What Have We Done?

On Wednesday night, the chaplaincy department at MEF holds a little hymn-sing in the chapel to which all members of the community are invited.  Molly and I have gone to a few of them now, and we really enjoy the beautiful voices of the participants and the opportunity to worship God midweek through song.

This past Wednesday (right after tearing all the army ants from my body) something beautiful happened.  Since the MEF hymnbooks don't have music in them but only lyrics, we have to figure out the tunes ourselves.  Someone called out a hymn number, and we found that it was the classic Good Friday hymn, "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross."  The muzungus started singing one tune and the Zambians another--obviously we knew different versions of the hymn.  We asked the Zambians to go on, and they continued singing the tune they knew, a mournful dirge in a minor key:

When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.

The tune sounded strangely familiar to me, but I couldn't place it.  The Zambians began singing to the same tune, as they do after each verse,

Alleluia, Alleluia,
Alleluia, Alleluia,
Alleluia, Alleluia
Alleluia, Alleluia,

and all of the sudden in hit me.  The tune was "Senzeni Na?" a struggle song from the South African anti-apartheid struggle, that I had learned during my time in Johannesburg.  It means, "What have we done?" and was often sung at funerals of activists who had fallen in the struggle.  After the hymn was done, I asked anyone if they had heard of "Senzeni Na?" but apparently no one had.  The pairing of that tune with those lyrics struck me as absolutely perfect (whether the tune of "Senzeni Na?" was originally taken from a hymn, as many tunes of struggle songs were, I don't know).  Singing the tune that had been sung at the funerals of so many fallen freedom fighters to the lyrics of a song about the death of the ultimate nonviolent Warrior for the freedom of his people nearly brought me to tears.  And there was yet another layer of meaning: as we come face-to-face with the gruesome act of the crucifixion, when humanity put to death the only Son of the living God, it is perhaps the only fitting response to ask, in horror, "Senzeni na?"--"What have we done?"