Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is ‘Advent candles tell their story’ by Mark Earey. It has five verses but each of them is specific to one of the Sundays of Advent, the fifth being for Christmas Day. It would appear to be the intention either that just one verse is sung each week, or another verse added each week, rather than as a regular all-through hymn. In fact it’s neither: I found the answer in the liturgical responses Mark wrote to go with the song – the idea is to sing verse 1 on week 1, then 1+2, 1+3, 1+4 and just verse 5 at Christmas.
The first week of the season is traditionally focussed on the Patriarchs, but the first verse here is expressed in more general terms of praying for the Lord’s coming. The second is about the Prophets, the third John the Baptist, and the fourth Mary, according to tradition. There’s not much in the words that grabbed my attention, other than that the verse for Mary has a possibly unexpected reference to Easter: ‘Who could guess the final story? Cross and glory; Easter Day!’
As an aside, we have been unable to find an Advent candle, of the sort that counts the days, in the shops this year. The fairtrade company Traidcraft also used to do them, but seem to have stopped. I did find that John Lewis were selling them online, but I’m always reluctant to order online for one cheap item to be delivered. In the end we took a standard purple dinner candle and with a ruler and knife simply marked it into 28 sections. But it’s only burning a few minutes each day, after saying grace at the start of the evening meal.
Stephen’s choices of hymns for both Saturdays and Sundays during “peak times” of the year sets me a problem, as I don’t feel I can necessarily include his choices on Sundays when the whole church has to sing a hymn. So I told him I’d be delaying this hymn … and then, in the event, an opportunity arose so we did sing it in our physical church service.
This hymn is on the same model as a number of others for Advent candles, and I think it does a fair job of saying what the different candles are about. The first verse (for the Patriarchs) isn’t specific – but, on the other hand, how are the Patriarchs relevant to the news of looking for the second coming of the Messiah? I hadn’t spotted Mark’s suggestion of verses 1 + n (for n=2,3,4) on those Sundays, but viewing v1 as a general introduction certainly makes more sense. Of course, if one uses the Methodist scheme of saying the candles are for love, joy, peace and hope, then you’d need a different hymn entirely.
Stephen highlights a problem with all these kinds of hymns: if you sing just one verse each Sunday the effect is too bitty, but if you sing them all the effect is too long and the focus moves through the sequence instead of staying on the particular Sunday you’re aiming at. Singing it every Sunday for 5 weeks does tend to get a bit laborious /tedious too. Mark Earey’s proposed solution works as well as any, but the problem does (in my view) persist.
I thought there were some other weaknesses, and Mark’s punctuation (with its use of the long dash – which functions like an alternative colon) indicates to me that he struggled to make some parts of the words work properly. John the baptist didn’t pour water so much as duck people in it (what else could the “as he came up out of the water” Mark 1:10a mean?), and the use of the words “Easter Day” at Christmas is highly odd. The way that the last verse can only be sung on Christmas Day itself is a disadvantage.
We re-used last year’s advent candles at church. I suppose I should have said that we are making a positive virtue of recycling?