The melody is "The Old 124th Psalm, from the Genevan Psalter arranged by Gustav Holst." It is a quite glorious hymn tune. And I was most delighted, at first, to have a more optimistically-toned piece to sing. Because our big piece of the semester is Verdi's "Dies Irae" ("Day of Anger." Or "Day of Wrath." Or something like that). Which isn't exactly the most encouraging and positive piece in the world.

However, when one isn't really paying attention to the words of the Holtz piece (because one is singing solfege instead), it's apparently very easy to get distracted by phrases like "124th Psalm," "Geneva," "Gustav Holst," "forswear thy foolish ways," and "not till that hour shall God's whole work be done."

And completely miss the fact that the whole thing is some rather atrocious mishmash of gnostic?-romantic-transcendental gibberish. I here copy the whole thing for your perusal:

Turn back O Man, forswear they foolish ways.
Old now is Earth, and none may count her days,
Yet, Thou, her child, whose head is crowned with flame,
Still will not hear thine inner God proclaim,
"Turn back, O Man, forswear thy foolish ways!"

Earth might be fair and all men gland and wise.
Age after age their tragic empires rise,
Built while they dream, and in that dreaming weep.
Would but man wake from out his haunted sleep,
Earth might be fair and all men glad and wise.

Earth shall be fair, and all her people one.
Nor till that hour shall God's whole work be done.
Now, even now, once more from earth to sky
Peals forth in joy man's old undaunted cry,
"Earth shall be fair and all her folk be once!"

I have concluded two things:
1) I am irrationally possessive of hymn tunes. Although I'm well aware that (orthodox) Christian hymn writers often appropriated common and singable tunes for their own purposes, my reaction to this song is still, "HOW DARE THEY!??!!?"

2) I am not, at present, capable of being very charitable toward the transcendentalist-romantics. After the Dies Irae, I wanted something with MEAT to it. Not this happy smiling mishmash of saccharine idiocy. (<--- a notable example of uncharitableness)

I am having great difficulty finding ways to rationalize away the "inner god," "dream/wake," "undaunted man," stuff, and pretend that this sorry excuse for a hymn has at least SOMETHING to do with orthodox Christianity. Which means I'm going to be stuck, at best, wincing and attempting not to laugh as I sing this mess of a piece. (<--- a slightly milder bit of uncharitableness)

I think I can pull a bit of something together. My postmil/amil leanings probably help. But it's still very very hard to ignore the authorial intent of the lyrics.

I wonder if non-Christians in choir get as conflicted as this when they sing Christian songs.