Anthony Esolen indicts pop Church music, for excellent reasons.
The implicit message of such music is that the worship of God is just like everything else: putting the moves on a girl at a drinking party, chilling out with college friends in the wee hours, selling a fashionable automobile, advertising a soap opera. We have enough and more than enough of that already. We need far more, and other. It’s as Aidan Nichols puts it, in Looking at the Liturgy: “Rites that do not allow a sense of distance deny to the people, paradoxically, a means of appropriating the act of worship, crippling them just at the point where they could be taking off Godward by a leap of religious imagination. For liturgical actors, though presented within a social frame, have to convey properties of what lies beyond that frame, a rumor of angels.”
Plenty more here.
Good article. I think Esolen's choice of Daniel Kantor's lyric to deconstruct as an analog to his contentions was unfortunate, as there are much worse examples abundantly in need of pruning, and actually out of context, "Night of Silence" (partnered to "Silent Night") is hardly the sort of song that Esolen describes as akin to secular pop with emotional intent and pretense. He should have perhaps listened more to Hart, Maher, Angrisano et al.
I know this lyric well, and I don't think it has any real evangelical value. Sometimes it is just meaningless, or vague (Shimmer in the sky so empty, lonely). In the third verse it is quite confusing, about God.
No matter how wonderful propers are, I'm a lifelong fan of hymnody, because excellent hymns help people live through anything. They even help people die well.
But I can't imagine being sustained in life or death by the thought of God being a shimmering sta or a voice in the distance.
I have never encountered the modern 'carol' quoted by Esolen, whereas 'Of the Father's Love Begotten' regularly turns up at carol services (usually in the Neale/Baker translation of 1854/9 although the popular 'Carols for Choirs' prefers the 1906 translation by Roby Furley Davis). It's usually sung in triple metre.