In His Own Images

Thanks to Bill Moyers’ 1990 PBS special on the hymn “Amazing Grace,” many people know the story of its author, John Newton, an 18th century slave trader-turned-parish priest. But anyone who thinks he was the last of his kind hasn’t heard of Jaroslav Vajda.

At 78, the Lutheran minister has written nearly 200 hymns and is regarded as the greatest living American hymn writer by the Hymn Society of the United States and Canada. Vajda (pronounced VY-dah) will be in Irvine on Sunday when he and his work are honored at a hymn fest at Concordia University.

“Anything I write in poetic form is meant to be set in music,” Vajda said recently from his home in St. Louis. “I just do the words. But I understand what music is. I have sung in choruses. I have played the violin and I’ve studied piano. So I’m very well acquainted with the necessity to merge the word with the melodies and make them singable.”

Sometimes the music is an extant melody, such as a folk song, but often it’s yet to be composed. Since Vajda favors irregular metrical choices, one might think composers would be discouraged. Quite the contrary, the writer said.

“They seem to be inspired by those irregular texts. They’re really a challenge to the musicians. Quite a number of those melodies have become quite popular and identifiable.”

Vajda’s work can be found in some 50 hymn anthologies distributed in the United States, Canada, England, Germany and Slovakia. The process of writing them begins with research.

“I probe [a] particular subject, not only in the Bible, but in other places, in literature, wherever it appears,” Vajda said. “Then I try to express the theme in poetic form, in some kind of rhythmic form. I just jot down poetic phrases that come to me. I fill maybe five to 15 pages of notes, just lines.

“Of course, I draw up an outline for the poem, so I have a beginning and end to it. What I’m striving for is imagery. That’s what distinguishes true poetry from what I call didactic poetry. So many religious hymns, especially from the Reformation era, were simply rhymed doctrine and had very little imagery.”

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In emphasizing “images in poetic form,” Vajda took his cue from Jesus, he said. “Most of his speeches were in parables, in image form, drawing on familiar images in people’s lives and society in general.”

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One of three sons of a Lutheran minister, all of whom became clergymen, Vajda grew up in Indiana Harbor (now East Chicago), Ind. After graduating from St. Louis’ Concordia Seminary in 1945, he served as pastor in churches in Pennsylvania, Indiana and St. Louis.

Vajda believes any hymn writer must become involved, as he has, in the lives of parishioners. “You’re not just meeting them as an audience,” he said. “You know them personally and share their ups and down, their trials, their jobs. You are present and participating in the major events in their lives. And also you’re involved in what’s going on in the culture and society.”

Vajda worries about the recent trend in some churches to make “worship entertainment rather than worship,” which imperils content, he said.

“Contemporary services restrict themselves mostly to praise songs,” he said. “Elements of the liturgy are being neglected. . . . I consider worship a two-way street. It begins with God revealing his mercies and favors and blessings to us and his message of salvation, forgiveness, eternal life, and then we respond to these offers.

“So God gets there first and then we come with our response, which is, for one thing, it is repentance, and it’s instruction, and it’s praise. It’s like a meeting to which we’re invited and God is the host,” Vajda said.

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His hymn-writing career began in 1968 when, as editor of This Day, a Concordia Publishing House monthly, he wrote his first text, “Now the Silence,” simply to fill a blank page. After it appeared, Carl Schalk, a Lutheran composer in Illinois, asked permission to write a melody for it. A hymn-writing secondary career was suddenly underway.

“It was fabulous. Unbelievable. I just had to keep pinching myself to believe that those words inspired a certain melody.”

The piece turned out to be a watershed that precipitated a new career. “It just came out of the blue. It developed from the creation of ‘Now the Silence.’ It betrays a lifetime struggle with worship. That’s what I’ve been doing with my hymns and with my whole spiritual life, and I find that to be the case with every person that takes his religion seriously.”

* The hymns of Jaroslav Vajda will be discussed and sung in the “Hymnfest: Then the New Creation Singing” at 4 p.m. Sunday at the Concordia University Center for Worship and Performing Arts, 1530 Concordia West, Irvine. $5-$7. (714) 854-8002.