Mormon song how can i be

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Twitter Pinterest Email Print. About the Author. At the end of the day, the LDS faith is based on a simple premise: that all people are the children of God.

This song tells people we are all promised a place with God so long as we choose to do so. A message such as this will go a long way in providing some relief. When you lose someone close to you, it can feel incredibly isolating. This song reminds you to lean on your love for God to get you through such a harrowing time.

It is simple, yet so very uplifting. Music and singing can help remedy the heart. This song is a terrific reminder of love, hope, and peace.

This is an excellent hymnal to add to a traditional LDS funeral music playlist. It is a popular option that many people are drawn to when it starts.

You will likely have heard this during a church service at some point. Tip: Creating a funeral playlist is just one of the difficult tasks you might be responsible for after the death of a loved one.

Our post-loss checklist can help you sort out the rest. Peace is what so many people strive to find when they lose someone close to them. This song reminds us to take a moment to breathe and find a small piece of calm. With its sweet and inspiring, many Mormon church members select this song to be added to their playlist.

Once in Utah, Welsh immigrants created a choir, which has become internationally known as the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square. Church colonies in the nineteenth century, no matter how small, usually had a town band. Even today many members of the Church learn to play an instrument, and reverent musical numbers are a frequent part of worship services. Each congregation is encouraged to have a choir, and congregational hymns are sung at virtually every meeting.

In more recent times, Church leaders have encouraged parents to include musical training in the lives of their children. Members are also encouraged to use good music as a way to control unwanted or degrading thoughts.

Latter-day Saints are counseled to avoid listening to degrading music, but as usual, it is up to the individual to distinguish between uplifting and degrading music. The hymns are not the only source of good LDS music.

There are hundreds of members who write inspirational music available to others through CD's, printed music, live performances, the internet, and sometimes even through the Church magazines. Surely, more records will resurface as Mormon historiography proceeds, but they will likely follow the bare-bones pattern of the records we know.

Still, when one considers the available minutes and personal records, a few trends emerge. The sources I have studied for the years to —all the extant minutes as well as journals and autobiographies of nearly two hundred Latter-day Saints—mention on only fifty-eight occasions the names of the hymns sung. Table 1 shows the occurrence of all the hymn names mentioned. While the sketchy records yield only a small sample for us to consider, one can easily conclude the obvious: some hymns were more popular than others.

In other words, two-thirds of the fifty-eight occurrences of hymn names from to are these ten hymns. Why are so few hymns mentioned by name?

It is partly a matter of record keeping. Clearly, clerks and scribes differed on whether it was important to record the names of hymns sung. And even those who thought it important may not have known the name of any given hymn, even if they wanted to record it. The seemingly limited repertoire of hymns also results from the choices of the people leading them. Those who chose the songs to sing—and we do not know how many different people that might have been—could choose only songs that they knew and probably chose songs they preferred.

Thus, biases in both record keeping and song choosing skew our results. Consider, for example, that five different hymns on our list of fifty-eight were sung in the same meeting on August 17, Thankfully, the minutes record the names of all of them and that one of them was sung twice.

So careful an inventory of singing is rare; thus the list may not be representative. As it turned out, four of the five different hymns he led that day did not appear in the soon-to-be-published Mormon hymnbook. But he knew them, and that was enough to have them sung. Would anyone else have chosen any of those five hymns?

Many hymns Latter-day Saints published and probably sang were for gatherings other than church services, meetings likely without clerks or recorders. Thus, the hymnbook included six of each, probably one for each day of the week except Sunday, when other hymns would be sung at church.

We have few records of such occasions. Some Mormon gatherings, while religious, were not strictly devoted to worship or devotion. Some Protestants revived the tradition. Come to the supper—come to the supper— Come to the supper of the great Bridegroom. William F. It did not appear in the first hymnbook. If some hymns thrived in special circumstances, others had broad appeal.

This hymn celebrated the place where early Mormons would make a last attempt to gather and build a city in Missouri. Latter-day Saints believed this to be the site where Adam and Eve dwelt after being cast out of the Garden of Eden. But Phelps had already written a hymn about it in This world was once a garden place, With all her glories common; And men did live a holy race, And worship Jesus face to face, In Adam-ondi-Ahman.

For the next two years, Church members sang it often, most notably, perhaps, in a meeting held on June 28, , to organize a stake of Zion at Adam-ondi-Ahman. Mormons revised, rewrote, and republished it for decades.

It remains in the current hymnbook , no. We can see why such a venerable Protestant hymn resonated with early Mormons. They intended to fulfill the prophecy implicit in the text:. Glorious things of thee are spoken, Zion, city of our God! He whose word cannot be broken, Chose thee for his own abode. That first hearing, in the midst of the ecstatic manifestations of the dedicatory services—angels, visions, speaking in tongues, and so forth—led some to believe that the song had been given by God spontaneously to the temple choir.

That was certainly enough to make it a Mormon standard. But most other hymns mentioned by name in early Mormon records fared differently. While all five of the most oft-mentioned hymns appear in the current hymnbook, twenty of the remaining twenty-three titles do not.

As to how early Latter-day Saints sang hymns, it is important to understand first that hymn names refer only to texts, not tunes. One could sing any hymn to any existing tune that fit it or even a tune that did not quite fit. Sometimes an epigraph on a hymn tells which tune to use. But all of these are special cases. So when we consider early Mormon hymn singing, we can generally be certain about the words but not about the music.

Surprisingly, we also know little about who actually sang the hymns in church meetings. We assume early LDS congregations sang each hymn in unison or harmony from start to finish, more or less as we do today.

If there are any such statements to be found, they are rare indeed. A few passages in Far West Record may connote this interpretation. On November 7, , for example, Thomas B. After which he delivered a very animated address to his brother ministers. We should understand such passages in the context of their time. Biographies and diaries of Protestant ministers from the late eighteenth through mid-nineteenth centuries commonly describe how ministers opened evangelistic meetings.

Descriptions of this three-part practice abound. After the singing of the hymn, comes the prayer, which is uttered with. And then follows the sermon on the text. Descriptions not just of evangelistic meetings but also of public worship meetings from this period show that ministers sang, prayed, and spoke. Asa Dodge preached to the people.

Their own accounts show that, in evangelizing at least, Mormon missionaries often followed the pattern of Protestant circuit preachers.