Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is “How long, O Lord, will you forget” by Barbara Woollett, a setting of Psalm 13. As a psalm of lament it is unsurprisingly set to a tune in a minor key. After a series of hymns expressing God’s love for us and ours for him, his everlasting Word, his call to follow him, the beauty of this world and the promise of the world to come, this one comes as a shock. “No tokens of your love I see, your face is turned away from me, I wrestle with despair”. And that’s just the first verse. It goes on to ask “When will you come to my relief? My heart is overwhelmed with grief, by evil night and day”.
The fact is that we all have times when we don’t experience the love of God in every flower and birdsong, as yesterday’s hymn put it. In fact quite the opposite, God can seem deliberately absent just when we need him most. It’s at those times that real faith draws on our own past experience and that of others to know that God is present, even if we can’t detect him. The third verse expresses that, as without any suggestion that God has replied to the earlier cries of “How long will you forget and forsake me?” the singer says “I find that all your ways are just, I learn to praise you and to trust in your unfailing love”. That ‘learning to praise and trust’ requires practice, like any skill that we wish to master.
Like Stephen I was quite impressed with this setting of Psalm 13, particularly the tune – although I think it’s likely that Barbara wrote the words with the tune “Repton” (“Dear Lord and Father of mankind”) in mind, and that the tune by Christopher Norton was a separate venture. (I am supposing that Christopher Norton is the same person who arranged quite a lot of the songs in Mission Praise, particularly the ones by Graham Kendrick, which were originally composed as melodies with guitar chords and needed setting out in more comprehensive musical notation for a hymn book.)
A lot of Psalms of Lament have “light at the end of the tunnel” moments – and this one does, expressed in verse 3 … but the tune doesn’t move to the major for this final verse, and actually this phenomenon in general is one of the difficulties of setting Psalms of Lament. Another problem (or perhaps one should say “idiosyncratic feature”) of the tune is the way it runs line 4 of the words straight into line 5 – which works extremely well for verse 3, but perhaps less well for the other two verses?
Of course I write with bias: Psalm 13 is one of the ones I have set to music, and I could go on at length about techniques of setting such Psalms metrically to appropriate tunes.