February 2021 – Page 2 – The Raynville Rambler

Above the voices of the world around me

Today’s hymn from “Sing Praise” is Timothy Dudley Smith’s “Above the voices of the world around me”. It comes with its own tune, but John played it to the better known Londonderry Air (Danny Boy) which the words do fit, with the odd stretched syllable. The words are copyrighted and too long to be reproduced here without permission but can be found online here.

The three verses are all written in the first person – it’s an introspective hymn – and the theme is being called by Jesus, who is named in each verse. The first is about the voice of Jesus calling me, as the first line has it, “above the voices of the world around me”. His call is, as one would expect from a Lenten hymn, to “turn from sins and put the past behind you, take up your cross and come and follow me”. In Lent we read of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness where it is the Devil’s voice that tries to distract him from his mission, but the Devil usually works more subtly through other things, whether the classic ‘deadly sins’ of lust, gluttony, anger and so on, or today’s more subtle temptations of TV, social media and Internet.

The second verse asks what my response might be, feeling that I have nothing worthy to offer Jesus, but concludes that “I come … and in repentance turn to you alone”. The Gospels record Jesus calling his motley crew of fishermen, tax collectors and housewives, without asking for any testimonials. When he called Nathaniel Bartholomew, he already saw into his heart and knew him to be a “true Israelite”. If Jesus calls us to serve him, he already knows he has found what he’s looking for: we need no qualifications other than willingness, no reference other than his own death on the cross to make us worthy.

The last verse is the promise to serve in faith. In singing it ith meaning, I ask Jesus to “let me become what you shall choose to make me”, which may well be different from what I had in mind for my life. Some people find themselves called to a life of poverty or celibacy, others to working in dangerous places and among deprived communities, others to long hours of unpaid voluntary work. But all in the name of serving Jesus. What matters is that, as the final line puts it, “in his love my new-born life begins”.

From ashes to ashes

The song I picked for today, Ash Wednesday, is “From ashes to ashes, from dust to dust” by Teresa Brown. It’s another cantor-and-chorus hymn (of which there are several in the Sing Praise collection). The chorus is provided in two alternative forms, one for general use and one specifically for Ash Wednesday, which I quote here:

From ashes to ashes, from dust to dust;
from life through death to eternal life.
Now is the time to turn from sin,
be faithful once more to your God.

The words here echo those of both the sacrament of baptism (dying to sin and rising to new life) and of the funeral rites (“for dust you are, and to dust you shall return: earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust”). Part of the Lenten discipline is about recognising our own insignificance, as yesterday’s setting of Psalm 131 also reminded us. The act of repentance to which we are called may well not be to confess some particular sinful act, but just to admit that we’ve been living as if God doesn’t exist or is irrelevant to our life, or as if we will live for ever.

Many people find that it’s only as we get old enough to recognise our own mortality that we start to understand our place in life as being dependent on God, and part of a much wider existence both in space and time. Ash Wednesday is one of the few major observances in the Christian year that, even in a nominally Christian country, always falls midweek but is not a public holiday. It is therefore an act of discipline in itself to take time out from work or other responsibilities to attend the ashing ceremony, as a reminder that there are more important things in life than work. This year of course few people will have been able to receive the ashes in person and like myself only joined in an online act of penitence. But here’s a photo of one parish priest who in other years has gone down to his local railway station in the morning rush hour to invite commuters to take a few minutes to be prayed for and receive the ashes on their way to work, as a reminder to themselves and others of their commitment to Christ.

The three verses are Trinitarian in structure, the first reminding us that the God who creates us also loves us and waits patiently for us to return from him. The second is a reminder that Jesus also called people to “repent and believe the good news” (repentance should always be seen as a good thing to do, not a necessary evil). The third calls on the Holy Spirit to “guide our hearts and minds today, that we may repent and believe”.

O Lord, my heart is not proud

With apologies, I’m running a day late here. The song I chose for Shrove Tuesday (16 February) was “O Lord, my heart is not proud” by Margaret Rizza. This is a short setting of verses from Psalm 131, and I chose it because it is a psalm of turning back to God, which is very much the theme of this day in the Christian calendar. It’s short enough to be quoted in full:

O Lord, my heart is not proud, nor haughty my eyes.
I have not gone after things too great, nor marvels beyond me.
Truly I have set my soul in silence and peace;
at rest, as a child is in its mother’s arms,
so is my soul. (translation copyright 1963 The Grail)

There is no attempt here to force the words into a set rhythm or rhyming pattern, this is essentially a prayer to be reflected on, equally well spoken as sung. It reminds me of Jesus’ words in Matthew 6:6, “Whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” It’s a reminder that in prayer we do not come to God boasting of our achievements, but rather aware of our limitations. Also that the ideal attitude for prayer is to seek silence in God’s presence and to relax into conversation with him (hopefully not falling asleep, but I don’t believe God minds if we fall asleep in his presence, any more than a mother minds if her child sleeps in her arms).

