Photo (c) Rodhullandemu, Creative Commons-SA-4.0
Today’s hymn is “The touching place” by John Bell and Graham Maule, also known by its first line “Christ’s is the world in which we move”. It’s a sort of lament for the many ways in which people suffer, and the Christian response to their need.
The first verse sets the tone for the rest: the world and its people belong to Christ, so it is his voice calling us to care, and (if we feel the task is too great) he is the one who “meets us here”. The remaining verses list the many forms of suffering that, with Christ, we may feel called to address. As with many of John Bell’s lyrics, he uses some unconventional and memorable phrases: “strange or bereaved or never employed”, “the women whom men have defiled”, “the baby for whom there’s no breast”, “the lonely heart, conscious of sin, which longs to be pure but fears to begin”. What all these people have in common – and between them probably cover nearly everyone at some time in their life – is that we are called to “feel for them”, to have empathy.
The chorus is equally memorable in its wording, and using only a slight variant of the tune of the verses: “To the lost Christ shows his face, to the unloved he gives his embrace, to those who cry in pain or disgrace, Christ makes with his friends a touching place”. “With his friends” is important: we should both pray for Christ’s compassionate help for those in distress, and do what we can for them in our circumstances.
Writing this later in the day after seeing John’s use of the hymn in morning prayer, may I express a bit of surprise at the brisk pace at which he took it. When we’ve sung this hymn in my own church, the music director always directs a slow pace to match the emotional burden of the words.
Stephen is obviously right about the emphasis of this hymn: its intention to encompass a wide variety of the people in difficulties for whom Christ cares and for whom we his church should care too. However, I confess I had doubts about the wisdom of there being a four-line chorus after each of the four-line verses, particularly as the tune of the chorus essentially just repeats that of the verse – the effect is really just to double the length of the hymn without adding very much content.
And I suppose it was my concern about the length which led to me taking the hymn at a fairly brisk pace, and surprising Stephen. I’d never come across the hymn before, nor its tune “Dream Angus” which the book says is a Scottish folk melody. I rebelled against the harmonies and arrangement of the tune in the book, so much so that I couldn’t sing the hymn out of the book and was compelled to write out the melody separately and use it instead. I do like to take hymns reasonably quickly, and on the occasions when I play the organ at church the choir is constantly begging me to slow down. But on this occasion I definitely felt that slowing it down would have run the risk of it dragging and becoming overly sentimental.
Maybe a Myers-Briggs test on me would show a deficiency in the “feelings” area?