The “Kyrie eleison” text is one of the most ancient elements of Christian liturgy. As traditionally conceived, it is a prayer of penitence, asking for God the Father (Kyrie) and God the Son (Christe) to have mercy on the supplicant. That is to say, I am sinful, you are holy; please spare me. In “Lovely Needy People” from Songs for the Holy Other, a collection of hymns and songs published by The Hymn Society in the United States and Canada in 2019, the sense of the prayer is altered:

You who feel so lost, but are afraid of being found; 

You who are in chains but are afraid to live unbound,

Kyrie eleison…

All who look hate in the face, locked in hate’s embrace, 

Kyrie eleison…

There is mercy enough; there is grace enough.

There is love enough for all of us.

      (Rand and Rand, 2019)

Have mercy on me because of what I’m going through, because of how I’ve been treated, because of how I treat myself as a result, the song says, with a final assurance that there is enough mercy, grace, and love for all.

Hymnody in the Protestant Christian tradition is not only theology set to music, but also a collective record of personal religious experience. But does this body of song passed down through generations truly represent “us,” all of us? For Cedar Klassen, coordinator of Songs for the Holy Other, the answer was no: a queering of hymnody was needed (Cedar Klassen, interview by author, October 27, 2020). According to musicologist Freya Jarman-Ivens, whose work focuses on music and identity, particularly through the lens of queer theory, queering is “a practice, a process, an act. . . of interrogating structures of sexuality as one expression of power and identity relations” that highlights the constructed nature of identities (2011, 16). She identifies singing as a site particularly productive of the queer because “the detachment of voice from body renders unstable the signifiers at play” (ibid., 3). Although the voice is “of the body” that produces it, it is not coterminous with the body and “does not function as a simple signifier of the gendered-ness of its producing body” (ibid.). It rather exists in “a kind of ‘third space’ between the voicer and the listener,” detached from the ontological identity of the voicer, thereby “keep[ing] open the possibility for multiple gender identities” (ibid.). With gendered identity thus unmoored from voice, congregational singing offers the opportunity to enact and celebrate identities that transgress social norms, even within a particular religious context. Songs for the Holy Other serves as a vehicle for this expression, a queering of collective devotional space and radical reimagining of conservative orthodoxy that makes room for a counter-hegemonic voice in collective music-making. Holy Other offers the potential for shared devotional experience that draws on Christian theological and hymnodic traditions to corporately celebrate, affirm, and—most importantly—institutionally endorse queer identities.

For individuals in the Christian tradition who have a history of being othered by their churches, including members of the queer community, it is vital to have a space where, through singing, they are able to experience who they are in connection with others and the divine. Klassen sees the ability to fully engage with this aspect of church life as key: “To fully include any group in the full life of a church, they need to be represented in the songs we sing. Hymns shape our faith, they shape our theology; singing together builds community. If we’re not represented in the hymns we sing, then we’re not represented in the full life of the church” (Cedar Klassen, interview by author, October 27, 2020). Hymns sung congregationally inform both individual and collective belief and so should strive to reflect the diverse nature of the church community. To this end, Holy Other’s collaborators strove to select hymns that would lift up as broad a spectrum of the queer community as possible, in particular groups that do not normally have a seat at the table, with an emphasis on queer authors and composers. These are examples of what Mary Louise Bringle calls “hymns for a room,” which she differentiates from “hymns for the hall”:

Given their breadth of appeal, “hymns for the hall” are capable of drawing widely disparate believers together in expressions of praise or lamentation. Yet, this very breadth may render such texts generic; they may warm the heart with easily shared pieties, while engaging neither the mind nor the will. Hymns for a room, on the other hand, speak to the needs of a particular congregation, refining and reinforcing its distinctive commitments of belief and practice. (Bringle 2006, 47)

Songs for the Holy Other offers a doorway between the hall and the room, bringing new and old texts together in order to foster a better understanding of queer Christian experience. It is important to note that this is not a standalone publication but rather one sponsored and promoted by The Hymn Society in the United States and Canada, which makes it available at no charge on the organization’s website (The Hymn Society, n.d.). The Hymn Society occupies a position that is especially conducive for such advocacy: as an ecumenical organization, one comprised of members from many denominational backgrounds, it is not beholden to any one doctrinal position or interpretation of scripture. Songs for the Holy Other is an extension of its stated mission “to encourage, promote, and enliven congregational singing,” advocating for the musical recognition and inclusion of the LGBTQIA2S+ community in congregational life (The Hymn Society, n.d.).

Hymns are meant for congregational singing, an intersection of individual and collective vocal performance in the context of group devotional practice, allowing for new levels of interaction and exploration between participants. Jules Balén terms this interplay of the individual and collective “polyvocality” or “multivocality,” at once an outworking of identity and a necessary act of protest:

Cultural stories that silence or denigrate the identities of whole groups of people must be challenged relentlessly until the stories change and silencing—denying the right to the full, polyvocal expression of any individual identities as socially valuable—is no longer the norm. The social form of singing together enacts this need for placing our voices together even as it allows space for exploring and nurturing the polyvocality inherent in all social justice movements. (Balén 2017, 16)

This protest element Balén identifies as a “counterstorying practice” pushes back against oppressive “master narratives” imposed by society. It is engaging in social justice, a multivocal movement that disproves stereotypes and “a practice of holding ourselves and each other in valued identities while letting go of damaged ones” (Balén 2017, 15, 30). 

