[Dialogue] Spong 12/14

[KroegerD at aol.com]

December 13, 2006 
Fred Kaan: Hymn Writer Par  Excellence  
If I were to mention the name of Frederik Herman Kaan, I doubt if the  faces 
of more than one or two of my readers would reveal even a glimmer of  
recognition. Yet Fred Kaan has been, arguably, the finest and most prolific hymn  
writer in the Christian Church in the 20th century. His texts are in almost  every 
major Christian hymnal today. His words, and indeed his life, reflect the  
struggles that so many people feel today in their attempts to make their Sunday  
worship relevant to the life of the world they inhabit. Several months ago, a 
 biography on his life, written by Dr Gillian Warson, was published in the UK 
by  Stainer and Bell, Ltd. of London. I recently read this book and it filled 
me  with an even deeper appreciation of this remarkable man and his wife, 
Anthea,  who Christine and I have known for a decade and whom we count as close 
personal  friends. I consider it a special privilege to introduce him to my 
readers  through this column.  
Fred still retains his Dutch citizenship. He was born in Haarlem, but grew up 
 in Zeist, a town widely known for its Moravian origin. His father worked for 
the  Netherlands Railways. Like other working class people his parents 
experienced  the depression of the thirties, which led to Adolf Hitler coming into 
power in  Germany. Fred was not yet eleven when the German armed forces invaded 
Holland  and would be almost eighteen when his country emerged from German 
occupation.  His family joined the Dutch underground resistance movement. Hiding 
a Jewish  woman in their home for months in a kind of 'Anne Frank' 
experience, they not  only risked execution but also learned the hard but important 
lesson that there  are principles worth upholding even if it costs one's life in 
the process. Fred  also embraced how essential it was to keep confidences. 
Indeed his life and the  lives of the members of his family depended on that 
ability.  
As the war dragged on, the Kaan family had to deal with both poverty and  
hunger. There was no hard currency available in the Netherlands so the Dutch  
economy retreated into the ancient pattern of barter. People swapped their labor  
for food, clothing and the other necessities of life. By the time the last  
Christmas under German occupation arrived in 1944, things were very bleak.  
Fred's mother Brandina had one asset left; her favorite dress that she decided  
she would sacrifice in an effort to provide Christmas dinner for her family. 
She  got out her bicycle, which had no tires and rode the rims to seek food in  
exchange for her dress. All she could get for this dress in this bartering  
marketplace was a single slice of white bread. In despair she accepted that and  
that slice of bread became Christmas dinner. Fred recalled the moment  
poignantly, in which four hungry people sat around the table to celebrate the  
birthday of Jesus. Turning this dinner into a liturgical event, they prayed, cut  
the bread into four equal parts and ate their portions slowly and thankfully  
until the Christmas dinner was consumed. They left the table with gnawing  
stomachs, but with a sense of their family's solidarity in suffering. Many years  
later Fred would observe that this was the most powerful Eucharist in which he 
 had ever participated. God is sometimes present in the humblest of  
circumstances.  
Fred was still able to attend school during the German Occupation, but it  
offered its own challenges. Like other children who did not belong to the Hitler 
 Youth Organization, Fred suffered from the constant threat of beatings and  
bullying. This wartime experience made a dedicated pacifist out of this man 
and  he still traces his deep desire to foster a sense of human oneness to this 
time  of his life. The twin themes of internationalism and an abhorrence of 
war would  mark both his own deepest values and would find expression in the 
words of the  hymns that he was destined to write.  
When the war was over, Dutch teenagers sought in a variety of ways to make up 
 for the time that had been stolen from them. For Fred this took the form of  
indulging his passion for music by forming a jazz band called the "Scout  
Serenaders." Through that band he met Elly, his future wife, who had endured the  
war as the daughter of missionaries in what was then called the Dutch East  
Indies. Repatriated to Holland at age 17 — a woman of great intelligence — she 
 enthusiastically started catching up with her lost education. She found much 
of  her identity in and was later confirmed as a member of the Netherlands 
Reformed  Church which Fred later joined. Its protestant theology appealed to 
him, but it  was the English variety of Congregationalism that attracted him 
particularly,  finally drawing him to England to study theology at Bristol 
University. It was a  difficult move since Elly did not accompany him so their 
courtship entered a  long-range phase. Fred, however, thrived in this new academic 
life, growing both  intellectually and spiritually. He was a natural linguist, 
speaking many  languages while quite literally mastering English, as few 
native born English  people do, with the skill of a wordsmith. His ministerial 
career began with a  part-time student appointment to a church in 
Gloucestershire. When he finally  received a full-time pastorate in Barry, near Cardiff in 
Wales, he returned to  Holland, married Elly, was ordained and returned to begin 
his career as a newly  minted pastor.  
Fred's ministry blended reformation theology with the social gospel and a  
concern for working people. He was also driven by his understanding of the  
inter-connectedness of all human life to work to make his congregation  experience 
the wider world. One of the ways he did this was by encouraging his  young 
people to join in missionary adventures and to bring their stories back to  
Barry. Local provincial thinking in that congregation began to give way to a  
world vision. Fred and Elly had some difficult personal experiences during that  
time, not the least of which was the death of their first child three weeks  
after his birth. Three other children Martin, Peter and Alison would in time,  
however, become part of this growing family. After a very successful ministry  
Fred and his family moved from Barry to a church in Plymouth, England that was 
 destined to shape his life perhaps more dramatically than did any other  
congregation. On his last Sunday in Barry, Fred wrote his first hymn to be used  
in worship. It was about the call of God, a call to which he believed himself 
to  be responding in his move to the Plymouth Church.  
