{"id":53388,"date":"2020-09-24T14:15:03","date_gmt":"2020-09-24T19:15:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/?p=53388"},"modified":"2020-10-18T14:42:32","modified_gmt":"2020-10-18T19:42:32","slug":"something-old-something-new","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/2020\/09\/24\/something-old-something-new\/","title":{"rendered":"Something Old, Something New"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Perhaps you\u2019ve had the experience of encountering somebody you know, but in an unexpected place or context. I still recall the time in undergrad that I went to a local shopping mall with some friends, and saw a familiar-looking woman walking toward us. Though I knew she looked familiar, I couldn\u2019t quite place her. It turned out to be my mother, who very rarely went shopping by herself.<\/p>\n<p>I had very nearly the same experience when I was online-worship-aid surfing shortly after Pentecost, out of a combination of professional interest, liturgical geekery, and pandemic boredom. One program I looked at from a Good Shepherd Sunday service had a \u201chymn meditation\u201d on the back\u2014something bound to get my attention\u2014with this text:<\/p>\n<p>A shepherd\u2019s voice is strong,<br \/>\nNot wavering or false,<br \/>\nIt calls out, sure and true,<br \/>\nAnd searches for the lost.<br \/>\n     Give your church, O God,<br \/>\n     A shepherd\u2019s voice,<br \/>\n     A voice for heaven\u2019s song.<\/p>\n<p>A shepherd\u2019s hands are tough,<br \/>\nBy toil and weather pocked;<br \/>\nYet shepherds\u2019 palms are smooth<br \/>\nFrom caring for the flock.<br \/>\n     Give your church, O God,<br \/>\n     A shepherd\u2019s hands<br \/>\n     To bring the world your love.<\/p>\n<p>A shepherd\u2019s life is hard,<br \/>\nForever on the move,<br \/>\nWhile stars of lonely nights<br \/>\nShine cold in skies above.<br \/>\n     Give your church, O God,<br \/>\n     A shepherd\u2019s life.<br \/>\n     Come, be our cheer, our warmth.<\/p>\n<p>A shepherd\u2019s heart is brave,<br \/>\nTo ward off every fear,<br \/>\nConfronting storm and trial<br \/>\nWith courage bold and clear.<br \/>\n     Give your church, O God,<br \/>\n     A shepherd\u2019s heart<br \/>\n     To seek, to serve, to save.<\/p>\n<p>Alan J. Hommerding<br \/>\nCopyright \u00a9 2019, GIA Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n<p>It wasn\u2019t until I got to the fifth line (\u201cGive your church, O God\u2026\u201d) that the wires connected and I recognized it as one of my own hymn texts. The text was only a bit more than a year old, and had been published less than a year prior to Good Shepherd Sunday 2020, so I certainly wasn\u2019t expecting to see it in use so soon. (This old dog still has not fully acclimated to the new tricks of digital circulation.)<\/p>\n<p>Though fleeting, that experience gave me a momentary encounter with the text in a way that was completely different from the way I\u2019d engaged with it as a creator. For the sake of convenience, I\u2019ll say that the experience of creating is more left-brained\/analytical, focused primarily on word choices, meter, scansion, rhyme scheme (or not), order of stanzas, and so on. In the non-creating encounter, I approached the text with openness to experiencing and embracing Christ the Good Shepherd in a new way. So I decided to see if I could use one of my own texts as a \u201chymn devotional,\u201d in the way I had done with so many other hymns.<\/p>\n<p>Like most Roman Catholics, the words \u201cdevotion\u201d or \u201cdevotional\u201d when used as nouns initially bring to my mind those rituals outside the Eucharist\u2014Stations of the Cross, Rosary, Forty Hours\u2014that, while often having basic structures that are similar in most places, do not have officially mandated structure or content. \u201cHymn devotional\u201d is a practice I first encountered through Protestant music colleagues. Its structure resembles Lectio Divina: a time of quiet to prepare; the actual reading (aloud, please\u2014hymn texts are a form of poetry and their sonics are important!); reflection on images, sounds of words, application to daily life; perhaps a time of journaling; concluding prayer.<\/p>\n<p>The spiritual practice of devotions is an enriching one. Our spiritual\/ritual lives\u2014like any ecosystem\u2014benefit from diversity, and help us avoid what has been called \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/2019\/02\/11\/monoeucharistitis-the-long-term-effects\/\">monoeucharistitis<\/a>.\u201d In the same way that the devotional exercise of lectio divina makes me a better hearer of the Word of God inside and outside of liturgy, I\u2019ve found that the practice of an occasional hymn-devotion helps me as a pastoral musician and as a hymn-singer at all types of worship. I\u2019ve also turned this practice toward the texts of the proper antiphons, especially those for the entrance and communion processions.