Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is another communion song, “Bread of life, hope for the world” with words and music by Bernadette Farrell. There are eight verses in the book, but three of those are each for specific seasons of the year, and two others offers as ‘additional or alternate’ options, so the intention is not to sing all of them, although if sung by a music soloist or group while the people take communion, it could need more than three if the congregation is of even moderate size.
The title is that of the first line of the refrain, which is followed by “Jesus Christ our brother, feed us now, give us life, lead us to one another”. In those few phrases is a summary of the various ways that the mass/communion is understood: as both physical and spiritual food, as a means to eternal life through his death, and as a means to unity within the Church as we share the one bread.
The first few verses expand on those themes: the death and resurrection of Jesus, the making of bread from individual grains compared with the making of the body of Christ from individual people; its breaking as a sign of Jesus’ body broken for us and as a sign of hope.
The additional verses cover the unity of the Church, the sharing of peace, the promise of Christ’s coming (in Advent), the Nativity, and in Lent “our hunger for your word, our thirsting for your truth”.
As with many of Bernadette Farrell’s songs, I found this one easy to grasp and engaging to sing, with a nice flow that keeps the song going and naturally leads one through what one is saying. As Stephen says, it could naturally expand to fill the time available if the distribution of the holy communion was going on longer than expected.
I didn’t really feel that the hymn was at its best sung “Slowly” as the music indicates, and I took it at a fairly brisk pace.
My only quibbles with it would be the occasional odd chord which somehow feels like a mistake: in this case the Gm7/D on the word “return” towards the end of the verse (which I felt should have been a C7, resolving as it does to the tonic F in the next chord) and the final F2 (which to my ears simply sounds as if the pianist played the G as a wrong note).