Bless their hearts, the editors of Anglicans Online are soliciting readers’ all-time favorite hymns. They invite you to nominate the single hymn you’d take with you to a desert island. Hmm. A hymn is awfully portable — you don’t need an organ or piano if you can hum the tune, you don’t need a hymnal to recall your favorite words, and I’d bet that those of us who attend church services regularly would be hard pressed to forget even some of the lesser hymns we carry around in our worshipful heads. So how could you take just one?
But let’s play anyway. I’d like to solicit Unitarian Universalists’ all-time favorite hymns. (And, since contrariness is next to Godliness, please feel free to nominate your least favorite UU hymn, too.) Nominations may come from any hymnal in use in a Unitarian Universalist church — Singing the Living Tradition, Hymns for the Celebration of Life, Hymns of the Spirit, etc. — but the hymn does not need to have been written by a UU.
My two favorites are probably Fred Pratt Green’s “When in our music God is glorified” (#36 in SLT) and the old Quaker hymn “My life flows on in endless song” (#108). Worst hymn? I’ll have to think about that one. Feel free to add your favorites and least favorites in the comments line. (Thanks to BITB and Mrs P for the near-simultaneous tip about Anglicans Online!)
Oh, and sorry about the scarcity of posts lately. Work is all-consuming this week. I’ve barely read a word about the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling — more on that soon, I hope!