————more nearly a cranky essay than a poem
A boy among the heretics, I was obliged to sing
no few specious verses spouting vastly bad theology.
With no true ear and not much sense, our hymnists packed immodest
lines with dearly wrought embarrassments, each one wreathed by a rash
of wretched rhyme and sorely tortured rhythm. One such excess,
“Onward Christian Soldiers,” bore especially untoward figures,
uneasy images owing more to our predecessors’
historical blunders than to the Holy One whom
we were incorrectly certain that we served. Levitical
seems a truer self-descriptor than Evangelical
in terms of these, my people’s, local disposition. I’d say
that in the interim, my heretics have not improved, not
their hymnody, nor odd theology. No, their selective
readings of the sacred texts have all but effaced the very
Face—the dear Image of Philanthropos—from all that passes
for thought regarding belovèd matter at hand, which matter
nonetheless continues to extend far beyond their paltry
apologia horribly pared and blithely spread to serve
as swill for the heretics’ right ravenous ingestion, while—
all the while—the soul-numbing choruses continue to swell
in large and dulling measures scored to keep the infernal, not-
so-Christian troops marching to a cadence called by the one they
truly serve, that famous, fallen messenger whose yearning they
unthinking love to press into a chorus, and love to sing.
Scott Cairns’s fifteenth book, Against Certainty, is forthcoming from Slant Books. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Denise Levertov Award.
Photo by Zack Smith on Unsplash
