CHRIST JESUS BE MY MASTER

Christ Jesus be my master, the ruler of my heart.

Who rules the sun in steady course will steady to my heart.

Though grief rain down upon me and hint of no relief,

who brings the rain to but a drop will soften, too, my grief.

My prayer seems more unanswered the more I strive to pray,

and darker looms the restless night the more I long for day.

But Christ will not forsake me who learned well when he cried,

“Pray Father, please remove this cup.” Some prayers are best denied.

I want my own pain lifted and pray my suffer’ing cease,

and look to Christ to offer aid and grant me quick release.

But his prayer was more humble. He said, “Thy will be done.”

The Father’s will became his cup to die a loving son.

A tear upon my pillow in contrast surely pales

to all the blood that Christ had shed, his hands pierced through with nails.

For Christ to gain all power, he suffered thus at length.

So, I’ll abide my mote of pain to gain a jot of strength.

Christ hallows grief with mercy, who hallowed love with grief

to season faith within the heart like autumn in a leaf.

I’ll bear the heat of summer until a time has passed,

for there’s a gold in my green faith will surface at the last.

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God Of Our Children

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Mikayla Orton Thatcher teaches anatomy and physiology at a local university and is the author of Beehive Girl.

Nathan Thatcher is a composer, arranger, and author based in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He has collaborated with a wide array of musicians, working in concert music, pop music, film, television, and Broadway.

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Carl Youngblood is a tech entrepreneur and president of the Mormon Transhumanist Association.

Andrew Maxfield. Composer of Music & Words • 2021 King's Singers New Music Prize, Special Commendation • “Rhythmically vital … superbly judged … [and] tender”—Fanfare Magazine

Sound of Ages, under the direction of Kameron Kavanaugh, celebrates the timeless power of the human voice through world-class ensemble singing and inventive storytelling.

Pure Religion

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I started reading words in about 1984 and music in about 1986, which is to say that by the time I was old enough to crack open any hymnal in sacrament meeting, it was the 1985 Green Book that I was opening. I didn’t think of it as the new book, which it was. I thought of it as the only book. I assumed that whatever was in there had probably been in there forever—a little like when my family moved into a new neighborhood in 1987, seven-year-old me assumed that everyone there had always lived there. 

Granted, some of the contents of the Green Book were indeed quite old. For example, the text for “O Savior, Thou Who Wearest a Crown” began in the medieval Latin poetic text Salve mundi salutare (though it was altered substantially, not just translated, for our hymnal), and the music made its way from Hans Leo Hassler (1564–1612) through J. S. Bach (1685–1750) through various and now effectively anonymous arrangers into the chorale harmonization we Latter-day singers know.

Meanwhile, it turned out that some of the Green Book Top 40 are only about as old as I am and written by people I know, meaning that these musical lauds weren’t eternal like God, timeless like chant or carols, or even just plain old like so many of the Victorian nuggets we’ve collected. For instance, I realized that the music for “Press Forward, Saints” (with the magical, “modally borrowed” chord that sets “Al-LE-LU-ia” apart from the rest of the text) was composed by my very own, beloved and loving, elementary school choir teacher, Vanja Y. Watkins (1938–). Similarly, I discovered that the music for “Lord, I Would Follow Thee” was composed by K. Newell Dayley (1939–), for whom I worked as a teaching assistant when I was an undergraduate music student at BYU.

The fact that these texts and tunes came from somewhere, that they were created by actual people nearly as ordinary as I am, took a long while to sink into my creative awareness. Over time I came to appreciate and admire the poets, lyricists, tunesmiths, and composers who expressed their personal devotion and spirituality through their consecrated creative work. The 2018 announcement that the Church would update the great Green Book itself moved hundreds, maybe thousands, of Church members to funnel their personal devotions and feelings into text and music, and it caused me to wonder why I hadn’t done the same.  

Despite having written quite a bit of music, including a fair amount of commissioned liturgical music for other denominations, I hadn’t ever really used my craft to serve my own tradition, and certainly not to express my personal devotional sentiments. Perhaps I felt that, despite our theological attachment to an open scriptural canon, our culture had come to accept something like a (tightly) closed musical canon—after all, if it wasn’t in the Green Book, our congregations essentially didn’t sing it. Simultaneously, the pragmatic professional composer in me did the math: few LDS congregations spend much money on music, and in the digital era, what used to be the tiny “Mormon music” market had become even tinier, even less viable. I can't think of a “professional” argument for writing LDS hymns.

The Church’s deadline for hymn submissions came and passed, and my skepticism and reservations had hamstrung my own participation.

