Monday, March 28, 2011

And who hies anymore, anyway?

So yesterday my ward sang “If You Could Hie to Kolob”.* It brought to mind something one of my missionary companions once mentioned when i was a full-time missionary in Germany. He said (paraphrasing from time-hazed but still strong memory)

You know, i hope they don’t ever translate “If You Could Hie to Kolob” into German—if they did, half the German LDS would leave the church. [pause] Well, and the other half would sing it every Sunday!

(It’s probably only amusing if you’ve spent much time around Mormons in Germany, but for those of us who have…)

Anyway, i haven’t gone through the 1996 Gesangbuch (the German hymnal) page by page to check on this (and they didn’t provide an index of authors, like they did in the English version), so i may be wrong, but as far as i can tell from a quick scan, a translation of the song isn’t to be found in there—so my companion’s prediction will have to wait a few more decades for testing, i suppose.

* Yes, my two oldest spontaneously sang “there is no end to this song” along with me in place of “there is no end to being” in the final verse. I feel that i can rest easy in the sure knowledge that i have raised them well.

4 comments:

Carla Schmidt Holloway said...

“there is no end to this song” - I think your family rocks.

KRad said...

In regards to your last few postings I believe your blog should come with a a warning something along the lines of of a prescription warning "Side affects of reading this blog without complete alertness & full mental capacity may result in painful side effects, including but not limited to: blurred vision, stuttering, twitching, brain freeze, headaches, and total mental meltdown." I am ashamed to say I shouldn't be reading your blog at night - I'm just not mentally alert enough.

Michelle said...

Seriously, why do we even have that song? It's not in the new Romanian hymnbook. They'd probably want to sing it every week.

David B said...

@KRad: I do try. <slight_bow />