Today’s hymn is ‘We cannot care for you the way you wanted’ by John Bell and Graham Maule. When I planned the hymns for the year I took into account the seasons of the Church’s calendar but not the lectionary readings for Morning Prayer, because it was only later that John decided to include them. But he has sensibly suggested a swap here, putting this hymn in the service that includes the account of the Holy Innocents, the slaughter of all the young children in Bethlehem on the orders of Herod. For this hymn, following on from yesterday’s, is also about death and our feelings around it, and specifically where the death was of a baby or young child. So in singing it we join with the mothers of Bethlehem of old, with ‘Rachel refusing to be comforted because her children are no more’, and with the countless parents who lose children in or own time to disease, starvation or war. I read only this week in the context of the topical discussion of climate change that hundreds of children are dying every day in Africa from drought alone. Each one made in God’s image, each one loved by God, each death the cause of grief.
As an aside, and with a linguistic link since Rachel means ‘ewe’, I saw a story on social media this week of a ewe whose lamb had been stillborn, grieving for it until another ewe in the flock ‘donated’ one of her own pair to the grieving mother to adopt. These emotions are not only human.
To the lyrics, then: the first three verses are written from the point of the view of parents, expressing regret at not having been able to fulfil their own potential as parents or that of their offspring: ‘We cannot care for you the way we wanted, cannot watch you growing into childhood, cannot know the pain or the potential which passing years would summon or reveal’. Instead, a word of hope is offered, a promise by Jesus to cling to: ‘love will not die’, ‘you will still stay’, ‘we hope and feel [for promised fulfilment]’. The fourth verse recognises the complex of emotions experienced – anger, grief, tiredness, unresolved tensions. The very sorrow that this death has created is offered back to God along with the child itself, not reluctantly or as sacrifice but as ‘worship’.
Although I wrote yesterday of the difficulty of squaring the ‘everyone goes to heaven’ attitude with the theology of the Bible, when it comes to a stillbirth or the death of a very young child, few people today would argue that a child dying unbaptised would be rejected by God because of ‘original sin’. And pastorally, it’s more important surely to grieve with the family in their loss than to speculate exactly what has happened to the child’s soul. So, the hymn ends with placing the child into God’s arms with the words ‘believing that s/he now, alive in heaven, breathes with your breath’.
The poignancy of grief, especially at a tragic loss, is expressed exquisitely in the music of Schubert’s song ‘Litany for the feast of all Souls’, sung in the original German at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrqIEwQhRMo (with subtitles, but only two verses) or https://youtu.be/9eUPVDPkdHM (all three verses, no subtitles).
I commend John Bell and Graham Maule for trying to provide a hymn for this particular trauma – that of losing a baby – and although I have mixed feelings about the actual hymn, I do feel it has a place in the hymn book. I also welcome the “alternative to singing” provided in the series of chords which may be played as the hymn is read rather than sung – very ingenious, and a proper recognition of the actual dynamics of the funeral. (I speak as one who has lost a stillborn baby, as well as a minister who has conducted funerals for stillborn and very young babies.)
Yet it is hard to sing it at Morning Prayer as part of the endeavour of singing through the book, not least because in its last verse it requires one to have in mind a particular baby whom one is placing in the hands of God.
Stephen is quite right that “few people today would argue that a child dying unbaptised would be rejected by God because of ‘original sin’”, and the Church of England actually wrote this view into its service books (ASB p280 section 106).
But I do have questions about the hymn: I wonder about addressing verses 1 and 2 to the baby rather than to God; I wonder whether it is real to say that “love will not die” (v1) or “you will still stay” (v2); I wonder if one should sing an explicit statement about the baby’s eternal destiny (v5) seeing as the bible doesn’t contain such an explicit statement? For me, I’d rather stick to some kind of paraphrase of biblical material.
Hence the following, which I wrote as part of a project to provide hymns which would retell the main stories behind the “saints days” in the Common Worship Calendar:
Rachel’s voice is crying,
weeping in the night:
at her children’s dying,
taken from her sight.
Wise men, seeking guidance,
stirred a hornet’s nest.
Now, with children silenced,
Rachel has no rest.
Joseph, warned, decided:
Christ to Egypt fled.
Others, not so guided,
now are lost and dead.
Herod in his fury
sought to kill his king:
acted judge and jury,
slaughtered everything.
Rachel still is grieving,
though her plight is old:
parents’ hurt, not leaving,
will not be consoled.
Christ, who came to find us,
seek and save the lost:
when we’re broken, bind us,
heal us by your cross.
When one purpose ceases,
when one phase is through;
send your strength, release us
for new tasks for you.
Words © John Hartley 2015. All rights reserved. Matthew 2:13-18.
Meter: 6.5.6.5
Suggested tune: Caswall (“Glory be to Jesus”).
My first thought reading the words of your Holy Innocents hymn was that pairing the 4-line verses it would go well to Noel Nouvelet, but one of the half verses would have to go or another be added.
I wrote it for the tune “Caswall” which was set to “Glory be to Jesus / who in bitter pains / poured for me the life blood / from his sacred veins” in Hymns Ancient & Modern. It was part of my response to a challenge by Michael Perham (then bishop of Gloucester) to the Hymn Society to provide hymns for use at the “other services” on Saints Days (i.e. when the main bible reading would be set for Communion, so wouldn’t be read at Morning and Evening Prayer – so there was need of a hymn to tell the story), in this case for the Holy Innocents. Part of his challenge would be that the hymns would need to go to well-known hymn tunes, as they’d only be used annually and therefore wouldn’t warrant the learning of a new tune.