Nothing can ever come between us

Today’s song from Sing Praise is ‘Nothing can ever come between us and the love of God’, another chant from the Taizé community.

The title is the first line of the chorus, the second line being ‘… revealed to us in Jesus Christ’.  I’ve discovered this week that there is now a tradition of a ‘gender reveal party’ where a baby’s gender is disclosed, not only to friends but to the parents themselves who have not previously been given the information (you may well call me slow on the uptake here, as apparently the idea started in America ten years ago, but I don’t have children myself!)  The point is that to reveal something is not only to share factual knowledge, but to make an event of it, to add drama to that passing on of information.  So when the Bible says that God reveals himself to us (and a concordance tells me the word is used 81 times in the Bible) it is more than simply telling us that he exists, it is intended to make a sudden and dramatic change in our understanding, one that will change our lives radically in the same way that people’s lives are changed by having a baby.

The verses, or rather chants to be sung by a solo cantor, are verses from Psalm 56 and Romans chapter 8. They are all about trust in God, and God as the Father who have us his son who died, rose again and prays for us. As a result, to quote the last one, “neither death, nor life, nor things present or to come, nothing can ever keep us from God’s love”.  That love once revealed never leaves us, like the love of a mother for her child.

One thought on “Nothing can ever come between us”

  1. I didn’t warm to this chant from Taize, and I felt it wasn’t up to the standard which Jacques Berthier set when he used to write the music. I thought the tune of the main refrain was really rather shapeless and unintuitive with stresses on odd words (for example, surely the key word in the second half is “Christ”, which appears on an upbeat instead of a downbeat); the bass weak (for example, what’s the progression C to A doing on the words “love of God”?, and why isn’t the bass a C instead of a B); and the whole inconclusive (why isn’t there a tonic chord at the end of the whole piece?).

    Instead of the chant continuing whilst the cantor sings over it there is a break for accompanying chords, but these don’t really go anywhere either, and the cantor’s part is sufficiently bland for one not to be able to remember how one verse differs from another. The triplet in verse 6 is clear case of the writer being unthinkingly wedded to a bible translation to the defiance of considerations of shape or artistry.

    Above all, I felt there was no rationale for the combination of Psalm 56 and Romans 8: the Romans text is adequate by itself and the three verses from the Psalm add nothing. I though the singers would do better to sing a rousing song like Robin Mark’s “Nothing shall separate us from the love of God” which has a clear and tuneful chorus and verse, or one of the other 26 hymns listed on this text in the Methodist “Singing the Faith” index.

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