We need each other’s voice to sing

Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is no. 169 “We need each other’s voice to sing” by Thomas Troeger. It’s a traditional style of hymn, though a modern one, and its theme is that in the Church every member needs every other member, a theme common in St Paul’s writings.

The first verse calls us to “set the whole world echoing with one great hymn of praise” and the chorus contains alleluias and refers to the “church’s common chord”. That makes it appropriate to sing approaching the start of Lent this week, because in some Church traditions the word Alleluia is not used at all during this season, as being too joyful for a penitential time.

But the hymn isn’t really or only about musical ability (which is good, because mine is modest). The second verse speaks of having the strength to bear each other’s crosses (a common Christian metaphor for any kind of burden in life) with “acts of love and tender speech”, and honouring the presence of another person as “a gift of God’s incarnate care”. That’s a reminder that in Jesus we no longer live for ourselves but for other people in his name.

The third verse acknowledges differences of opinion in the Church: “we need each other’s views to see the limits of the mind / that God in fact turns out to be far more than we’ve defined”. This is a very important truth: any religious group that claims to know the whole truth about God or to understand God’s requirements without a doubt, is narrow minded and needs to learn from others. There’s a well known parable (not from the Bible, possibly from Buddhist tradition) of several blind people coming across an elephant, each feeling a different part of it (trunk, tail, legs, ears) and arguing that the others can’t have encountered the true elephant at all. If that’s true of a single creature, how much more true of God!

The final verse summarises the first three – we need each other’s voice, strength and views – and then compares our lives to “coals placed side by side to feed each other’s flame”. It’s true that without joining with other Christians in prayer and praise, it’s easy for the fire of enthusiasm for Christ to grow dim or even die out altogether, something that’s a real risk in these Covid times when we can only join in worship remotely on a screen, if at all. So this is perhaps a hymn to keep for use when we can all be back together in church again. Let’s hear that chorus again: “We give our alleluias to the Church’s common chord: Alleluia! Alleluia! Praise, O Praise, O Praise the Lord!”

Alleluia! Father we praise you as Lord

Today’s hymn is Fintan O’Carroll’s “Alleluia, Father we praise you as Lord”. Both the chorus and verses have memories for me.

The chorus, or perhaps antiphon (congregational response) is the technically correct term, is a setting of the word Alleluia! sung four times and on its own is known as the “Celtic alleluia”. It is used in several churches of a more Catholic style, including one where I sometimes worshipped in London (St Luke’s Charlton), as the ‘greeting of the Gospel’. This is a tradition whereby the Gospel book is processed from the altar into the middle of the congregation to be read, as a symbol of God’s word coming among his people. By singing “alleluia” as the book arrives, we are praising God for coming among us. This is a reminder that when we talk of the “word of God” we mean not just the Bible, important though that is, but the very nature of God which is to communicate truth and love to the world he has created, most importantly when he was incarnated in Jesus Christ to whom the Gospel accounts bear witness.

As is noted in the hymn book, the verses are a setting of “Te Deum”, an ancient hymn of the Latin church. In it, everything created is urged to give praise to God. In the original this starts with the angels, cherubim and seraphim (the spirits surrounding God’s throne and his messengers). They praise him with the song “Holy, Holy, Holy” which is also sung at the Communion / Mass, although in this hymn setting it is “we” who praise God the Father in this way. They are followed by “the glorious company of apostles, the noble fellowship of prophets, the white-robed army of martyrs” – those who founded the Church and those who at a time of persecution were honoured for having given their lives for Christ. These praise God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. After that comes the song of the whole church in praise of Jesus as both man and God. The final section reminds us that he will come again as judge, although that isn’t explicit in the hymn setting.

The memory for me here is from my schooldays. I wasn’t a regular member of the school choir, but when it came to plans to perform Berlioz’s setting of Te Deum, the call went out for additional singers for a work that demands a large choir. Since I enjoyed singing hymns in assembly, I volunteered. The experience of rehearsing this great choral work helped draw me into both a love of classical music and a personal faith in Christ over the next few years. Sadly, I fell ill just before the performance and didn’t get the experience of singing it to an audience. But worship doesn’t need an audience, for in worship – alone or in a massed choir – we are praising God himself.

