Frederick W Faber, 1814-63 was a follower of John Henry Newman, who converted to Roman Catholicism in 1846. He published Souls of men why will ye scatter (a hymn of 13 verses, one of which begins "There's a wideness in God's mercy") in his collection Oratory Hymns of 1854.
Here are the 13 verses. I am unsure of the original order but I think it's correct here up to about verse 6.
1 Souls of men! why will ye scatter
Like a crowd of frightened sheep?
Foolish hearts! why will ye wander
From a love so true and deep?
2 Was there ever kinder shepherd
Half so gentle, half so sweet,
As the Saviour who would have us
Come and gather at His feet?
3 It is God: His love looks mighty,
But is mightier than it seems;
’Tis our Father: and His fondness
Goes far out beyond our dreams.
4 There’s a wideness in God’s mercy,
Like the wideness of the sea;
There’s a kindness in His justice,
Which is more than liberty.
5 There is no place where earth’s sorrows
Are more felt than up in Heaven;
There is no place where earth’s failings
Have such kindly judgment given.
6 There is welcome for the sinner,
And more graces for the good;
There is mercy with the Saviour;
There is healing in His blood.
7 There is grace enough for thousands
Of new worlds as great as this;
There is room for fresh creations
In that upper home of bliss.
8 For the love of God is broader
Than the measure of our mind;
And the heart of the Eternal
Is most wonderfully kind.
9 But we make His love too narrow
By false limits of our own;
And we magnify His strictness
With a zeal He will not own.
10 There is plentiful redemption
In the blood that has been shed;
There is joy for all the members
In the sorrows of the Head.
11 ’Tis not all we owe to Jesus;
It is something more than all;
Greater good because of evil,
Larger mercy through the fall.
12 Pining souls, come nearer Jesus,
and O come not doubting thus,
but with faith that trusts more bravely
his great tenderness for us.
13 If our love were but more simple,
We should take Him at His word;
And our lives would be all sunshine
In the sweetness of our Lord.
Some hymn books print the lines as eight line verses (it depends what tune you want to use whether four line or eight line verses make sense). Some hymn books (including Hymns A and M) have the hymn with its original first verse (so it starts "souls of men why will ye scatter") while many others (including the EH and the NEH) omit the opening verses and start at "There's a wideness in God's mercy". Most hymn books give a maximum of 8 verses; only 7 in the NEH.
The New English Hymnal has also taken the trouble to include the last verse but to corrupt the words for us. Clearly they do not have a sweet tooth, or they think sweetness is bad for our teeth. Faber—doubtless dealing with his poor folk around the Oratory that he established in King William Street in London, and the local schools, for which he composed his hymns—was happy to provide a little beauty and sweetness in their lives. The editors of the New English Hymnal as always prefer to replace something striking with something tedious.
No sunshine, only gladness.
No sweetness, only joy.
Here is the ending of their hymn:
If our love were but more simple,
We should take Him at His word;
And our lives would be all gladness
In the joy of Christ our Lord.
Why not leave that verse out if you don't like what it says? After all there are plenty more to choose from!
Robin has some thoughts on the tune (prompted by Annie) which he may care to share with us. But meanwhile I thought I'd finish by adding an extract from The Guardian of July 14th 2003:
Whoever compiled the order of service for yesterday morning's Eucharist attended by members of the Church of England synod at York Minster - maybe it was "the Management", as senior churchmen tend to call Him Upstairs - clearly has a sense of humour.
The 580 lay, clergy and episcopal members of the synod, deeply divided this weekend over the aborted appointment of Canon Jeffrey John as the church's first openly gay bishop, found themselves singing in nearly perfect harmony the obscure 19th century hymn: There's a Wideness in God's Mercy, Like the Wideness of the Sea.
Its author, FW Faber, could never have realised the relevance his words would have,140 years after his death: "We make his love too narrow/By false limits of our own;/And we magnify his strictness/With a zeal he will not own .../If our love were but more simple/ We should take him at his word;/And our life would be all gladness/In the joy of Christ our Lord."
Well, evidently it wasn't Faber's hymn they were singing but the one in the NEH.
The real one, the one Faber wrote, perhaps is a bit obscure now. But the reason why it's obscure is mostly because it has been obscured by the very widespread use of the corrupt version...
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Saturday, April 01, 2006
Place holder
Apologies for the lackof a blog entry so far this week. The cause is partly Mothering Sunday duties, together with excessive pressure of work and not yet having located any information about "There's a wideness in God's mercy" (nor much information about the content of Mark's sermon).
