The words of our songs and hymns are not meant simply to accompany nice melodies. The songs, hymns, responses and acclamations of the liturgy are forms of prayer, and as such, their wording takes on great importance.
Are the words that we sing genuine prayer for us? Do they really say something that we mean? Or are the words seemingly selected because they fit nicely with the rhythm of the music, or because they happen to rhyme? Are the words poetry, inviting us to read between the lines, filling up with our own lived experience what the song does not say?
Or rather do the words cause us to be baffled, wondering what the author ever had in mind? Are the words of the song "we" words, words in the plural that say we are a church, and not isolated individuals in our Sunday assembly, words that express a common voice of many people? Or are they "me" or "I" songs, more appropriate to settings of private and personal prayer?
Another reason why the words of our songs are important is because of an ancient liturgical principle that says that the way we pray not only expresses, but also gives shape to, what we believe. Thus a person who constantly focuses on guilt and unworthiness in his or her prayer is not only expressing what is apparently a lot of personal guilt, but at the same time fostering the belief that he or she is indeed unworthy and guilty before God.
In the same way, if the song that accompanies the presentation of gifts and the preparation of the altar at Mass makes such statements as ""Lord, we offer you..." or "Take this bread..." or "Take my hands..." or "Take my heart...," one begins to believe that this part of the Mass is about offering something, when indeed it is not at all.
It might be good, perhaps as a preparation for the celebration of the Eucharist, to occasionally pick up our church hymnal and pray the words of a song without the music or the singing. Sometimes it is by taking a hymn apart like this that we begin to see the real poetry hidden within.
Look, for example, at some of the words of the wonderful eucharistic hymn "Gift of Finest Wheat," a hymn whose words do not simply sing praise about the mystery of the Eucharist, but also poetically suggest that celebrating the Eucharist ought to lead us to change our lives: "Is not the cup we bless and share the blood of Christ outpoured? Do not one cup, one loaf, declare our oneness in the Lord? The mystery of your presence, Lord, no mortal tongue can tell: Whom all the world cannot contain, comes in our hearts to dwell. You give yourself to us, O Lord; then selfless let us be, to serve each other in your name, in truth and charity."
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