So our journey has now concluded. (OK my journey has concluded — I realize the PH has approximately two readers, one of them me.) This has by no means been a thorough or complete breakdown of the entire hymnal, but it is fairly exhaustive (also exhausting, but hopefully in a positive way).
The reason I have “left out” some of the hymns is because we never sang them. As in, we never ever sang them, or if we did, it was a brief experiment by an overly-ambitious song leader that never ended well.
The hymns I have reproduced and examined here are the ones that we sang, week to week, and depending how religious the household was, day to day. When I started this project, it was with a little bit of snarky “Kilroy was here!” and a touch of maybe, yes, that dreaded b-word. Better that it should be presented in the open, then left to fester. Yes? Yes.
So if I’ve left out your “favourite” hymn, or you think I’ve missed out on excoriating a particularly appropriate hymn, let me know, at purplehymnal@gmail.com.
It has been a long, strange, interesting, sometimes exhausting journey. But I would not have traded the past few months, for anything in the world. I may not have cleared every last one of the cobwebs of religion out, but I think I made an admirable effort towards getting most of them.
I hope that the information that I have presented here will be helpful to someone else, somewhere along the way, on their journey out of the church. When it is needed it will be here.
Now if you will excuse me, I am going to get out of the house, and enjoy the remainder of the day. And the rest of my life.
