Lutherans Ahoy!

One of my personal downsides in attending a Lutheran college and now regularly attending a Lutheran church is that a Lutheran -- the Lutheran, actually, the big Martin himself -- wrote what is my least favorite hymn of all time, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, and thus one rarely goes more than three or four Lutheran services without hearing it. I don't know what it is about this hymn, but the tune just annoys me. I can't phrase just why I don't like it, but I have never heard it in any guise that appealed to me. "Dee Dee Dee doodoo Dee, doodoo Dee, Dee...." GAHHH!

A Mighty Fortress, played on a pipe organ by a virtuoso of the instrument? Nope. Sung by a wonderfully rehearsed college choir? Sorry. The same choir, doing an entire program featuring four different arrangements of the thing? Hand me the earplugs, please. A "praise group" in church, singing a "pop-ified" version of A Mighty Fortress? I'd build my own mighty fortress if that would make it stop.

So today at church, the praise group launches into A Mighty Fortress in honor of Reformation Sunday (something to do with something that afore-mentioned Martin Luther fellow did), and almost immediately, little Quinn started crying. He let out five or six good, loud squeals of displeasure, which stopped about halfway through the hymn. This was the first time he's cried in church. Granted, the sample size of opportunities he's had to cry in church is a small one, but still: the kid who has been perfectly silent every time out chose A Mighty Fortress for his first "church cry".

I know that it was most likely a slight bellyache or a burp he couldn't get out or some such thing, and not a statement of musical taste on Quinn's part. But I can't help but admit that some small part of me hopes it was.