Sister has written more than 300 hymns
By Bill Vossler
At a national church music conference, a stranger introduced herself to Sister Delores Dufner. “I said my name, and she jumped up and gave me a hug,” said Sr. Delores. “She said, ‘I just love your hymn, Sing a New Church.’”
Of the lyrics for more than 300 hymns she has written in the last 45 years, Sing a New Church is her most popular. “It was quite a thrill to get hugged by a perfect stranger.”
Sr. Delores was commissioned to write lyrics for a hymn for the 1991 conference of the National Pastoral Musicians in Pittsburgh called Singing A New Church.”
“So I titled it Sing A New Church to affirm the teachings of Vatican II, that the church was called to unity rather than uniformity, and diversity is a gift we need to value. Also to affirm the dignity of all the baptized, women and men, as sometimes our church has not done that very well.”
And that was just the beginning. Through her work, Sr. Delores has become well known, with lyrics written for hymns that more than 20 publishers include in their hymnals and hymn collections.
A Sister’s History
Sister Delores grew up loving poetry and writing.
“I loved playing with words, and rhymes. I memorized poems written by others and entered speech festivals to recite them. That was big in my rural county. Most classmates groaned when we were assigned something to write in high school, but I was excited.”
About that time in her nightly prayers she began asking God for help. “I asked God to show me what God wanted me to do, and help me do it. I loved the liturgy and felt close to God. The Benedictine Sisters regularly celebrated the liturgy and prayed together. Plus, they sang a lot, and I loved music very much. So becoming a nun seemed like a natural choice.”
After she was asked to return to St. Benedict’s Monastery in St. Joseph as Liturgy Director in the 1970s, she needed hymns for daily Eucharist and liturgies for morning and evening prayer. “I kept looking for hymns the community could pray. We didn’t have enough good hymns to sing all the verses. Often they imaged God as a strict judge or stern father, with excessive stress on human sinfulness. I thought the military images of God and exclusively masculine language about God with a negative view of human nature weren’t conducive to prayer, so I revised some in the public domain.”
Then she decided to write her own. “I thought it might be easier. Once while reflecting on a scripture passage, a hymn started singing in my head. I thought, ‘Oh, that’s not too bad.’ I sent it to a publisher and it was published in a missalette used in many parishes. I was thrilled.”
But she didn’t regularly write hymns until the early 1980s during a Eucharist course at St. John’s, when she wrote a couple of communion hymns. “Then after my father died, I wrote many funeral hymns for grief therapy, I suppose. Liturgical Press published a funeral booklet including some of my hymns, which got them known better.”
Visiting different parishes in the Diocese of St. Cloud, Sr. Delores, as the Director of the Office of Worship, discovered people weren’t experiencing the renewal of the liturgy that Vatican II had envisioned.
“Vatican II so excited me that I wanted everybody to share that good news. I felt not enough was happening, and I wanted to write about it. I thought if scripture and good theology were placed on the lips of the people through hymns, it would stick better, because tunes help us remember words,” she said.
While in Australia in 1990-91, she wrote more hymns. “With a small population and distant country parishes, they didn’t have many musical resources or trained musicians. In those smaller parishes a CD or tape was used to provide music that parishioners might or might not sing. So I compiled a diocesan hymnal to give them the resources to sing from.”
How to Write Lyrics for Hymns
Sr. Delores said Vatican II invited people to read, study, think, and pray about scripture. “So I try to base my lyrics on scripture rather than my own personal piety; I want to write lyrics everybody could pray and sing. I once heard someone say, ‘Don’t ask someone to sing something that they can’t mean.’ So I want my lyrics to be authentic and from the heart.”
What Sr. Delores enjoys most about writing lyrics for hymns, she said, “Is reading what I’ve written and connecting one verse to the next. To me a hymn comes from one source, like a spider weaving a web with a single filament, so it’s very unified. That’s how I want my hymn to be--one central idea, and the entire hymn spins out from there.”
