An elderly person, who is not a member of the CELESTIAL CHURCH OF CHRIST, was surprised to hear in the Church a hymn they knew well, but cut down to two verses. They had someone ask Lévi M. YANSUNNU for its story. This hymn is hymn 291 in the Recueil de chants en français, Tome II (Collection of hymns in French, Volume II). Here is the answer.
A cleaning Thursday at the Supreme Headquarters
The story takes place on Thursday 31 October 1964, in Porto-Novo, at the Church's Supreme Headquarters. The right term is "Supreme Headquarters" ("siège suprême"), and not "Holy See", because that is the Prophet's own expression in the Constitution.
Every day, a group of the Church's mothers came to clean it: they cleaned the temple, the courtyards and the toilets, and filled the jars with water. This temple was the second at the headquarters. The first had been built of earth; this one, built in 1964, was the first built of solid materials.
That Thursday, part of the group was sweeping inside the temple. Among them was a small woman known to everyone for making people laugh. She made people laugh so much that they avoided sitting next to her during services. That morning, she kept on joking. She went up to an open window, broom in hand, and spat outside.
As soon as she had finished, an invisible hand lifted her out of the temple and threw her outside through the window. Then the same hand lifted her from outside and threw her back into the temple, again through the window.
Having landed on her back, she began to sing a hymn in Goun, the language of Porto-Novo. She had to spend some time in hospital, and when she came back, she never joked during services again. As the Bible says: "The Lord is in his holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before him" (Habakkuk 2:20).
"It is a Protestant hymn"
When the hymn was brought to the Prophet OSCHOFFA, he recognised it at once: it was a Protestant hymn. That is why, in Porto-Novo, it was never sung during a service.
But in Cotonou, people began to sing it, distorting the words. From there, the hymn passed to Nigeria, where it went into the hymn books, then to Côte d'Ivoire, where all sorts of approximate translations arose. So much so that today it is not sung the same way from one parish to another, although it is the same Church.
Finding the lost verses
During his lifetime, the Prophet had nevertheless laid down a method. He had asked each head of diocese to record the hymns the Holy Spirit gave in his region and to bring them to him. He would pray, and the Holy Spirit would choose those that would become hymns proper, that is, hymns for worship; the others would remain songs of celebration. This work was not done. So Lévi M. YANSUNNU and his wife went themselves, from country to country, to trace the origin of the hymns.
For hymn 291, it was in the YANSUNNU family that they found the answer: relatives who had remained Protestant had kept the Protestant hymn book in the Goun of Porto-Novo. The hymn was in it, with the same words, but with four more verses than the one sung in the Church. The Church's collection therefore now gives all six verses, on the original melody:
God is mysterious in his ways as he accomplishes his works, and no one can discern them, for they are all unsearchable.
Harmonising, yes; changing the melody, no
For all hymns, the rule is simple. Anyone may harmonise them, that is, add voices, according to their abilities and musical knowledge. But the melody, the main tune sung by the soprano voice, is not changed. And when we take up a hymn that came from elsewhere, we must respect it:
When you take something that belongs to someone, make good use of it and give it back to them in the same condition.