Any reports from my readers of the gist of Mark's sermon would be most welcome.
Any reports from my readers of the gist of Mark's sermon would be most welcome.
Sunday, March 19, 2006
Wrestling Tunes
I forgot to mention the tunes.
I've discovered tunes as follows that must have been specially written for this hymn:
Wrestling Jacob by SS Wesley at Public School Hymn book 363 tune 2
Peniel by Josiah Booth at Congregational Hymnal 400
Jabbok by Cyril V. Taylor at BBC hymn book hymn 4
I deduce from the names that all of these were designed to suit this hymn. Of the three I think Jabbok the best. The rest are boring.
I've discovered tunes as follows that must have been specially written for this hymn:
Wrestling Jacob by SS Wesley at Public School Hymn book 363 tune 2
Peniel by Josiah Booth at Congregational Hymnal 400
Jabbok by Cyril V. Taylor at BBC hymn book hymn 4
I deduce from the names that all of these were designed to suit this hymn. Of the three I think Jabbok the best. The rest are boring.
To me, to all, thy bowels move (Thy nature and thy name is love)
Once again I missed the sermon this morning because I was catechising the children, but I gather that even after the sermon there's a lot more to be explored in the Wrestling Jacob hymn—indeed far more than could be covered in a sermon and probably more than I can put into a short blog commentary. I hope you'll agree (by the time we get to the end of today's entry) that it's not entirely surprising that two of our Lent preachers chose this hymn for their topic—and one of them had to be told to think of another one instead. Apparently Isaac Watts was quoted as saying that this single poem of Charles Wesley's, Wrestling Jacob, was worth all the verses he himself (Watts) had written. (Watts quoted by John Wesley, brother of Charles).
The topic for today, then: Come, O thou traveller unknown.
Words by Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems, 1742.
There are fourteen verses in the original poem. I shall append the whole lot complete at the end of this entry. Four were included in the English Hymnal, BBC Hymn Book and Songs of Praise, five in the New English Hymnal and Hymns A and M, six in the Public School Hymnal, seven in the Congregational Hymnal. Any advance on seven? I haven't found anything. So none of us has ever sung more than half of this hymn (actually I doubt most of us have ever sung more than about a third).
1 The background:
Genesis 32:24-32. Jacob trying to appease Esau his brother sends on his servants and kinsfolk ahead of him, south towards Seir, with gifts (what gifts! See Genesis 32.13). Jacob himself remains on the north side of the Jabbok river and spends the night there entirely alone.
Except that he is not alone.
He is visited by an unknown stranger who wrestles with him the whole night until the break of day.
Jacob struggles all night with the stranger and towards the break of day, the stranger, finding he is not winning the fight, touches Jacob's thigh and puts it out of joint.
Then there follows this exchange of conversation between Jacob and his mysterious companion:
Stranger: Let me go, for the day breaketh.
Jacob: I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.
Stranger: What is thy name?
Jacob: Jacob.
Stranger: Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.
Jacob: Tell me, I pray thee, thy name?
Stranger: Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name?
Then the stranger blesses Jacob and is gone. Jacob then gives a name to the place: "Peniel", says the author of Genesis, adjusting the name Penuel to get an etymology that has something to do with God's face. "For I have seen God face to face and my life is preserved," says Jacob, to explain the act of naming.
And as he passed over Penuel the sun rose upon him, and he halted upon his thigh (verse 31).
Even for the writer of Genesis we can see that the traditional motif of the struggle with a mythical beast or demon that will vanish at dawn, and the need to know his name in order to achieve power over him, has been transformed into an allegorical struggle with God. The need to know a person's name in order to have power over him has been transformed into the need to know a person's name in order to bless him. But the God of the Old Testament will not reveal his name. This is an uneven struggle in which one participant is in a position to give the blessing and the other is not.
The stranger does not stop to be blessed by Jacob, but he also implies that Jacob already knows who he is. He does not need to be told. "Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name?" says the stranger. The story reminds us of the disciples on the road to Emmaus: "did not out heart burn within us?" they ask when they recognise the Lord at the moment when he blesses the bread, and find that they have been debating the theology of the crucifixion with the man himself (Luke 24:32).
Jacob earns the title Israel (God persists) because he did not yield in the struggle, but endured to the break of day against a God who persists in testing him to the bitter end.
