Nostalgia, or something like it...

(...but with emphasis on the "something like it" part)

A few weeks ago I found myself at Mass in a church I'd never been to. Well, not exactly--more like a church I had not been to in years, more than a decade in fact. Before the Mass started I noticed the choir was practicing some songs, mostly schmaltzy, poppish, sentimental tunes all too common in Catholic liturgies today. And lo, what should I hear, but that perennial favorite in Manila churches during the 1990s-- Don Moen's Give Thanks! I have to confess, most of the churches I attended in my childhood had (to be blunt) crappy liturgies-- girls dressed in green sacks with yellow tambourines dancing in the altar, homilies about "the bad old days", basically the works. But the Don Moen song was almost always sung in all of the churches we attended. So it was with a mixture of nostalgia, and a little indigestion, that I listened to it being sung in a Catholic church once more.

Off hand, though, I must say: doesn't it sound suspiciously like this song from the Pet Shop Boys?