Finally, I found myself on a flight to the London Festival of Contemporary Church Music, where I would network with music directors and vocal ensembles who perform my music. I wondered: What kept me from using my creative skills in service of my own tribe, when I was willing to fly so far away to make music for other tribes? Something shifted as the plane bumped through the air, and I remembered “Sister” Watkins, who had recruited my sister, brother, and myself from our elementary school choir to sing on the Church’s early 1990s recordings of the Children’s Songbook. She had communicated something like “pure religion” through her ebullient eyes and radiant smile as we rehearsed and recorded hundreds of songs, some of which she had written. 

I assume—that is, I hope—the roar of jet engines covered my spontaneous humming and vocalizing as I scratched out three verses of text, reflecting my desire to grow as a disciple, and a melody that struck me as artful but plain, not quite Appalachian but intuitive and singable (with a little Renaissance-era compositional trick at a key moment). Later I worked out a four-voice harmonization that pleased me and, to my ear, supported the feeling of the text, taking a page from Sister Watkins’s own playbook in employing a distinctive “modally borrowed” chord in the final phrase. 

Ultimately, all hymns, no matter how old or venerable, come from somewhere, and unless they were a sonic transcription of the music of the spheres, they came from somewhere inside someone. And this one comes from me out of a growing desire to connect my faith to my craft, sparked by a memory of a loving mentor who pressed forward in doing the same.

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Andrew Maxfield is a composer based in Provo, UT, whose “rhythmically vital . . . superbly judged . . . tender” works (Fanfare Magazine) have been performed by The Gesualdo Six, The Choir of Royal Holloway, Salt Lake Symphony, Utah Opera, and others.

Art by Gaudenzio Ferrari.

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Thomas Durham was born in the early industrial boomtown of Oldham, Lancashire, England in 1828, and joined the church in 1850.  He and his first wife Mary Morton survived the harrowing trek across the plains in the Martin handcart company in 1856, and settled in Parowan, Utah, where he was the heart of the community’s musical life, serving as ward choir director from his arrival there in 1856 until his death in 1909.  He also directed a brass band and string orchestra under the guise of the “Parowan Harmonic Society.”  Music was revealed to him in dreams, including an ancient Nephite melody.  Family tradition has it that during a discussion about whether to buy a chandelier for the meetinghouse an objection arose from the back of the congregation asking, “Why go to all that expense when Brother Durham will be the only one able to play it?”  

Thomas launched a family tradition of hymn-writing.  His hymn “Stars of Morning, Shout for Joy” was a standard in earlier hymnals.  It was left out of the 1985 green book but his musical and spiritual legacy is well represented there through four hymns by his son, Alfred M., three by his grandsons G. Homer and Lowell M., and two by his great grandsons Lowell Jr. and Thomas L.  These hymns range from the triumphant (“Firm as the Mountains Around Us,” “They the Builders of the Nation,” “My Redeemer Lives”) to the pensive (“As the Shadows Fall,” “With Humble Heart”) but common to them all is deep devotion.  Also common is a family resemblance in musical language--a fondness for accidentals and modulation.  

With his third wife Caroline Mortensen Durham, a convert born in Denmark who also crossed the plains in 1856 as a young girl in the ill-fated Willie handcart company, Thomas had ten children in addition to one with his second wife, Mary Moore Mitchell.  Almost all of his descendants seem to be musical to one degree or another, as far as we both know—there are so many of us that cousins remain unacquainted.  

Indeed, we first met in New York City in June 2017 at the inaugural gathering of the Latter-day Saint Arts Festival.  John is the grandson of G. Homer Durham, and Ethan the great-grandson of Alfred M. Durham.  John loved Ethan’s string quartet that was performed at the Festival and a seed was planted that sprouted when the Church issued a call for contributions to a new hymnal.  To write a new “Durham hymn”—that was the plan.  

John’s lyrics were shaped by the experience of repeatedly teaching the poetry of Emily Dickinson to Yale undergraduates.  The meter matters a lot for understanding the very musical Dickinson (like most poets).  She typically uses “common meter,” a line of eight syllables followed by one of six, reinventing this, the dominant meter of hymnody, for her own transcendent purposes.  Isaac Watts was a major influence on her, as he was on the LDS tradition.  Of 30 sacrament hymns in the green book, however, only seven are in common meter.  Nearly half (14) are in “long meter,” with lines of 8 syllables each.  “Our Savior Went Where No One’s Gone” establishes its status partly as a sacrament hymn by the generic appropriateness of long meter.  Counting syllables can be a spiritual discipline!  

