Last night, we heard a recently-completed hymn….Almost Home. The writers, Matt Papa and Matt Boswell, explained their motivation to compose a simple melody and message that evokes the longing we feel for our eternal home (amusingly, they were motivated by the real-life fishermen singers portrayed in the movie Fisherman’s Friend).
I can’t help but hear in this song the same lilt and cadence of so many Swedish hymns I heard as a child. Perhaps apocryphal, I’ve been told that more than one or two of the hymns we sang were adopted drinking songs from the old country….straight from tavern to sanctuary. I tend to be a little accepting when Christian musicians and artists attempt to adopt and adapt the contemporary, secular world around them. We heard the Matts say, “you need to baptize that!” Caution is warranted, but the effort has redemption value.
It wasn’t originally a bar song, but the hymn “I Sing With Joy and Gladness” is set to a tune called Joyful Pilgrim, by Nils Frykman. He wrote both the words and the tune to this lilting wonder. Our little congregation sang it with gusto, my father bellowing from the pulpit in his sonorous but tone deaf tenor. As they say, “he couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket,” but it was a beautiful bucket.
The final stanza echoes the call to home:
Now marching on courageous, with joy I see my goal,
the blessing of the ages, the haven of my soul:
and on the pilgrim journey my voice in song I raise,
my God and my Savior to praise.