Parts of writing hymns still offer Sr. Delores a challenge. “Rhyme, for example. To use a metrical tune that people know, usually how I write, it almost demands rhyme, and each verse must follow the same pattern. If verse one rhymes lines two and four, then two and four must rhyme in all the verses. Words must sound beautiful, and express beautiful thoughts and prayer. Sometimes what I want to say and how I want to say it don’t come together very easily.”
How long to get lyrics right varies greatly, she said. “Several days, weeks, months, or years,” she laughed. “I usually choose a tune to express the mood or spirit of the text I want to write, which helps me come up with the right words because they have to fit together hand-in-glove. I try to come up with a pithy and poetic phrase that I can use or expand on in every stanza.”
Sometimes the discovery is quick, as when she was commissioned to write a new hymn to dedicate St. John’s newly-renovated organ. “I hadn‘t come up with an idea, but while playing organ for the community’s morning prayer, we prayed, ‘. . . that my life might sing your glory, never silent in your praise.’ I thought to myself, ‘That’s my new hymn!’ That was it, ‘Never Silent in Your Praise!’”
Normally she writes a first draft and lays it aside for a while. “Later I see it with different eyes. I think, ‘This isn’t good. It doesn’t hang together. I don’t like where that stanza went, so I have to make changes.’”
When she finishes, she passes it off to her four trusted critics: a college English professor, a musician, a theologian, and a spiritual director. “Each one provided different expertise. The professor was not a sister. She might tell me, ‘Most lay people won’t understand what you’re saying here.’ The musician might say ‘This word does not sound nice when you sing it,’ and the theologian might add, ‘This gives a negative image of God,’ while the spiritual director might say, ‘If a person had a rough relationship with her mother, this sentence might not be good.’ Each gave helpful comments to make the text better. Not to tell me how to fix it, but what bothered them about what I’d written.”
Unfortunately, only one critic remains. “Two died and one moved to our retirement center, so the theologian is the only one left.”
When is a hymn finished? “When I feel satisfied as it flows from one stanza to the next, and it’s unified. It has to reflect good news, and express what I believe is our Christian faith. Sometimes the critics will tell me they believe this one is finished.”
When commissioned to write hymns, she wants extra time. “Several months, because sometimes it doesn’t come easily, and I don’t want to be pressured doing anything less than my best. I have written pieces in less time.”
Her favorite hymn took the longest to write, she said. “O Spirit All-Embracing,” set to the tune of ‘Thaxted’ (often sung with the words, “O God Beyond All Praising”). That was commissioned by the Diocese of St. Cloud for Confirmation and Ordination, and I think it expresses both the joy and the pain of human life, that we have disappointments, but the Holy Spirit is with us and in the world guiding us.”
Another favorite is “To Be Your Presence.” “That came from the Diocese of St. Cloud’s mission statement, that ‘We are to be the hands and the heart and voice of Christ in the world.’ The first three verses reflect those thoughts, and the fourth brings them all together. I was delighted to learn that song was sung when Pope Francis met with Protestant leaders several years ago.”
Keeping abreast of what is happening in the world helps her write lyrics and tunes. “Deuteronomy says, ‘Take care not to forget the things your eyes have seen.’ And if we can remember how faithful God has been by seeing events in the Middle East, and Ukraine, and to remember God was faithful in the past, and will be in the future, getting good out of seeming disaster.”
One surprise about her work, she said, “Is all the editing. I do many drafts and use lots of paper. Sometimes I work all day and throw most of it away. Almost always it is heavily edited, because sometimes my first thought is very different from the final. Sometimes it takes me somewhere I didn’t anticipate.”
Her work is quite universally loved. “One of the biggest compliments I ever got was a Sister who said, ‘Your hymns put on our lips the prayer in our hearts.’ Another said, ‘Words mean first in the mouth,’ that is, make the lyrics understandable by making it beautiful to say and sing.”
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