Less technically, John wanted to write a hymn that frankly acknowledged the struggle, worries, and wonderments that face disciples of Christ.  “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” is beloved in part because of its open admission that our hearts are “prone to wander” as is “A Poor Wayfaring Man” for confessing that we all have “a wound concealed.”  John wanted to state deep theological truths—about the atonement, repentance, and the ways that covenants can transfigure history--in ways both simple and poetic.  Lyrically speaking, it’s more condensed than the average hymn, but that’s what happens when you read Dickinson a lot and have been thinking about the sacrament for decades!  It’s clearly more on the yearning, pensive side of the Durham tradition than the triumphant one.  

When he received John’s poignant text, Ethan was struck by the rich imagery that mingled the Gethsemane story with the aforementioned “struggle, worries, and wonderments” that disciples face. Sacrament hymns in particular hold a special role in drawing minds and hearts to the atonement of Christ, while also creating space for reflection and meditation. Musically this suggests a particular tone, a narrow range of tempi, and a melodic-harmonic profile with just enough tension to render the sweet-sadness of remorse with hopeful resolve. 

Ethan’s music attempted this in three ways. First, satisfying harmonic resolution is withheld until the last chord of each verse. This is done by deploying a formal structure called a ‘double-period.’ In double-periods there are four phrases, but the first three phrases avoid strong conclusions on the primary chord (in this case, F-major) until the end. Each of the first three phrases (ending respectively in measures 8, 16, and 24) conclude on a C-major chord (a most unstable chord in this hymn’s key of F-major). The chord in these three places offers temporary respite, but always leans into the beginning of the next phrase. This mechanism keeps the music moving forward, but while delaying the gratification of the final cadence (phrase conclusion) on the home chord until the end. Second, Ethan altered the harmonic color with the occasional use of D-flat (‘borrowed’ from the key of F-minor). He also created a texture with lots of scale-like stepwise motion rendering ‘non-chord tones.’ Non-chord tones create dissonance as they rub against the more consonant members of a chord at any given time (note the tenor in m.8, the alto in mm. 16 and 32). Finally, the highest note of the melody is reserved until the final phrase (m.26), creating the sense that all previous movement leads inevitably to this place. The total effect is one of a miniature drama in which each participant yokes themselves individually to Christ and his atonement.

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John Durham Peters teaches and writes on media history and philosophy. He is the María Rosa Menocal Professor of English and of Film & Media Studies at Yale University.

Ethan F. Wickman is Professor of Music Composition and Theory at the University of Texas at San Antonio. 

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Our Savior Went Where No One's Gone

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Our Savior Went Where No One's Gone

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John Durham Peters teaches and writes on media history and philosophy. He is the María Rosa Menocal Professor of English and of Film & Media Studies at Yale University.

Ethan F. Wickman is Professor of Music Composition and Theory at the University of Texas at San Antonio. 

Performance by Sound of Ages.

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Recently, I opened a storage box containing the scriptures that our children used to tote to church meetings and seminary growing up. Seeing their embossed names imprinted in gold or silver on the leather covers was nostalgic, but a little bittersweet. You see, two of our four adult sons are no longer a part of our faith. It was a moment emblematic of an ongoing anxiety common to many LDS parents today: how do we respond to or relate to our children who do not remain in the church?

Younger people leaving their childhood faith is not a trend exclusive to Latter-day Saints; churches at large are diminishing, with the rising generation less interested in formal religion. That’s cold comfort, though, to those of us who have been so nourished and inspired by our beliefs and our church membership. It is as though we have offered a great gift to our children which they will not accept, or which they do not see as being a gift at all.

This anxiety was a topic that composer David Sargent and I were discussing when we sat down together in 2019 to collaborate on writing some hymns to submit for possible inclusion in the new LDS hymnal. Like us, David and his wife have gone through a kind of grieving as they have seen children distance themselves from the life of belief and church involvement that they knew growing up. 

The thing is, we love our children—all of them—regardless of their religion or lack thereof. We love them fully, equally, and eternally. How could we express that love, while still prizing the restored gospel for all that it means to us? 

A large part of the answer for me and my wife (as for David and his spouse) was the decision not to dwell on this aspect of our children’s lives. That has not always been easy, but we have set aside otherwise gut-wrenching worries and chosen instead to prioritize and safeguard our core relationships. Above all, we never want our non-practicing or ex-Mormon children to think for even a moment that our love is contingent upon their beliefs or their church activity. And this has worked!

Consciously prioritizing our relationships with our children has made us feel more connected to them. We no longer use church attendance as a proxy for how a family member is doing. And although it is certainly an irony, sacrificing what used to be firm expectations for our children about their spiritual lives has been a means of helping us feel more of the Savior’s unconditional love.

As David and I discussed how to write a hymn reflecting some of this, it helped for us to expand our scope and think about how even those living active church lives may still feel excluded, misunderstood, or ignored. Feeling alienated is core to the human experience, and there is no shortage of those who feel like outsiders even within the walls of faith.

