Sing Praise – Page 27 – The Raynville Rambler

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.

Lord, set your servant free

Today’s hymn is one of many settings of Simeon’s short song (Nunc Dimittis). What perhaps sets this one apart form others is that the author (Mary Holtby) has departed from the original words in several places.

Instead of referring to Simeon’s ‘departure’ (meaning his imminent death) she has him asking to be ‘set free’ – which could be taken to mean ‘set free from this earthly life’, but is capable of wider application. We all have things that we need to be set free from.

She also drops the last line ‘the glory of your people Israel’, instead following ‘the hope of humankind’ with a parallel phrase ‘the glory of our race’. That worldwide message appears also in verse 2 with ‘on the nations lost in light I see his dawn arise’.

The Christ here is therefore understood as having a universal ministry from the start, rather than understanding Jesus having come first to the people of Israel. Simeon had been promised he would see the hope of his own people, and finds that he has been given a whole lot more, a universal vision of hope. Such is God’s way, offering blessings greater than we had hoped for.

New light has dawned

Today’s song, continuing the Candlemas theme, is “New light has dawned, the son of God is here” by Paul Wigmore. In terms of Biblical stories of Jesus, the first three verses cover the incarnation, the announcement to the shepherds (but surprisingly not the magi), the presentation to Simeon (meriting its inclusion among hymns for this season) and the later episode where the adolescent Jesus debates theology with the Temple priests in Jerusalem. The common thread is that anyone who encounters Jesus encounters light, whether through a prophetic word or an apparition of angels.

The qualities of the Christ-light are listed here: it is “a holy light no earthly light outshines”, “the light that casts out fear”, “the light that evil dreads and love defines”, “the light of glory”, and quoting Simeon “the light to lighten gentile eyes”. The fourth verse is our response to Christ as we acclaim him “the light who came to us on earth”.

But what does the “light of Christ” mean to us ordinary believers who haven’t met an angel or had an extraordinary gift of prophecy? It’s hard to put into words but here’s the best way I can express it: when Christ is present in my life, there is an optimism to life, a sense that whatever ups and down I experience in physical health or the stresses of work, something or someone is ‘shining down on me’. When I experience this, even if I shut my eyes so that I see no natural light, it is as if I’m still in a well lit room, not a dark one. Does that tally with Wigmore’s description? Fairly well – it certainly casts out fear, or at least anxiety, it can be glorious, and lightens the eyes of this particular gentile. But what about “the light that evil dreads and love defines”?

This light is not something I experience all the time. Most Christians will agree that love for God is like love for your partner in that after the first few years of excitement, the relationship can easily be taken for granted and the spark of love goes out – not that you dislike your partner or Lord or want to disown them, just that the light of love has gone dim. That’s why the last lines of the hymn ask Christ to “renew the faith you gave at our new birth, destroy the dark, and let your light come in”.

I’m attending a ‘quiet day’ tomorrow, usually held in a retreat centre but this time with the devotional talks on Zoom and time away from the computer to reflect at home in between them. I pray Christ will enlighten me again, and pray that for you too.

Kindle a flame to lighten the dark

The song from “Sing Praise” for today, still on the theme of Candlemas, is a very short one, one of John Bell’s brief motets to be sung several times, slowly and meditatively, and ideally with different voices in harmony. The text is short enough to quote in full: “Kindle a flame to lighten the dark and take all fear away”.

I wrote at length yesterday about Candlemas, so like the song I will keep it brief today. Following on from where the last blog post finished, Candlemas is a time to remember that “do not fear” is one of the most common phrases in the Bible, and it is the light of eternal life kindled in Jesus that enables fears of all kinds to be taken away.

Whatever your fear is, sing (or say) this text to yourself several times, slowly, and ask Jesus to take the fear away and replace it with His light. “Kindle a flame to lighten the dark and take all fear away”.

Lord, now let your servant

The hymn I’ve chosen for today is “Lord, now let your servant go his way in peace”. The title is from Luke 2:29 and part of the chapter of Luke’s gospel that tells the story of Jesus from his birth to adolescence and is nearly all we know about his early life. The text is very familiar to anyone who enjoys Evensong in the Church of England. It is one of the Church’s shortest canticles (Bible passages that are usually sung rather than spoken) known by its Latin title “nunc dimittis” and is a setting of the song of Simeon, an elderly Jewish priest. The hymn is James Seddon’s four-part setting of the canticle to a regular metrical tune.

The occasion of Simeon’s song was the ‘presentation’ of Jesus in the Temple, an old Jewish ritual that allowed a woman to be proclaimed ritually clean forty days after giving birth to her son (for a girl it was twice as long -eighty days, see Leviticus chapter 12). With the birth of Jesus arbitrarily celebrated on 25 December, that makes 2 February the occasion to remember this ceremony, known as Candlemas because candles are lit as a sign of revelation (enlightenment).

Simeon’s revelation from God at some time in his life was that before he died he would see the “hope of Israel” (that is the promised saviour, also known as the Messiah or Christ) although this hymn doesn’t actually use that phrase. By the same revelation from God, he recognised in the infant Jesus someone who in later life would be this hope, the one who would rescue the Jewish people.

But rescue them from what? It’s generally assumed that people in his day were hoping for a military or diplomatic leader who would save them from subjugation as part of the Roman empire and give them the independence under God that they longed for. But it turned out that Jesus understood his mission much more in terms of saving them from the twin evils of secularism (ignoring God altogether) and legalism (trying to follow the letter of the religious law while ignoring the basic principles of fairness, justice and mercy, the fault of the Pharisees). He was sent to ‘redeem’ (literally ‘buy back’ God’s people for God. Later Christian thought has added further layers of understanding to this concept of redemption, but now isn’t the time to go into those.

But there’s more to the story than that. Simeon saw more than the hope of Israel in this baby. He hailed him also as the “light of revelation to the Gentiles shown and light of Israel’s glory to the world made known” in the words of the hymn – other translations are available. Jesus is God’s gift not just to the Jewish people but to the whole world. Mary had known that ever since the annunciation, the shepherds at Bethlehem knew it. But when Simeon proclaimed it in the Temple, the secret was out. The people of Jerusalem may have forgotten this incident thirty years later, until the Messiah returned to fulfil his destiny.

For us, Candlemas is a time to recognise the light that Jesus brings to our lives. That might be a recognition of having forgotten God’s call and living life without reference to his standards, or living by obsolete rituals that are holding us back from living life as God intended (like the Pharisees), or offering a way out of some kind of darkness in our life (perhaps depression, addiction, or being controlled by someone else). Or it might be a time to remember a promise that God once made that we have not yet seen fulfilled, or failed to grasp fully, and ask him to fulfil it now. Go your way in peace, God’s word has been fulfilled.