composer, arranger, workshop facilitator, author, and mischief maker
Suzanne Guthrie is visiting Professor for Spiritual Practices for the Spring Semester at Church Divinity School of the Pacific, and she’s asked me to come along at noon on Monday to teach a bit about chanting as a spiritual practice. We’ll run barefoot through individual and group practices, and perhaps transform a life or two. Go big and go home.
Location: 2451 Ridge Rd, Berkeley, CA
Open My Heart is 20 years old this year, so imagine my surprise when I got an email from my friend David Bjorlin telling me he was going to write an article about Open My Heart. Whoa!
Check it out below. It’s nice when people encounter my work, which seems simple enough, but which, in the case Open my Heart and a few other tunes, can take a lifetime of practice. Anyway, about the article!
The article appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of The Hymn: A Journal of Congregational Song, a peer-reviewed journal of The Hymn Society of The United States and Canada.
Thanks Dave!
Here it is:
“Often in articles that focus on the interpretation of hymns, we tend to choose stanzaic texts for our hymnic exegesis. In some ways, this is understand- able; they fit the traditional definition of a hymn most clearly and have a high text load, which gives the interpreter plenty of fodder for their analysis. Yet, not only does this bias often limit our analysis to the Western (often White) canon, it also keeps us from examining specific and unique ways words can be employed and in- terpreted in cyclical songs. For these reasons, in this article I will examine Ana Hernández’s “Open my heart/ Abre mi corazón” to show how a text of only three words can be open, and open us up, to various theological and liturgical interpretations.
I remember vividly the first time I encountered “Open my heart/Abre mi corazón.” Many of us were at the Dallas Hymn Society Annual Conference in 2019, and Hernández was leading one of our nightly hymn festivals. I can’t remember if I had this exact reaction to the song that evening, but I know that by that time I had grown weary of “heart” language in my own evangelical context. The heart had come to represent a sort of sentimental and individualized faith for me—that place we invited Jesus to enter so we could have a personal relationship, which often seemed to be an “exclusive relationship,” cut off from our relationship to our neighbors and the world. So, no doubt when I first encountered the word “heart” in this song, much of this theological and personal baggage also showed up on the airport carousel of meaning-making (which is an important point for hymn/songwriters to remember: words don’t only mean what you intend them to mean; they carry meanings and associations that people bring with them to the song from past encounters). So, how did this text not only transcend but also transform my preconceived notions about heart language? I can think of three reasons that both helped me to broaden my interpretation of this particular song text and perhaps helps us understand and interpret short-form/cyclical songs more generally.
First, instead of foreclosing on meaning by explaining exactly what the words mean, the simplicity of the song opens the singers up to a range of meanings through its very explanatory reticence. One cycle of the song consists of four repetitions of “Open my heart” or “Abre mi corazón” that can be sung in (at least) three parts.1 Upon singing it through, several questions may naturally arise for the singer. First, to whom are we directing the song? Who are we asking to open our hearts? In the context of the liturgy, the assumed answer is God. Yet, by not naming God, the question is left at least partially open. While this might be seen as a limitation in particular contexts, this openness also makes the song usable in interfaith or even non-religious gatherings. Indeed, Hernández notes that the melody is adapted from a Kuan Shi Yin (“To see the sound”) Buddhist mantra and first used at an Episcopal General Convention, so it has intentional interfaith origins.2 But for me, the more interesting question is: what or who are we asking that our hearts be open to? Jesus? One another? The Spirit? The world? By not giving a specific answer, the song can answer “Yes!” to all these possibilities. And perhaps the lack of an answer serves as an important reminder that we cannot truly open our hearts to God if our hearts are not open to the movement of the Spirit, the need of our neighbor, the plight of the outsider, the groaning of creation. In majority English-speaking congregations like my own, the very act of singing this song in Spanish (or in French—“Ouerve mon couer”—as is also given as a possibility on the Music That Makes Community website3) is also a gentle nudge to remember and open our hearts to the neighbor who sings in a different language than we do to a God for whom every tongue is native. So, it is the very simplicity of this song—and cyclical songs more generally—that allows it to be multivalent, speaking to many possible meanings and hopefully pushing us past any single or narrow interpretation.
Yet, if I was still in my individualist, Jesus-in-my-heart mindset, couldn’t the lack of specificity allow me to keep singing this song with this narrow interpretation?