1.    Some stand apart: with us, and yet alone.
       Their spirits ache; in sadness they descend.
       Through bonds of love we remember every one.
       Let us be faithful ministers to them. 

It does not require leaving the church to feel left out. My wife and I found this out in a sacrament meeting a few years back, not too long after our son came out of the closet. A returning missionary was telling the story of saving a homosexual man from his wayward life. He even mocked the effeminate mannerisms of their gay investigator. The congregation didn’t seem bothered by any of this, but we were very hurt by the speaker’s insensitivity. As the meeting ended we just sat dazed on the front row bench, feeling like outsiders in our own ward. 

My wife and I have come to see homosexuality as a God-created state with its own peculiar blessings and opportunities. We await—with so many others—the further light and knowledge that can help us to understand God’s plan for his homosexual children. But in the interim, we sometimes feel at odds with our fellow believers. Could my wife and I keep coming to sacrament meeting if we are made to feel bad because we love our gay son and do not see him as someone in need of changing?

We suddenly felt very unwelcome in the church that had sustained us for decades. Our first instinct was to withdraw. However, immediately following that sacrament meeting, some friends of ours came right over to us. They know our son’s status and were keenly aware of what we felt was insensitive in the returning missionary’s story. They didn’t say much. They just came up to us and put their arms around us. So small an act, but it touched us deeply. Such are the bonds of love. Right when we were feeling a tearing in the fabric of our church family, we got restitched back in through timely ministering. 

2. 	Some part from us; some choose another way.
        We’ll joy in you, our once and future friends.
        The bonds of love will outlast life’s little day.
        In faith we trust to find you near again.

As I wrote this second stanza, I had to be very honest with myself. Do I really joy in the lives of my children who have chosen not even to be Christians anymore? When one’s children make choices that we would not, this becomes a defining moment, a test of the depth of our love. My wife and I are hopeful that we have passed that test, that our sons outside of our faith do not feel shamed or judged or that they are worth any less than their church-active brothers in our eyes. It’s really a two-part test: letting them not be Mormon, and finding their non-LDS lives as meaningful. Ironically, our very commitment to our beliefs and sacred covenants can end up estranging the very children we would forever be connected with. 

I worry about the way we practicing Latter-day Saints talk about those who are less active or who turn away completely from our church. I think people mean well, but some talk as though the ones who go their own way are living an inferior life, that their lives will be forever diminished so long as they remain outside the church—or, worse, that they have betrayed their family or their upbringing. 

My wife, a convert at age 19, firmly departed from her Catholic upbringing and moved thousands of miles from home to live among fellow Mormons. Her parents did not guilt her for leaving Catholicism. In fact, they drove her out to Utah and urged her on with her new adventure. They have truly taken joy in the lives of my spouse and her four siblings, even though only one of their five children has remained a faithful Catholic. I’ve learned from them that bonds of love are more firm than the boundaries of membership.

It is my firm belief that as active Latter-day Saints we need to allow for some not to find God by way of Mormonism. As a parent who believes in loving Heavenly Parents, I need to extend all of my love to each of our children without hesitation, without that love being conditioned on whether those children remain active church members. It is the only way. I do believe that the bonds of love “will outlast life’s little day,” and I know from lived experience that one can be as close to a child who is not Mormon as to another child who is.

3. 	We all depart, all wander, all are lost.
        Without condition God opens wide his arms.
        We turn, we learn Jesus Christ has paid the cost.
        His bonds of love unbind us from all harm.

Isaiah taught that “all we, like sheep, have gone astray. We have turned every one to his own way.” We live lives of sin and virtue at the same time, trying daily and weekly to repent, to come back. But we are inveterate wanderers and recidivists. We fail and we fall. Each of us believers is the prodigal son, to some degree. We wander strange roads in our hearts and minds. Jesus is not just the Way; He is the way back. And it is his unqualified, exuberant embrace of us wanderer-sinners that allows us the dignity to make real progress. 

The bonds of love can be formal and obvious, like a sealing ordinance. Or those bonds can be subtle and powerful, like timely ministering to those who feel on the fringes of our families or congregations. Music is itself a binding force, both within and beyond our worship services. And as David and I have composed our hymn, “The Bonds of Love,” we have felt how such bonds transcend barriers and connect us across whatever boundaries and differences that seem to separate us, uniting us through a merciful God and His radiant, ample empathy.

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Gideon Burton is Assistant Professor of English at Brigham Young University where he teaches Renaissance literature, literature of the Latter-Day Saints, and rhetoric.

A copy of the hymn (music and words) can be found here. A piano rendition can be listened to here.

Artwork by Esther Hi'ilani Candari

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