Erik Routley (1917-82)

Dr. Routley passed from this life thirty years ago yesterday, October 8, 1982, while on the road for a church music workshop at Westminster Presbyterian Church, Nashville, Tennessee. Perhaps more than any other single person, he was central to my spiritual formation.

I had the privilege of attending Westminster Choir College during his tenure as Chaplain and Professor. His graduate courses in Liturgy and Hymnody are my only formal training in those subjects. His weekly sermons in the College Chapel taught me what it means to undertake this work of Church Music and memories of those Tuesday mornings have often sustained me through the dry places when the work of music has seemed meaningless, a lost cause. I had the further privileges of serving on the Chapel Committee, and, as graduate assistant for the church music department, of preparing the weekly service bulletins for those Tuesday liturgies.

When word reached me of his death, I felt lost, even though by that time I was serving in a parish far away. It seemed to me that there was no one to carry forward his work, in a time of liturgical and musical upheaval when his wisdom was needed more than ever. At the distance of thirty years, others have arisen to supply theological underpinning to the work of church music, but I still think that I was correct in that judgment for that critical moment in the early 1980's. I must trust the Lord of Hosts that Dr. Routley's work on this earth was done, no matter how it might appear.

I miss him.

Hymns are delightful and dangerous things. They are regarded, in the late twentieth century, as inseparable from the worship of all but a very few Christian groups. They are as familiar an activity as reading a newspaper: in worship they are for many people the most intelligible and agreeable of all the activities they are invited to join in or to witness; they are the most easily memorized of all Christian statements, and one who has not been in a church for most of a lifetime, but who was brought in church when young, remembers some hymns, though everything else may be forgotten. [Routley, Erik: Christian Hymns Observed (Princeton, NJ: Prestige Publications, 1982): p. 1]

… Singing goes with whatever means most to people. But hymnody introduces into the life of the church a creative tension between the passing and the timeless, between the spatially universal and the local, which without them the church would disregard to its lasting detriment.... It is perhaps surprising... how much abuse they survive: but, if we may ignore for a moment the present age's impatience with history, we may judge that what meant so much to Ambrose, St. Francis and St. Thomas Aquinas, to J. S. Bach and Isaac Watts and John Wesley, to Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten and your own Christian neighbour, is worth treasuring, preserving and nourishing. Even if our heathen children don't want them, we will not hide them from them: another generation will be grateful if we don't. [Ibid., p. 107]