Well, of course you’re going to sing “Eye Has Not Seen” this weekend! Preparation of Gifts would be a good place. When you’ve got so strong a quote in the day’s scripture, not to reinforce it with a song whose text mirrors the scripture so well would be an act of omission. If your community doesn’t know it, have the choir or cantor sing it; the assembly will be able to sing the refrain in very short order indeed.

It’s hard to believe that there was a time when few church songs—even well-known traditional hymns—had much to do with actual scripture.

Pre-Vatican II hymnals, like The St. Gregory Hymnal and Catholic Choir Book, had a very limited range of congregational music: metrical hymns, Latin texts, and many songs that were not meant to be sung for Eucharistic liturgies. Early post-Vatican II hymnals, such as People's Mass Book, really had little in the way of scriptural texts. But when the St. Louis Jesuits came along, with their singable melodies and scripturally-based texts, something wonderful happened: the congregation sang because they loved the songs, and singing them reinforced scriptural texts in a way that mere words, however lofty, cannot do.

Those songs, and other like them (yes, like Marty Haugen’s “Eye Has Not Seen”), became part of our very lives. They help us make the connection between what we sing— and what we do about the words we sing.

So don’t just take the suggestions in planning guides; look in the back of your hymnal (sometime in the accompaniment book) for the scriptural index and see what’s listed for the day’s scriptures—and what connections those texts can make.