Holy Spirit, come to us

Today’s hymn from “Sing Praise” is another Taizé chant with verses sung by a cantor over a repeated chorus. The chorus line is “Holy Spirit, come to us, kindle in us the fire of your love, Holy Spirit come to us, Holy Spirit, come to us”. There’s also a version in Latin, a language still used in Christian worship and understood across many European cultures.

*Holy Spirit and Fire*, mixed media, Beverly Guilliams

The six short chants are all Bible verses about love. The first three are sayings of Jesus: “I give you a new commandment. Love one another just as I have loved you”; “It is by your love for one another that everyone will recognise you as my disciples”; and “No-one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for those one loves”. These represent a progression in depth of love: the love between members of the same church which in practice may be hard to distinguish from the camaraderie and common purpose found in any healthy group; demonstrating that love to people outside the church in a way that they recognise to be distinctive; and finally the challenge to love others more than ourselves even if it should cost us our own life.

The last three are sayings about God’s love rather than ours: “We know love by this, that Christ laid down his life for us”; “This is love, it is not we who have loved God but God who loved us”; and “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God and God in them”. The answer to the question “how can I love in a way that might even lead to accepting my own death for someone else’s sake?” is that only the love of God makes this possible. Again it’s a progression, from observing the sacrificial love of Jesus Christ, to accepting God’s love for us personally which then makes it easier to love others, to letting God’s love “abide in us and we in him”.

What’s the connection between the six sayings about love, and the chorus calling on the Holy Spirit, who is not named in the Bible verses? Here’s one way of looking at it (I’m sure there are others equally valid): We can easily believe in a loving God as an intellectual proposition, and in Jesus as a historical figure who demonstrated God’s love in action to the point of death, but still find it difficult to love others in an equally sacrificial way. The Holy Spirit is sometimes understood as God’s way of putting his love into our hearts, stirring the individual believer to love and action. When Jesus promised that God would send the Holy Spirit after his death and resurrection, he described the Spirit as a ‘helper’ or advocate’ who would ‘abide in you’ (John 14:16-17). Without the Spirit, it’s difficult to love people, with all their faults. With the Spirit in us, God’s love works through us to make us love other people in the way God does – for who they are, not what they do.

That takes us back to the central acclamation of the chorus: “kindle in us the fire of your love” or “tui amoris ignem accende”. The link between the Spirit and Fire is a Biblical one, from John the Baptist’s prophecy that Jesus would “baptise with the Holy Spirit and fire” and the day of Pentecost when the Spirit appeared as “tongues of fire”. That fire sometimes takes a long time to get going again, especially if the embers have gone cold, but the Spirit’s job is to ignite it. Come, Holy Spirit!

Thanks be to God

Today’s hymn, not set for any particular season, is “Thanks be to God whose love has gathered us today”, with both words and music by Stephen Dean. The theme throughout verses and chorus is simply thanking God, and it is a really uplifting hymn to sing, fulfilling St Paul’s exhortation to “sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Ephesians 5:19-20).

At the start and end, thanksgiving is for the things you might expect: God’s love, help and guidance, life and light, protection, creation, and the gift of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. That reminds me of the now rarely used “prayer of general thanksgiving” in the Book of Common Prayer, which in full reads “Almighty God, Father of all mercies, we thine unworthy servants do give thee most humble and hearty thanks for all thy goodness and loving-kindness to us and to all men; We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory. And we beseech thee, give us that due sense of all thy mercies, that our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful, and that we shew forth thy praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives; by giving up ourselves to thy service, and by walking before thee in holiness and righteousness all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom with thee and the Holy Ghost be all honour and glory, world without end. Amen.”

Where this hymn departs from the expected range is in the middle – from the last line of verse 2 to the beginning of verse 4. Here, the text is realistic about the fact that our lives are often in a mess and we often fall away from God. God is thanked in these lines for “keeping in mind us who forget him”, “knowing our secret joys and fears”, always hearing when we call on him, and being the one who “never turns his face away, heals and pardons all who stray.” Perhaps God deserves our thanks for that compassionate, empathetic love more than anything.