2 Charles Wesley's reflections
Wesley responds to the Jacob story with a reflection on the Christian struggle, perhaps his own in particular. It is said that John Wesley, Charles's brother, broke down in tears as he tried to expound this hymn shortly after Charles's death: he broke down at the third line "My company before is gone, and I am left alone with thee." We may assume that for John this line was not just about Charles's life-long lonely struggle with the God of love, but here John saw his own struggle too. His brother has been sent on before into the far country beyond the river, and now he is left to wrestle alone with the stranger god.
In our Christian life, we encounter a God who does not reveal his name or his nature. We struggle with him throughout our life—indeed the struggle seems to be a struggle to keep hold of him, to prevent him from slipping away from our grasp. It is the fear of being abandoned by God that haunts the Christian in this hymn, the fear of being alone. Time and again we are close to exhaustion, but even in exhaustion and despair we refuse to give up and let go. As we struggle we come to realise in our hearts who it is that we are engaged with, and the realisation yields peace and security at last.
Who is it? The answer is an inspirational Christian take on the Jacob story: the identity of that strange God can only be love. "Thy nature and thy name is love": this refrain features as the last line of each one of the last six verses. That is what we discover-- but we don't discover it because he tells us. We discover it because it dawns on us in the course of a life that is both compelling and demanding.
Finally we become fully aware of the truth of who it was we were engaged with as day breaks: day break in Wesley's poem is the moment of the dawning of truth. 'The morning breaks, the shadows flee, pure universal love thou art' (verse 9). To know the truth is to end the struggle, but not in failure or submission but in success, since the struggle was itself a struggle to find out the name and the nature of the object of one's encounter.
But then there is the lameness, the crippled thigh: God has lamed us in the struggle, and we are now wholly dependent upon God for strength (but joyful with it). "Contented now upon my thigh I halt, till life's short journey end; all helplessness, all weakness I on thee alone for strength depend."
3 Exegesis
Besides that brief summary of what I take to be the general purport of the poem, I now want to offer a small amount of detailed exegesis on particular bits that seem to me to be particularly fine or striking, verse by verse.
Verse 1
Come, O thou Traveller unknown,
Whom still I hold, but cannot see!
My company before is gone,
And I am left alone with Thee;
With Thee all night I mean to stay,
And wrestle till the break of day.
The speaker is, as it were, Jacob. "My company before is gone" refers to the occasion on which Jacob has sent his servants and family on ahead. "And he rose up that night and took his two wives, and his two womenservants, and his eleven sons, and passed over the ford Jabbok. And he took them, and sent them over the brook, and sent over that he had. And Jacob was left alone." Genesis 32:22-4.
The traveller unknown is the stranger who wrestles with Jacob all night "And there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day" Genesis 32.24.
Wesley picks up on the determination and persistence theme in Genesis: he announces his intention to persist in the struggle till dawn from the first: "With thee all night I mean to stay..."
Verse 2
I need not tell Thee who I am,
My misery and sin declare;
Thyself hast called me by my name,
Look on Thy hands, and read it there;
But who, I ask Thee, who art Thou?
Tell me Thy name, and tell me now.
The speaker (ourselves now) dissents from the Genesis version: in Jacob's case the stranger had to ask him his name.
Here, by contrast, God does not need to ask us who we are, nor what our name is.
For firstly our condition declares who we are in terms of nature: our nature is misery and sin.
And secondly our name was given by God himself. "Look on thy hands and read it there": God has our name written on his own hands, perhaps (I suppose) because he made us.
"But who, I ask thee, who art thou?" This introduces the real struggle: we want to find out about God. That is the task. It is not a struggle for God to come to know us, but it is a struggle for us to come to know God.
Verse 3
In vain Thou strugglest to get free,
I never will unloose my hold!
Art Thou the Man that died for me?
The secret of Thy love unfold;
Wrestling, I will not let Thee go,
Till I Thy name, Thy nature know.
The exclamation mark in line 2 is important to the dialogue. It's missing in the NEH.
Again the Jacob story and the Christian one are intertwined. Now it is the stranger who is trying to escape (but that is also hinted at in Jacob's story, for it is the stranger who says "Let me go for the day breaketh" and Jacob demands that he bless him first). Here Wesley envisages us demanding that Christ identify himself: we will not let him go until he has given up the secret of his love.
