My Lord! What A Morning...
Illustration
"My Lord! What A Morning" is the title of a hymn found in many hymnals. Its refrain goes like this:
My Lord! what a morning,
My Lord! what a morning,
Oh, my Lord! what a morning,
When the stars begin to fall.
What sort of people would celebrate such a dreadful cosmic cataclysm? The answer can be found in the author line printed in the hymnal: "African-American spiritual." This song rose out of slavery -- out of an entire people's horrific, protracted experience of suffering.
Those persecuted slaves did find some measure of hope in singing, "My Lord! what a morning, when the stars begin to fall." For they believed that only when the stars fell from heaven -- or when they themselves died, whichever came first -- would they and their people be free from suffering. When people from a culture without that history sing hymns like this one, they do well to try to hear the melodies through the ears of another people -- the oppressed people who cherished and preserved them. If such songs are sung from the perspective of affluent citizens of the world's most powerful nation, they hardly even make sense (or, worse, it may sound ghoulishly like cursing the rest of the world).
It is only when an appreciation of the perspective of an oppressed people is reached that the apocalyptic teachings of Mark 13 can be understood.
My Lord! what a morning,
My Lord! what a morning,
Oh, my Lord! what a morning,
When the stars begin to fall.
What sort of people would celebrate such a dreadful cosmic cataclysm? The answer can be found in the author line printed in the hymnal: "African-American spiritual." This song rose out of slavery -- out of an entire people's horrific, protracted experience of suffering.
Those persecuted slaves did find some measure of hope in singing, "My Lord! what a morning, when the stars begin to fall." For they believed that only when the stars fell from heaven -- or when they themselves died, whichever came first -- would they and their people be free from suffering. When people from a culture without that history sing hymns like this one, they do well to try to hear the melodies through the ears of another people -- the oppressed people who cherished and preserved them. If such songs are sung from the perspective of affluent citizens of the world's most powerful nation, they hardly even make sense (or, worse, it may sound ghoulishly like cursing the rest of the world).
It is only when an appreciation of the perspective of an oppressed people is reached that the apocalyptic teachings of Mark 13 can be understood.
