My Fingerprints Are Right

The Joke Was the Point

On its own, that chorus is an ugly little verse — smug, small, and certain of itself. But it was never meant to stand alone. It's the refrain inside a hymn, and the verses around it say plainly what the chorus is for. The first verse opens with the vastness of God — a mind no one can know, an eternity no one can comprehend — "and yet we say" the small, petty thing that follows. The second verse answers it straight from scripture: God is love, judge not, love one another. And the third verse turns the whole song into a prayer, asking forgiveness for fencing in infinity, asking when peace will come and wars will cease — "when we no longer say" the chorus at all. The song isn't teaching children to believe their fingerprints are right. It's teaching them to long for the day no one believes that anymore.

Who She Was

Florence Byerley taught Sunday school in Pinellas Park in the 1960s, and she spent her life reaching past the walls most people build around their own faith. Though she was a committed Methodist, she considered herself a lifelong student of religion, and she attended services across many different traditions. At one point she was an active member of her Methodist church and a member of a Jewish synagogue at the same time — not out of confusion about what she believed, but because she wanted to understand, from the inside, the faith that Christianity itself grew out of.

That's the spirit behind My Favorite Jewish Mother, the book she wrote using the warmth of the Jewish mother archetype to remind her readers that the Christian story begins with a Jewish mother and her Jewish son. She wasn't blurring two faiths together. She was pointing at the root the branch came from, and asking her readers to stop treating a shared family tree like a border wall.

The song is the same idea, just small enough for children to carry. It takes the ugliest version of religious certainty — the idea that my fingerprints are the right ones — and lets it sound as foolish out loud as it is. The lesson underneath was never in doubt: God is love, and loving one another was always meant to matter more than being the one who's right.

Why It Stayed With Me

I was a little girl the first time I sang that song, and I've carried it my whole life. It's easy to hear a line like "you're on your way to hell" and flinch. But Florence Byerley wasn't teaching children to say that to each other — she was teaching us to hear how it sounds when someone says it, so we'd know better than to become it. That's a harder, better lesson than most sermons manage, and she folded it into something a room full of restless kids could sing.