Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is “Lay your healing hand upon us” by Alan Gaunt. It is a call to Jesus for healing from both physical and emotional hurts. The healing that is sought from Jesus here is the gentle, compassionate healing of one who has suffered more than we can imagine – the “wounded healer” as he is often called. In the first verse we ask “bind our wounds with your compassion, bring us back to health again”
The first line of the second verse “Hold us like a gentle mother” is perhaps intended as a reminder that although Jesus was undoubtedly male, he showed the intuition and empathy that are more often associated with women. We ask him to “set us on our feet and make us strong to take life in our stride”: this is healing as the wholeness that brings confidence as well as physical ability.
The third and fourth verses move on: as we are healed by the one who was wounded, so we who are healed should seek to bring healing to others. “With the confidence you give us, give us your compassion too, so that we may offer others comfort, healing, strength from you”.
The tune by Stephen Dean is called “Susan” (I wonder who she was). It a syncopated rhythm consistently throughout, except in the penultimate bar it’s a crochet followed by a minim in the melody rather than the other way round, and that doesn’t really fit the words other than in the last verse where the stress then fall on “God’s”.
I have mixed feelings about these words, as I suppose I quite often do with Alan Gaunt’s. I don’t feel this is a hymn for springing on people at the start of Morning Prayer – rather it is for the middle of a service which has had some focus on the whole topic of healing and wholeness. The “like a gentle mother” of verse 2 takes up some of the thinking of “A song of Anselm” (at:
https://www.churchofengland.org/prayer-and-worship/worship-texts-and-resources/common-worship/daily-prayer/canticles-daily-56
and I wonder if Alan got the idea of the hymn from that canticle? (Anselm (1033/4-1109) was Archbishop of Canterbury.) If so he goes beyond Anselm’s thoughts, as verse 3 takes up Paul’s thought in 2 Corinthians 1:4.
The tune “Susan” is the fourth and final one by Stephen Dean that we’ll be singing as part of the “Sing Praise Challenge”. I criticised a couple of the others for what I considered to be musical errors, but I thought this tune fitted the mood of the hymn fairly well and I have no complaints about the construction of it. In the penultimate bar I think the lower parts ought to reflect the syncopation of the melody; but Stephen Dean’s preference is fine too. Stephen Craven is right to say this syncopation has nothing to do with the words.