a favorite Community of Christ hymn

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As I’ve written before, one of my favorite things about the Day One journaling app is the “On this Day” feature that lets me remember moments from my past—often moments I might have forgotten if I hadn’t journaled about them.

This morning, Day One reminded me of a hymn service my local Community of Christ congregation held a couple of years ago. I had been invited to share a memory of a favorite hymn. It’s been a lot of fun to learn new hymns (and new versions of familiar hymns) during my adventure with Community of Christ, but the hymn I chose to speak about was Peace Salaam Shalom, which you can listen to in the video below:

Here’s what I wrote that I planned to share with my congregation. If memory serves, I ended up speaking extemporaneously rather than reading this, but I’d held onto the text in my journal, and now I’m posting it here:

September of 2001 was an important month in my life. I was an eighth grader at Ockerman Middle School in Florence, KY, and I was a few weeks into my very first French class. For the next decade (and even a little more), I would keep taking French class after French class, and even living in France and Switzerland for two years, until I graduated with a degree in French Teaching in 2012. I don’t teach French anymore, but even though those skills are getting rusty, French is really, really special to me. I wouldn’t go so far to say that the Holy Spirit speaks to me in French, but it’s pretty close. It’s a language that moves me, that inspires me, that will always be an important part of my life.

Of course, September of 2001 was an important month for the whole world, and for more urgent reasons than foreign language classes. On the same day of the September 11th attacks in the United States, musician Pat Humphries recognized the urgent need for peace in the world and began writing the Peace, Salaam, Shalom, which she and Sandy Opatow would eventually perform as part of their musical group Emma’s Revolution.

Let’s fast forward a few years. In 2013, as Community of Christ Sings was being put together, someone reached out to Emma’s Revolution and asked about including this song in the new hymnal. The World Church also produced a video of the song for the 2013 World Conference—this video featured members of congregations from “Korea, Tahiti, Zambia, Haiti, Spain, Democratic Republic of Congo, Australia, First Peoples of North America and the US” (source) all helping to perform the song together.

Let’s fast forward a few more years, and let’s bring these two September stories together. In September of 2019, I was still in the early months of learning more about Community of Christ, and I signed up for an online course taught by Katie Harmon-McLaughlin called “Spirituality Along the Edges.” This was a course that was about reexamining one’s faith during a time of questions, which is something that I really needed during that time.

During one of the sessions, Katie announced that we would be listening to the hymn Peace Salaam Shalom as part of the class. She played for us the same video that was played at the 2013 World Conference, and to my great surprise and pleasure, the first part of the first verse of the song was being sung in French. I loved the message of the hymn, regardless of the language, but I was moved by hearing that message in a language that is so special to me, and I was impressed by the way that the entire World Church of Community of Christ had come together to sing this beautiful song.

I continue to love this hymn. In fact, at the recent Community of Christ World Conference, I picked up a DVD with this video on it; once I got home, I ripped the audio so that I could also listen to it in my music app. Writing all this reminds me that it’s been a while since I’ve listened to this—maybe it’s time to do so now.

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