Today’s song from Sing Praise is a cantor-and-chorus type, called “Athirst, my soul, for you, the God who is my life” (that’s the first line of the first chant). The chorus starts “As the deer longs for running streams”, but there are many hymns with that or similar titles, because Psalm 42/43 on which it’s based is very popular as a basis for sung versions.
The appeal of this psalm is in the opening lines, with the attractive image of the hunted deer finding a refreshing stream in a hidden dip in the hills, out of sight of its hunters, where it can drink and rest awhile. The simile is that God will likewise offer us rest and refreshment in prayer and meditation when we are stressed or frightened. That’s true, but not easy to achieve: I find that the greater the pressures of life, the harder it is to find time for prayer and the longer it takes to relax into it.
That’s why I try to find opportunities offered for quiet time away from the usual routines of life – a ‘quiet day’, teaching weekend or short retreat offered by one of the many Christian communities, abbeys or retreat centres. In the present pandemic, I have one booked at the end of next week on Zoom, and that will mean sessions on the screen in my usual study, and finding a quiet space in the house for the personal meditation times in between, where I won’t get distracted. I am looking forward to it, but the experience will be different.
Back to the song, and the verses remind us why we get so stressed and in need of God’s protection and refreshing. Surprisingly, “All your mighty waters sweeping over me” suggests that the feeling of being overwhelmed might actually be the result of God’s intention, but it’s an accurate rendition of Ps.42:7. Perhaps it means the sense of being burdened by the requirements of God’s law and commandments or the guilt of not keeping them, which as we saw the other day has been relieved by Jesus taking us back to the law’s true intentions.
“The foe delights in taunting me”, on the other hand, puts the blame for my troubles firmly on other people. The taunt given as an example is “where is your God”, a phrase that is still used by those who don’t understand the nature of religious faith – “what sort of God is it who allows this to happen?” (whatever “this” is). The antidote to this is to turn back to God and affirming that we do trust in him, whatever is happening around us.
One verse in the psalm (42:4) is not referred to in the song but is very relevant at this time of church closures – in the Prayer Book psalter used at many an Evensong, “Now when I think thereupon, I pour out my heart by myself : for I went with the multitude, and brought them forth into the house of God; In the voice of praise and thanksgiving : among such as keep holy-day.” As much as anything, it is the music and ceremonial of church services that I miss – we can keep in touch by phone call or maybe even Zoom meetings, but it’s not possible with those to chant a psalm or sing a hymn together, or physically to process into or around the church building as we might do on special occasions.
The last verse, though, does look forward to a time when all the sadness and frustration will be put behind us. “Then shall I go unto the altar of my God, praising you, O my joy and gladness, I shall praise your name”. Let’s keep that in mind throughout the lockdown.
Although Stephen calls this song “Athirst my soul for you”, the index (p. xxxix) calls it “As the deer longs”, and that’s the way I think of it. I think it’s a lovely song – potentially as memorable in its chorus as Martin Nystrom’s “As the deer pants for the waters” (Mission Praise 37), and a lot closer to the wording of the scriptures. I have always felt that the depths of feeling in this pair of Psalms, with its memories of the past and its lamenting over present feelings of anticlimax and disappointment, deserve better treatments in hymn books, and I think the song does a very good job of putting the actual feelings of the Psalm of lament across.
Simon Stocks’ Grove Booklet B46 “Using the Psalms for Prayer through suffering” * has a very good basic introduction to the features of “Psalms of Lament”, in which there are often “three dimensions” of lament: (1) the Psalmist’s own situation (“Why are YOU so downcast, O my soul?”), (2) God’s connection with the situation (“I say to God my rock ‘Why have YOU forgotten me’?”), and (3) the enemy’s malign activity (“my foes taunt me”). This Psalm has them all, and I appreciated the way that Bob included instances of them all in the verses.
And about its structure, I think the verses have been written with great skill to ensure the stresses of the music coincide with the stresses of the words – something that these kinds of free-writing songs can easily get wrong. And I think the intertwining of the melodies of verse and underlying chorus is very clever, although I can see that some would prefer a definite “descant” feel where the verse line is always pitched above the accompaniment.
The only things that struck me as strange were the placing of the song in the “Christian Initiation” section of the book, and its comment “May be sung in procession to the font”. Well, of course one can sing anything one likes on the way to the font, but linking of the running streams in the Psalm to the waters of baptism really is the purest imagination! Do we invite baptismal candidates to drink the water to symbolise quenching their thirst? One really does wonder what the “two of us involved at a national level in liturgical education of various kinds” (p. vii) were thinking of? (I suppose the song could be sung in procession to the tea-urn at the end of the service?)
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* Grove Biblical series B46, ISBN 978-1-85174-673-6. I recommend Simon’s book, and it was a big influence in getting me started at writing metrical versions of the Psalms of Lament.
Thanks for this comment, John. Simon Stocks was the tutor in spirituality on the Southwark Reader course, though I have always struggled with the sort of silent contemplation for extended periods that he advocated.