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For Peaceful Living’s founder Joe Landis, growing up in southeastern Pennsylvania’s oldest Mennonite community has been to
know what a family circle felt like. At home the sensation focused in table fellowship and story-telling. At church there was
the sacrament of singing together in a folk harmony one joined from childhood, hardly noticing how one had learned to do so.
We thought anybody could sing like that. Both home and church singing settings nurtured a powerful, taken for granted sensation
of being included. If one was in the circle. Even the voices of those, like Joe’s father’s ancient great-uncle Jonas L. Alderfer,
whose less than average I.Q. kept them from learning the notes, were folded into the haunting sound, not of performance but
community. Joney and his peers were there at the table and in the hymns. Only with such taken for granted completeness did
the sacraments of table and church fellowship feel valid. Only with those hoarse voices did the harmony sound fully like home.
Hymns endear. Old ones connect us with souls who breathed them before we were born, and those who will take them up when
our own breath fails. Hymns connect us with moments in the unfolding of our own individual and communal faith stories. New
words – if they tap deep wells -- enrich old truths, surprising us with their gift of insight. Both singer and hearer are
blessed in reprising fundamental thoughts of supplication or praise in a medium that lends to our ordinary minds the superior
gifts of poet and composer. We make great hymns our personal property. And as we lift our hearts corporately to God, we are
reminding each other that we belong to God together.
Not only persons familiar with traditional a cappella congregational singing can be touched by its sense of family. Often,
even persons unfamiliar with the experience respond to its warmth. So it ought to be shared. But how?
What would it be like to hear our humble meetinghouse strains profoundly ennobled by the string section of a major orchestra?
That would have been nice, and Joe Landis indeed imagined that with a friend, while realizing, of course that it was beyond
our means. But with his sense of family, Joe could invite friends to bring those encircling harmonies, on a chamber rather
than symphonic scale, into an album. The traditional four-part sound hangs in the air of the community. Stan Yoder,
leader of the accompanying string quartet, has lived and taught for years at the epicenter of instrumental music among local
Mennonite schools and congregations. Most of the nonprofessional singers assembled for the sessions in April and June 2005
have sung since childhood in local congregations.
The seventeen hymns and spiritual songs can all be found in Hymnal: A Worship Book (1992), the collection currently in
use among Mennonite and Brethren congregations. The very first number, strongly evocative of place, time and memory, weds
modern words to the vigor of a 17th century chorale. Next comes a 19th century folk tune carrying a 20th century prayer.
A paraphrased essay by Menno Simons is woven across a contemporary tune. Then comes a cavalcade of Isaac Watts and Count
von Zinzendorf and Beethoven and African-American spirituals and Brian Wren and the Mormons and, and, and. With such
teeming memories, such a circle, and a God who, the Psalmist reminds us, “setteth the solitary in families,” how can
we keep from singing?
-- John L. Ruth
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