Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is “Lord, make us servants of your peace” by James Quinn. It’s a setting of a well known prayer by St Francis of Assisi. As a long metre text it could be set to any of many existing tunes, the suggested one being ‘O Waly Waly’. Quinn has kept, I think, to as close a translation as possible within the regular 8-syllable metre, rather than attempt to rhyme the words. So it reads more as blank verse than a song.
The essence of this prayer is, firstly, for the will to set aside our own needs and desires for the sake of other people. That much is a basic building block of civilisation. But it goes beyond that in actively seeking to bring love, peace, hope, reconciliation, understanding and other relational virtues, recognising that this will mean giving more than we receive and loving even where love is not returned.
That is the basis not only of Christianity but of other religions and spiritual movements: Francis of course was the head of a Catholic religious order, but most of these words are ones that people of all faiths can share, apart perhaps from the one specific appeal to Jesus, which could equally be addressed to God by whatever name he is known. The last verse is more specifically Christian in that it brings the hope of resurrection, and an awakening in heaven’s light where there is eternal peace.
The alternative sung version of this prayer, Make me a channel of your peace” by Sebastian Temple, has become well known across the Churches, but this one seems an equally singable one that could grow on me.
Actually most people nowadays don’t think this prayer really does go back to St Francis of Assisi: Wikipedia says it was first published in 1912 in a French spiritual magazine “La Clochette”, and was probably written by the editor Fr Bouquerel. It’s a bit naughty for the Sing Praise hymn book to perpetuate the myth of Franciscan authorship!
As Stephen says, James Quinn has simply tried to stay as close as possible to the text and thus ignore questions of rhyme; and readers of this blog will know my unease with this. Rhyme is more important when one is writing in a standard meter to which hymns are often sung: Sebastian Temple’s “Make me a channel of your peace” has an idiosyncratic meter and its own unique tune, so the lack of rhyme is just a fact one gets used to as one hears the hymn – but it’s not like that with a tune like “O Waly Waly” to which one is used to singing lyrics which rhyme (for example “When I survey the wondrous cross”).
Part of the argument for non-Franciscan authorship is that St Francis would never have been so individualistic as to write “I” and “me”, so it’s interesting that James Quinn has also avoided these singular pronouns and instead cast the prayer into the first-person plural. I can’t work out whether I like that or not? And I wasn’t so sure if verse 4’s “for love’s return” was too complicated for the sentiments of the hymn? And I didn’t really think “Dying we live and are reborn” was a very near translation of “For it is in dying that one is raised to eternal life”. But I think my biggest feeling was sadness at the lack of rhyme.
Finally, I thought the musical arrangement of the tune was over-complicated with the feeling that it had to be in 4-part harmony and not too simple: this leads to accented passing notes and other odd effects, and I wish the book had provided something much simpler.