My soul proclaims your mighty deeds

Today’s hymn, “My soul proclaims your mighty deeds”, is Owen Alstott’s verse-and-chorus setting of the Magnificat (Mary’s song), and the words are familiar to anyone who knows Luke’s gospel, so there’s not much to say about them, except this: Magnificat is traditionally associated with Evening Prayer in the Church of England but I’ve sometimes wondered why it’s not associated with than morning prayer instead, as unlike the Nunc Dimittis (the song of an old man about to die in contentment) it’s such a celebratory, hopeful song, sung by a young woman during her first pregnancy. Surely it goes better in the morning when the promise of the new day lies ahead? So I sang it this morning although I’m only writing these notes in the evening.

Bless the Lord, my soul

The song for today is a chant from the French Taize community, and is (as John points out) a setting of Psalm 103. The setting in Sing Praise includes nine short chants for solo cantor, each intended to be sung over a choir singing the 4-part refrain. The refrain is often used on its own: “Bless the Lord, my soul, and bless God’s holy name. Bless the Lord, my soul, who leads me into life”.

That last phrase intrigues me – “who leads me into life”. I have also seen a version of the same song giving it as “who rescues me from death”, both of them probably deriving from verse 4 of the original Psalm, “who delivers your life from the Pit” (NRSV). I happen to have a Taize prayer book so I looked to see how the community translates the psalm for their own worship: the relevant phrase is “qui rachète à la fosse ta vie” – literally, “who buys back from the ditch your life”. The translation in this English version of the song puts that idea into one of the cantor’s verses: “The Lord is forgiveness and redeems our life from the grave”.

All these carry the same idea, not yet the full Christian concept of Jesus dying to redeem us from our sins, but a foretaste of that, a germ of the idea. Without God’s blessing we would all end up in the ‘pit’ of death or Sheol – the old Hebrew concept of the afterlife as neither heaven nor hell but an undesirable, eternal nothingness or meaninglessness. A pit is a hole that is too deep to climb out of unaided, as the biblical Joseph found. To believe in God and accept his blessing is to accept a hand up out of the pit, to find meaning where there was none, to find eternal life instead of merely existence, to receive (as Jesus would later put it) “life in all its fulness”. Which is presumably why the refrain uses the more positive interpretation: if we are bought back from death, then by implication we are indeed led into life.

Imagery like this seems pertinent at this time of Covid lockdown and isolation. Today is the tenth and last day of our isolation at home, and even though the freezing weather has not been conducive to going out walking much anyway, it will be good to get out tomorrow, if only to the shop with a mask on. I can get out of this little pit and get on with life in the limited way currently allowed, and look forward to a ‘new normal’ at a later time. For those who live alone all the time and cannot get out on their own, for those in prison or trapped in controlling relationships, or in unrelieved pain, it must be far worse. For some people, even death may seem like a positive way out, and God is the only one who can lift them up.

The Christian promise is that the reality is much better than we might dare to hope. If we give ourselves to God, then we can find peace among the troubles of this life, and know that beyond death is not mere existence in a pit but a new creation where fullness of life will be something more than we can now imagine. Bless the Lord, my Soul!

Love is the touch of intangible joy

Today’s hymn, as we move on from the Presentation and towards Lent, is titled “Love is the touch of intangible joy” by the Scottish composer Alison Robertson.

John Hartley has indicated that he preferred not to include this in a service of worship, and I will be interested to hear his reasons. I found a recording of it online where it is set to a tune by John Bell. The notes there say that “one of Mrs Robertson’s aims in this hymn was to write something that people who may not subscribe to the Christian faith could still assent to and be helped by”, which might tally with John’s hesitation – I will be interested to find out.

Leaving aside the refrain “God is where love is, for love is of God” and the Trinitarian reference in verse 4, which clearly are Christian statements, could a humanist agree with this hymn? The illustrations of love given here are mostly passive, things that make life’s problems more bearable for us, such as “the goodness we gladly applaud”, “the hope that can make us rejoice” or “the light in the tunnel of pain, the will to be whole once again”. The same notes referred to above interpret “love is the lilt in a lingering voice” in verse 2 as referring to “the voices of those who have gone before and still matter to us”. One would hope this just means the memory of our beloved dead and not that they communicate to us, which is not consistent with Christian theology.

What seems to be missing here is the outgoing, practical and sometimes risky kind of love that Jesus taught in his parables and demonstrated in his life: the Good Samaritan giving of his time and money to help an enemy in need, his countrywoman at the well giving Jesus a drink, Jesus himself spending time with the outcasts of society, challenging prejudice and healing diseases in the face of vocal opposition and ultimately giving his life that we might live. That is where Christianity comes in – the challenge that “greater love has no-one than this, to lay down one’s life for a friend”. It is the challenge that we must consider during the approaching season of Lent.