Today’s Pentecost hymn from Sing Praise is “May we, O Holy Spirit” by Paul Wigmore. Whereas some of the hymns this week have been about the Spirit’s power, or the way s/he communicates God’s peace and presence to us, this one is very much about the way that the Spirit builds our character. For personal reasons that I can’t go into here, this is particularly relevant to me at present.
In the first verse we ask that we may bear the Spirit’s fruit. In fact the three verses list all the “fruits of the Spirit” from the book of Galatians: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-restraint” (or similar words, depending on which translation of the Bible you use). The words of the hymn expand on what these fruits are meant to achieve: joy and peace to accompany our words, love becoming deeper and stronger, patience to prevent us saying or doing harm, kindness to look for the good in other people, goodness to be seen in action, faithfulness as a quality of endurance, gentleness to “lend courage to the weak” (an interesting phrase) and finally self-restraint to “help us know the grace that made the King of Heaven meek”.
That memorable phrase about making the King of Heaven meek comes in the last line of the hymn, but to me it says a lot not only about Jesus but about how He wants us to live by the Spirit. The Christian life is not only about what we achieve but about the quality of our character (and as I hinted at the start, I write from a position of knowing that I very much need that character-building work of the Spirit). The character God looks for is not that of the high-flyer but of those who, in the words of Romans 12:16, “are not haughty but give themselves to humble tasks” (NRSV footnote).
John chose to sing this hymn to the tune “Ellers” rather than the one provided in Sing Praise. That tune is also used for a setting of the Methodist Covenant prayer, the final verse of which is “Go with us, Lord, from hence; we only ask that thou be sharer in our daily task; So, side by side with thee, shall each one know the blessedness of heaven begun below”. That is the true work of the Spirit, as much as signs and wonders.
I could see the point of a hymn which goes through the nine fruits of the Spirit as listed in Galatians 5:22-23, but I felt the hymn could have done with being taken back to the drawing-board in some of its craftsmanship points. To me, the lines would naturally fit in 8 syllables rather than 10:
May we, O Spirit, bear your fruit:
your joy and peace in what we say,
your love become our very root,
and these grow stronger every day.
May patience stem the word and deed
that harm, and kindness stop our wrongs,
and goodness from our lives proceed
in thoughts and actions, words and songs.
May faithfulness endure and grow,
and gentleness reshape our moods,
and self-restraint help us to know
our Saviour’s inner attitudes.
… or something? I particularly disliked the ways in which, in verses 1 and 2, the word-order of lines 3 had been mangled in order to make the rhyme come out right. So I ended up wondering whether the old children’s chorus “For the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace …” wouldn’t actually be both shorter and more to the point?
With this background I wasn’t convinced that the effort of learning a new tune (in 5 flats, no less) was worth it, and resolved to sing it to a standard tune. (Which, as Stephen says, is also used for the Covenant Prayer so has the right connotations.)