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/A-shepherd-voice-image-2.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"259\" height=\"194\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-53390\" srcset=\"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/A-shepherd-voice-image-2.jpeg 259w, https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/A-shepherd-voice-image-2-100x75.jpeg 100w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 259px) 100vw, 259px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>In the writing of \u201cA Shepherd\u2019s Voice\u201d my starting point was the interior stanza about hands. When I was on a concert tour of Ireland with the Notre Dame Folk Choir in 1997, I got to meet and shake hands with a real shepherd, a man who lived part of the year outdoors in the fields with his flock. The tops of his hands were rough and sunburned (my dad worked outdoors most of his life, so I was familiar with rough hands). What was remarkable in the moment of shaking hands with that shepherd was how smooth and soft his palms were. Sheep\u2019s wool is a rich source of lanolin (which was how my etymology-wired brain remembered la lana = wool in high school Spanish), hence his smooth palms. That potent handshaking experience remained with me throughout the intervening 22 years before the hymn was written.<\/p>\n<p>For my devotional time\u2019s reflection, I turned to the memory of that handshaking experience, and the still-compelling tactile image of that hard\/soft. First to come to mind were all my spiritual\/ministerial role models, living and deceased, whose lives exhibited both the toughness brought about by the vagaries of ministry, as well as tenderness in caring for \u201cflocks\u201d of various kinds. Delving a bit deeper, I became aware of how my occasional \u201ctoughness\u201d was a result of weathering years in service to God\u2019s people, but I also thought of those times it was unnecessary and unproductive. Likewise I meditated on the \u201csmooth\u201d side of my nature, a blessed result of the love of Christ present in all those with, and for, and to whom I\u2019ve ministered, along with the times that smoothness turned into an un-Christlike docility or indifference. This is a brief encapsulation of what was\u2014God be praised!\u2014a very rich time of meditation.<\/p>\n<p>Those of us in any type of liturgical ministry have artifacts lying around: intercessions, other types of prayers, articles we\u2019ve written for the bulletin, reflections we\u2019ve presented, song\/hymn texts, and so on\u2026 I don\u2019t plan to turn to my own work with great frequency as a devotional source, since I can see that frequent trips down that path could very well lead to pride or arrogance, an egocentric echo chamber counterproductive to the spiritual life. I will, however, put an occasional item or two from my past into my current devotion ecosystem on occasion. This lone experience has shown me it will increase self-awareness regarding my growth, and help me in future creative endeavors.<\/p>\n<p>Behold! Christ does, indeed, make all things new.<\/p>\n<audio class=\"wp-audio-shortcode\" id=\"audio-53388-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio\/mpeg\" src=\"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/A-Shepherds-Voice.mp3?_=1\" \/><a href=\"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/A-Shepherds-Voice.mp3\">https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/A-Shepherds-Voice.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n<p>Audio: A Shepherd\u2019s Voice. Text and music by Alan J. Hommerding. Copyright \u00a9 2019, GIA Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n<p>Michael Potsic, tenor<br \/>\nAlan Hommerding, organ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The spiritual practice of devotions is an enriching one. Our spiritual\/ritual lives\u2014like any ecosystem\u2014benefit from diversity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":53394,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[12,1],"tags":[2067,3271,3374],"class_list":["post-53388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-devotions-and-sacramentals","category-uncategorized","tag-devotions","tag-hymnody","tag-liturgy-and-devotional-prayer"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Something Old, Something New - Home<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/2020\/09\/24\/something-old-something-new\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Something Old, Something New - Home\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The spiritual practice of devotions is an enriching one. 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