Bertram J. Schirr (2018) expands Jarman-Ivens’s idea of the queer-productivity of the voice from individual to group singing, which intensifies the possibility of queer-productiveness. He singles out hymn-singing, with its collective devotional focus, as especially powerful: 

When people sing together in worship they create something physical. Maybe because of the framing as an activity that involves transcendence, maybe because of the practice of music making and its otherness, [congregational singing is] a physical engagement with otherness, a third space and time and body of otherness. (Schirr 2018, 44)

Jarman-Ivens’s “third space” is thus sanctified, becoming a site where the earthly other and the divine other can mingle.

Group hymn-singing also allows a space for allies of the queer Christian community to participate in the construction of this radical third space. Stephanie Budwey recounts a 2011 Colorado hymn festival sponsored by the Hymn Society that featured five categories of hymns: “queered,” or reclaimed hymns (hymns that in conservative churches signified exclusion reclaimed as emblems of acceptance and inclusion); hymns written by members of the queer community; hymns that “speak of inclusion and acceptance that might hint at the inclusion of LGBTIQQA people but do not explicitly say so”; hymns that “dare to speak the name[s]” of these identities (lesbian, gay, transgender, etc.); and hymns about life experiences specific to these communities (Budwey 2016, 21, 23). Such events point beyond the important but more basic aims of visibility and relatability to the full “queering” of liturgy that decenters heteronormative language and life experiences in religious services (Garrigan 2009, 214). Seeing and hearing their lives reflected and celebrated in their spiritual community through these hymns, LGBTQIA2S+ people can be full participants, not merely tolerated but fully themselves to all those around them (Garrigan 2009, 215).

Songs for the Holy Other emerged out of the need to give voice to the queer community and to celebrate the otherness that has so often led them to be excluded by their congregations. The preface states, “For many members of the LGBTQIA2S+ community, assimilation is not an option. […] We continue to be othered for our identities, relationship-styles, dis/abilities, race, economic status, and more” (Klassen et al. 2019). The title itself is a reclaiming of othered identity: “We who have been labeled as ‘wholly other’ are claiming our holiness and reclaiming our otherness as a prophetic witness to the church” (Cedar Klassen, interview by author, October 27, 2020). The hymns in the collection give this community a voice and a space that is their own. Singing these songs together, affirming one another’s identity and the worthiness of that identity in a place that for many has been exclusionary, draws the circle wider, in the spirit of Adam Tice’s hymn: 

Draw a wider circle—

Or, perhaps, erase.

Spiral toward God’s center,

Gravity of grace.

Raze former fences

Marking out and in—

Holy and unholy,

Sanctity and sin. 

(Budwey 2016, 21) 

References

Balén, Julia “Jules.” 2017. A Queerly Joyful Noise: Choral Musicking for Social Justice. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Bringle, Mary Louise. 2006. “Hymns for the Hall or Hymns for a Room?” The Hymn 57 (3): 47–49. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015057457338.

Budwey, Stephanie. 2016. “‘Draw a Wider Circle—or, Perhaps, Erase’: Queer(ing) Hymnody.” The Hymn 67 (2): 21–26.

Garrigan, Siobhan. 2009. “Queer Worship.” Theology and Sexuality 15 (2): 21–30.

Jarman-Ivens, Freya. 2011. Queer Voices: Technologies, Vocalities, and the Musical Flaw. Palgrave Macmillan’s Critical Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Culture, edited by Patricia T. Clough and R. Danielle Egan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Klassen, Cedar, CJ Redden-Liotta, David Bjorlin, Stephanie Budwey, Tom Baynham, Matthew Messenger, T. Wes Moore, and Slats Toole, eds. 2019. Songs for the Holy Other: Hymns Affirming the LGBTQIA2S+ Community. Washington, DC: The Hymn Society in the United States and Canada.

Rand, Gary, and Lenora Rand. 2019. “Lovely Needy People.” Songs for the Holy Other: Hymns Affirming the LGBTQIA2S+ Community, edited by Cedar Klassen et al. Washington, D.C.: The Hymn Society.

Schirr, Bertram J. 2018. “The Body We Sing: Reclaiming of the Queer Materiality of Vocal Bodies.” In Queering Freedom: Music, Identity, and Spirituality, edited by Karin S. Hendricks and June Boyce-Tillman, 35–52. Music and Spirituality, edited by June Boyce-Tillman. Oxford, UK: Peter Lang Publishing.

“Songs for the Holy Other.” n.d. The Hymn Society. Accessed 28 November 2020. https://thehymnsociety.org/resources/songs-for-the-holy-other/.

The Hymn Society. n.d. Accessed 28 November 2020. https://thehymnsociety.org/.