On Music: We Belong to God

Patrick Evans

In the mid-to-late 90s, I had only been in Delaware a few years in my first academic music job and was also serving a downtown, scrappy PC(USA) congregation that had made a clear choice to open its doors wide and not be a fortress against its changing neighborhood, but a place of true welcome and support. Members had worked hard to let go of longing for the “good old” days when the pews were filled with white, straight, middle-class couples and had done the hard work of becoming intentionally interracial and LGBTQ-affirming. They had reached out to the neighborhood, which had half-million-dollar houses on one side and Section 8 housing on the other, with a growing Hispanic population and LGBTQ folks moving in, as well as a halfway house for women struggling with mental illness across the street.

When I first arrived in Delaware, I was sure I didn’t want a church music job any more, and I had both feet out the door of the institutional church, tired of the racism, misogyny, and homophobia that seemed rampant in the fundamentalist congregations of my youth and even in some of the more mainline churches in which I’d worked as a musician. But this congregation and its mission called me to put my whole self back together—to be out in the church for the first time at age twenty-eight, and to reclaim the improvisational musical styles from my Pentecostal background and utilize them in serving a multiracial congregation while continuing to support its long tradition of classical choral and organ music. For me, it was life changing. On Presbyterian AIDS Awareness Sunday, for the first time in my life I heard from a pulpit that LGBTQ people were good and holy and blessed by God, and I learned from this particular gathering of saints far more than I brought to them over the decade I served with them. During this time, I would eventually learn from John Bell, Mary Oyer, Pamela Warrick-Smith, and others about the power of incorporating global song into local worship, humbly listening to songs of non-Western cultures, giving literal voice to important aspects of our faith viewed through lenses and experiences far different from our own.

Early on in my time at this congregation, before my ears were opened to this rich heritage of global song, I received a call from a colleague at another church, the largest and wealthiest in the presbytery, with more formal worship than ours, but an equally strong commitment to justice and to God’s people. “Patrick, could you cantor a funeral on Thursday?” Linda asked. “This is a particularly difficult one and needs special sensitivity.” I replied that of course I’d be glad to help in any way I could, and then she told me that the infant child of a couple in the congregation had died and that the father spoke very little English. They were planning a service to celebrate the child’s brief life, serve as witness to the resurrection, and include as many of the family as fully as possible. “I’m hoping you could sing and lead us in #400 (from the blue 1990 hymnal, of course), ‘Pues si vivimos,’ do you know it?”¹

I was somewhat embarrassed to say that I didn’t know it, not yet, anyway, but I would certainly learn it for this important moment in the life of their church family. I hung up the phone and opened my hymnal, remembering how many times I had glanced at the hymn, translated in English “When We Are Living,” considered it, then reminded myself that I had such a busy few weeks ahead, that I’d probably get the Spanish wrong, that my improvised accompaniment for the melody and chord charts in the hymnal might not be authentic enough to the style, and all the other things we say and think to talk ourselves out of what God may be calling us toward. 

This time I finally took the time to learn it, thanks to the faithful pastoral musicianship of my colleague, whose only concern was to include every hurting person in their large, stone sanctuary in the act of raising our voices in unison, proclaiming a central tenet of our faith. 

This Mexican folk tune was first published in Celebremos II in 1983 as part of an effort of the United Methodist Church to include more Spanish-language indigenous music into the worship of the global denomination. Gertrude Suppe, a member of the editorial board, recorded and transcribed the first verse after meeting with a Mexican woman after a worship service in Los Angeles.² “Both in our living and in our dying, we belong to God,” the hymn states with a musical and textual reiteration, in case we might not fully believe it—“we belong to God.” 

Around the time Celebremos II was published, the PC(USA) appointed a committee to write what would become A Brief Statement of Faith, which was adopted into the Book of Confessions in 1991 as a part of the union of the former PCUSA and the PCUS, amid significant struggles over biblical understanding and theology, gender and racial justice, care for creation, and human sexuality. The very first line of that confession is “In life and in death we belong to God.”³ Of course, Romans 14:8 provides the scriptural framework for both the Statement and the hymn: “If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.” 

Clergy and musicians from my colleague’s congregation report that following the infant’s funeral, and the profound act of unity created by the singing of this hymn together in such a crucial time, it entered the regular repertory of their congregational song, all due to the act of a faithful pastoral musician. 

In the thirty years since, I’ve learned much more and served many worshiping communities, and I’ve experienced the loss of friends, my own parents, and other family members that inevitably follow in life’s journey, but this clear gentle melody and its profound witness—that everyone, living or dying, of any age, national origin, gender, denomination, sexuality, or any condition of life, belongs to God—have sustained my faith, and that of so many others, thanks to the Mexican woman who sang it, to the editorial committee member who recorded and transcribed it, and in my life, to Linda, who taught me not only this hymn, but also what it means to be a true pastoral musician. We belong to God. Alleluia!

Notes

1. The Presbyterian Hymnal: Hymns, Psalms, and Spiritual Songs (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), #400.

2. Diana Sanchez-Bushong, “History of Hymns: Pues si vivimos,” Discipleship Ministries, The United Methodist Church, August 31, 2016, umcdiscipleship.org/resources/history-of-hymns-pues-si-vivimos/.

3. Book of Confessions, Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Part 1 (Louisville, KY: Office of the General Assembly Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)), 11.1.