All Are Welcome

Once again the blogosphere is interesting… I’m in the process of trying to put together our community chapel service for next Tuesday (yes, this should have been done a week ago, but I’m way behind already). A song we sang at liturgy several Sundays ago keeps returning to me, and it fits (I think!) with the text I’m working with. The song, entitled “All Are Welcome” by Marty Haugen, has some beautiful words in it, and rather than trying to type them all out for my meditation this weekend from the hymnal, I thought I’d surf the web for a few minutes to see if someone else had already typed them out. Of course, several people have. And in the process, I found some fairly vitriolic rants against the song (at Victor Lam’s blog, as well as at the Carite Dei blog), as well as an interesting use of it paired with a children’s drawing in a sermon in a church in Edinburgh. You can find the words at the Edinburgh site, below the picture. The rants made me wonder to what extent the music (that is, the melody) had been part of their reaction, because the words are only part of the song. Not all hymns are poetry by themselves, and these melodies (like much of Haugen’s stuff) are fairly flowing and contemporary.