By Amy Sens
When I was contemplating starting a new church, I wanted to do something a little unusual. I wanted to move away from the strong divide between the traditional hymns I had grown up with and the contemporary Christian songs that so rarely felt like a good match for my theology. I also wanted a style of music that could be played without a piano or an organ and had a similar worn and worked-over quality to the old hymns. Which got me to bluegrass and folk. I had been thinking there would be a lot of songs people knew and recognized, probably because of all the time I spent listening to the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack. But pretty quickly we figured out there were maybe three or four that most people know, and that there wasn’t a lot of progressive theology in those hymns, either.
So I started writing hymns. I had written one years before for a contest and had enjoyed the process—fitting the words to the music, trying to express deeper realities with very few words, all while making it singable, accessible to a congregation. But now I was at the confluence of a couple of very interesting streams—the stories of the Bible, progressive theology, the hymns I grew up with, and the traditional tunes of bluegrass, folk, and old-time music.
I’ve put new words to existing hymns, new tunes to existing hymn texts, rewritten old hymns and given them new tunes, retold Bible stories, and I have written entirely new songs. For me, writing a new song usually goes best when I have a problem to solve—when there’s some new idea that needs to be expressed and made accessible. In the case of my hymn, “When Heaven Comes to Earth,” I was working with an interfaith group, making plans for a weekend retreat focused on creation care. We wanted a new song and realized that too often the messaging and our way of thinking about creation care is all about grief, loss, what is missing, what is going wrong. And so the theme for the weekend became about envisioning a better future, envisioning what it will look like when we succeed in our efforts. And I really enjoyed, too, the emphasis on bringing heaven to earth, of working to make this world better. It’s something of a contrast to the pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by theology in some songs.
When I’m writing something new, it helps to get a little bit of tune and a little bit of words, and let them interact with each other and spread out. I think for “When Heaven Comes to Earth,” the chorus came first. The tune had some inspiration from a song called “Jesse James,” and then I moved to the central idea of the whole song: imagining what this world will look like, what things will be like when we get it figured out, when we learn to treat everyone and the whole of creation with respect and care. When heaven comes to Earth, what? The verses came later, repeating the chorus tune for simplicity, with a different theme for each, starting with an echo of Genesis, putting the sky and the water together, and then considering our food and our relationships with each other, and finally putting forth a call to action.
What I appreciate most about writing hymns is that they stay with us and contribute to our spiritual lives in a unique way. I’m also a preacher, and while I put in the time and work hard to bring together ideas and stories that will help us live better lives, I don’t believe sermons have the same staying power. Hymns can go out with us into the world and bring us back to ourselves, even—maybe especially—in our most trying times. It is an honor to be a part of that tradition, and I’m grateful for the calling to contribute in this way.
“When Heaven Comes to Earth”
Sheet Music
Amy Sens is a preacher, hymn writer, storyteller, and musician. Visit her website, amysens.com.