Journalists have trouble covering "normality" and everyday events in religious life, Terry noted yesterday. While news organizations tend to cover religious perspectives on contentious issues, denominational infighting, and the latest clerical scandals, the real action for the average devotee is in worship, prayer, personal piety and, if we're being honest, coffee hours. David Crumm, a prolific and longtime religion writer and columnist at the Detroit Free Press, breaks this mold with a substantive look at how faith inspires art. Using an unlikely subject, he manages to get a newsworthy story out of the ordinary life of the church:
One evening as his mom was fixing supper in their Bloomfield Hills home, 11-year-old Harrison Kenum laid aside his Lego construction sets and Star Wars games and launched an unusual new mission.
In the next 30 minutes, he wrote a remarkable hymn that will be sung at a 9 a.m. Dec. 11 service at Kirk in the Hills Presbyterian Church in Bloomfield Hills.
It would be easy to write this as a novelty story. The elements are all there: precocious kid, seasonal schmaltz, feel-good religiosity. But Crumm does not condescend to his pre-teen subject -- or his audience -- and permits Kenum to explain the creative process and religious influences that fueled his hymnwriting:
At the core of this effort is his vivid Christian faith in which he says he clearly senses God sitting in the heavens and ruling with a compassionate hand.
To capture that lofty image in verse, Harrison found himself calling upon a host of traditional religious words that have swirled around in his head during the seven years he has performed in boys' choirs.
"To make it sound like it should, I knew that I had to put in 'doth' and 'ne'er' and some other words like that," he said. "To sound right, hymns like this always need a 'thy' or two."
Also commendable is how many resources Crumm and his colleagues devoted to the piece; it's more of a news package than a story. On the website, at least, the article is accompanied by the lyrics and audio to the hymn, pictures, and a video interview of Kenum explaining his vision. The 11-year-old definitely has a theology he used to write the hymn and Crumm highlights it and puts it in the context of congregational life. The writer even understands that the liturgical season most Christians are in right now is Advent, not the High Holy Days of Commercialized Christmas. Crumm explains how the Magnificat -- the song Mary sings upon hearing she will bear the Savior -- will be one of the appointed readings for the congregation's upcoming Advent service:
"This is the season of Advent for us and that's the theme on Sunday in the service where we'll sing Harrison's hymn: Everyone's got a song to sing," [assistant pastor Rev. Lana] Russell told me.
"Wouldn't it be wonderful if everyone took time like he did to think about these things? I want people to ask: What's the song that I've been waiting to sing?"
Eleven-year old hymnwriters might not exist in every area, but editors and religion writers would do well to look at how faith and religious devotion affect every vocation, from mothers and barkeepers to janitors and soldiers. Real life, real news, and all that.