Or, for that matter, couldn’t some sing this song and continue to open their hearts to dangerous ideologies? (Though I would argue that most of these ideologies are a closing off of the heart rather than an opening up, but you get the general idea.) It is at least possible to maintain a narrow interpretation, which brings me to my second point. The ritual context in which this song was sung also demanded a broader interpretation of heart language. While I do not recall the entire hymn festival, I remember clearly that the singing was interspersed by a recounting of the injustices against the Dakota people in modern-day Minnesota that led to the US-Dakota War of 1862 and the mass execution of thirty-eight Dakota men. In that context, when we sang “Open my heart” together, it was clear that if we were to sing it with integrity, it meant opening our hearts to the true and unvarnished history of our nation, to the murderous effects of the “Doctrine of Discovery,” to the continued oppression of indigenous communities in our nation and around the world.
The song’s origins give another clear example of the way context helps interpret text. As Hernández explained to me in a recent email, the song was birthed during the 2003 Episcopal General Convention when the governing body was deliberating on the possible consecration of the first openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson. The delegates were deeply divided, and the mood reflected this division. Hernández had been tasked with leading the music at noonday, and she decided to choose one familiar hymn each day and then improvise a second song as the Spirit led. On the day of the vote, she still had not figured out what to do with the second song. As she explained, “I was literally walking up to the podium when I saw the people in the first row with their arms crossed and looking down at their table. I saw they were not going to sing with me that day. I silently yelled at God, ‘What these people need is to open their hearts!’”4 She soon realized that it was she who needed to open her heart, and those words combined with the Kuan Shi Yin mantra in her head served to create the song as it is. As the delegates (at least some of them!) sang, “it was like a gear shifted and the energy mellowed almost to sweetness.”5 In this context, when the delegates sang “open my heart,” it could be read as a plea for God to open the singers’ hearts to the Spirit’s discerning wisdom and also open their hearts to one another, even in the midst of great division. One can imagine the song taking on other layers of meanings if it was sung before a scripture reading, during communion, or after a national tragedy. Thus, the ritual, liturgical, and/or cultural context in which a cyclical song is sung will also provide a lens through which the text is interpreted.
One final interpretive key to the text is the way this song is sung. First, the melismatic, mantric tune requires a bit more time, it slows us down from the way we often rush through stanzaic hymns. That slowness gives us the time to enact the song, or have the song enacted upon us—time to grow less anxious so our hearts can begin to open. Further, the (at least) three-part melodic structure and invitation to improvise requires an opening of our ears and, dare I say, hearts to those around us as we navigate the song together. We must listen and adjust to one another in that sonic space when we sing an improvisatory cyclical song together, which perhaps serves as an apt metaphor for the life lived together in communities of faith. Thus, we find that our hearts are opened in the very act of singing; the song fulfills its deepest purpose when it does what it sings.
This leads to a necessary word of caution. This column is called “Hymn Interpretation,” so it will naturally take up questions of meaning and interpretation in a song, which are not unimportant. Yet, if we simply take a cyclical song and begin thinking about all the different interpretations or meanings it could hold, we miss the point; “We murder to dissect,” as Wordsworth wrote.6 Meaning in cyclical songs is not primarily found in an abstract reflection on the text, but in the doing, in the singing itself. Here, that insatiable desire for meaning can even get in the way, for as Hernández again explains, songs like this at their best “relieve us of the need to fill space with all the meanings” so that we can be open to that still, small voice of the Spirit that “is speaking into our hearts.”7 Yes, these different theological and liturgical interpretations are open to us in the song. However, if that search for meaning becomes the central focus of the singing, we perhaps miss the greater point, which is less about meaning than encounter. If we know every possible interpretation of the song but do not find our hearts opening in the singing, our interpretation becomes “a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”8 But if our hearts do indeed open as we sing, perhaps it is then we discover true meaning and our deepest doxology.”
You can find the video of Hernández teaching the song at the Dallas Hymn Society Conference here: https://www.youtube.com/.
watch?v=B6SkffFSsOE&t=1s.You can also find the three-part arrangement in Voices Together (Harrisonburg, VA: MennoMedia, 2020), #731.
David Bjorlin is the Assistant Professor of Worship at North Park Theological Seminary. He is also a hymnwriter whose texts have been published in Protest of Praise (GIA, 2020) and four other recent collections.
How cool is that?!