It is generally agreed that music embodies geopositioning and time-traveling qualities. You can hear a song and be transported mentally and emotionally to another place and time where you heard it before.
A handful of hymns do this for me. Easter doesn't really come in fullness until I hear "Christ the Lord is Risen Today," preferably from obnoxiously loud organ pipes. I also need "Joy to the Word" to feel like Christmas is complete. Those two hymns can take me back to my childhood church. I spent three years of my life at a church where they mostly skipped traditional Christmas music, and I am poorer for that. I say "mostly" because one of those years they did perform "Joy to the World," but it had an odd tempo and they clapped on the upbeat.
I have heard "Silent Night" so often that it isn't tethered strongly to any specific church congregation; in fact, I associate it more with public school. I entered elementary school at the time that prayer was being banned. But that did not stop the teaching of culturally relevant music history, so in addition to "Silent Night" leaving me with a mental image of Franz Gruber trekking across the Austrian Alps with his guitar, we also learned the hymn "Come, Ye Thankful People, Come" at Thanksgiving.
And because that wasn't played at my church this past Sunday, I looked up videos on YouTube...
Whadda'ya know!
First I noticed that the lyrics I learned don't match the "traditional" version on YouTube. I have no explanation, but "God's own temple" was not part of the verse that I was taught in school.
Here's the first verse:
Come, ye thankful people, come,
raise the song of harvest home;
all is safely gathered in,
ere the winter storms begin.
God our Maker doth provide
for our wants to be supplied;
come to God's own temple, come,
raise the song of harvest home.
At my school, instead of the line "come to God's own temple, come," we repeated the first line, "come, ye thankful people, come."
Secondly, I was amazed at how much eschatology there was in the remaining verses. The topic isn't food supply, it's about angels gathering the end-time harvest of souls.
And lastly, that hymn was written in London in 1844, which is 224 years after the Pilgrims set sail from Plymouth, England, and it wasn't about them at all! But the picture from my school days had connected this song to thankful Pilgrims, and that bond isn't dissolving any time soon.