The Plymouth congregation was a church with vision. The only tradition in  
this church seemed to be that they had no tradition. It was a place where people 
 were open and everything seemed possible. One expression of this was that 
the  leadership of this congregation encouraged him to explore new ways of 
worship.  Fred increasingly found the traditional hymns about a supernatural God 
who lived  above the sky, and a Jesus who, as the sacrificial lamb, had paid 
with his blood  the price of sin to be no longer relevant in a post World War II 
world. He  searched for hymns that embraced an understanding of God as a life 
force moving  throughout the universe and as the power of love enhancing the 
human struggle.  He wanted hymns that would conceptualize his God experience 
inside the  contemporary world view, lay bare the social concerns of his day and 
allow  people to speak of a vision of universal peace. Finding nothing 
available, he  began to write new words for the old tunes and one by one he 
introduced these  hymns each week. The collection of his hymns grew.  
When this collection first came to the attention of established church  
leaders in hymnody, they were, not surprisingly, generally rejected. That did  not 
stop Fred. Consciousness must be raised, he believed, before his message  
could be heard. The traditional hymns portrayed Christ primarily as a figure of  
distant history, shrouded in fanciful myths and surrounded by increasingly  
unbelievable doctrines. Fred's Christ was a compelling presence and about this  
Christ his hymns sang. As his reputation grew, people began to ask him to write 
 hymns for special occasions, like Human Rights Day in 1965, for which he  
composed what was to become his most popular hymn, "For the Healing of the  
Nations." Some of his adopted tunes were daring. For example, his hymn, "We Have  
a King Who Rides a Donkey" was set to the tune of "What shall we do with a  
Drunken Sailor." When Fred finally left Plymouth for a position with the World  
Alliance of Reformed Churches in Geneva (1968-78), his hymn writing 
credentials  were well established.  
This new hierarchal position tied together Fred's commitment to ecumenism  
with his developing world experience. There he became an international leader.  
Among his accomplishments was his work to bring together in 1970 English and  
Scottish Congregationalism with English Presbyterianism in to form what is now 
 called the United Reformed Church of Great Britain. Fred's career continued 
to  develop as he became known as a television preacher and his contributions 
were  recognized with the awarding of two well-earned doctorates. He finally 
returned  to England to be part of the United Reformed Church he had helped to 
found,  serving first as a Provincial Moderator and later in a concluding 
local  pastorate. This last assignment proved to be a difficult time for him as 
his  marriage to Elly ended in a divorce that marred his reputation. He later 
married  a medical doctor named Anthea Cooke, who gave him dimensions of 
wholeness and  happiness he had never known before. In order not to allow the 
circumstances of  his divorce to hurt his church Fred resigned from its ministry. His 
reputation,  however, was so deeply established that he was almost 
immediately brought back  to the list of ministers in good standing by popular acclaim. 
Interestingly  enough, all through this difficult time he continued to write 
hymns. He lived to  see many of them included in various Christian hymnals. 
Whenever I go into  churches around the world today, I examine its hymnal to find 
Fred Kaan's name,  turning then to read his passionate, people-centered, 
peace-oriented words that  are free of the theology of yesterday, but which 
clearly reflect his deeply  shaped God consciousness and his continued devotion to 
that God presence that he  finds in Jesus of Nazareth. His words are and will 
be part of the new  Reformation.  
Christine and I spent two wonderful days last June with Anthea and Fred who  
live in a village in the beautiful Lake District, that is literally on the 
path  that we walked across England two years ago. We hiked together up a 
mountain. He  shared with us a diagnosis he had received the day before. His time is 
now  limited, but his spirit is undimmed. For generations to come, Fred Kaan's 
hymns  will still be sung in places where Christians gather to worship. The 
themes  about which I write today will still be heard in Fred's words. That is 
the way  the church changes as year succeeds to year. I am glad that I have 
known him. I  hope the United Reformed Church in Great Britain knows what a 
treasure they have  produced.  
John Shelby Spong  
_Note from  the Editor: Bishop Spong's new book is available now at 
bookstores everywhere  and by clicking here!_ 
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060762055/agoramedia-20)   
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Tom Penn via the Internet writes:  
In a recent column you wrote: "If sexual relationships are to have the  
potential to be holy and life giving, they must be fully consensual and they  must 
be grounded in mutual love. Otherwise they are exploitive, meeting the  needs 
of one, but not the other. That is why rape is always wrong. It is the  
imposition of one with power on one without power. That is why sex with multiple  
partners is wrong, for it reduces sex to a loveless thrill, not a sustaining and 
 loving relationship."  
It seems to me that the last sentence does not necessarily follow from the  
first in that I can imagine having sex with multiple partners, either at the  
same or different times as meeting the test of the first sentence which test I  
accept as very legitimate.  
Dear Tom,  
You and I will simply have to be in disagreement. Sex to me is the ultimate  
relationship of intimacy and calls the partners to the ultimate level of  
commitment. I think that this kind of commitment elicits in those who follow it  a 
new dimension of consciousness that makes us more deeply and fully human.  
I do not think that monogamy is natural, especially among males of any of the 
 higher mammals. I do think that it takes a very deep commitment and that the 
 nature of such a commitment introduces us to new levels of consciousness. To 
 give yourself away totally means that you have to possess yourself totally. 
To  give yourself away in commitment to another is to accept great 
vulnerability,  but that is now what I think life is all about. I would not trade the 
depth of  love and trust that a monogamous relationship creates for anything. I 
do not  believe the pathway to that deep human experience can be found in 
multiple  relationships.  
My best,  
John Shelby Spong 
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