Art thou the Man that died for me? This has no counterpart in the Jacob story: it alerts us to the fact that we are reading Jacob's wrestling as our wrestling with the Christian faith. And it reminds us of those intimations in the Gospels (and in Christian mythology) that one may meet Christ in the most unlikely characters who turn up at our door unannounced, the poor and the outcasts. Here it is the stranger whose identity is both compelling and worrying. Who are you, stranger? Are you the man who died for me? I know and yet I don't know. I have to find out what the secret is.
Verse 4
Wilt Thou not yet to me reveal
Thy new, unutterable Name?
Tell me, I still beseech Thee, tell;
To know it now resolved I am;
Wrestling, I will not let Thee go,
Till I Thy Name, Thy nature know.
Verses 3, 4,and 5 all end "till I thy name, thy nature know". It is important to have the full set of verses at this stage of the poem, since the length of the struggle (a whole night or a whole lifetime) is measured by this repetitive exchange. The stranger never replies: he just wrestles endlessly to get free. The monologue is the Christian's struggle through the darkness and loneliness: struggling with a silent stranger who never replies. But the Christian never gives up: he demands and demands. He tells the stranger that he will not give up until he knows. It is the determination to continue and never to give in that is captured by these demanding verses. Tell me, I still beseech thee, tell!
"Thy new unutterable name" is crucial to the OT/NT parallel that is being set up. In the Old Testament God had an unutterable name ("I am", or words to that effect) and the unutterability or unknowability of his name is part of the theme in this passage of Genesis. Humans cannot know God's name, nor can they see his face and live. Jacob knows that he has been face to face with God well enough to name the place Peniel on account of it, but he does not discover the name.
But here instead the "new unutterable name" of God is his new testament name. That name is love, though he never tells us so.
Deus caritas est. That fact is for us to deduce. He will not tell us so.
And it is the name of the new covenant because Jesus gave us a new commandment, the commandment to love, on the night before he died. It is that new unutterable name that Wesley suggests we struggle to discover in the stranger who wrestles with us all night until dawn breaks.
Verse 5
’Tis all in vain to hold Thy tongue
Or touch the hollow of my thigh;
Though every sinew be unstrung,
Out of my arms Thou shalt not fly;
Wrestling I will not let Thee go
Till I Thy name, Thy nature know.
"Or touch the hollow of my thigh" alludes, of course, to Jacob's story, where the stranger puts Jacob's thigh out of joint and then the sinew shrivels up and he is lamed.
Wesley goes on "Though every sinew be unstrung..." In other words, he means to say, it is vain to try to overpower me and test my faith by physical trials. Even if every sinew were dislocated, I would still persist. The perseverance is endless. I will not let thee go, not whatever you do to me.
Verse 6
What though my shrinking flesh complain,
And murmur to contend so long?
I rise superior to my pain,
When I am weak, then I am strong
And when my all of strength shall fail,
I shall with the God-man prevail.
The theme of resisting depsite physical exhaustion continues in this and the following verse.
The shrinking flesh alludes to Jacob's thigh: "Therefore the children of Israel eat not of the sinew which shrank, which is upon the thigh, unto this day: because he touched the hollow of Jacob's thigh in the sinew that shrank." (32:32).
Here the pain in the flesh is conceived as complaining and urging the man to stop the struggle, but he continues none the less. "I rise superior to my pain".
Indeed, he now sees that the more his strength fails the closer he is to winning the fight, and when all of his strength fails that is when he will prevail. In other words the destruction of physical strength is part and parcel of acquiring an understanding of the nature of love. There is no accidental connection between frailty in the body and strength in the understanding of God's love.
Verses 7-8
My strength is gone, my nature dies,
I sink beneath Thy weighty hand,
Faint to revive, and fall to rise;
I fall, and yet by faith I stand;
I stand and will not let Thee go
Till I Thy Name, Thy nature know.
Yield to me now, for I am weak,
But confident in self-despair;
Speak to my heart, in blessings speak,
Be conquered by my instant prayer;
Speak, or Thou never hence shalt move,
And tell me if Thy Name is Love.
These two verses complete the process of declining strength in the physical sense and increasing strength in faith.
In verse 7 we get the first hint that faith is what keeps him going as he becomes totally weakened in bodily strength: "I fall and yet by faith I stand". He is still clinging on, but not by any physical strength now.
In verse 8 he no longer has any self-confidence. He is confident in self-despair: that is he is confident precisely because he has given up hope in himself.
Notice that the punctuation of this line is correct here, without a comma, and not in the NEH ("but confident, in self despair").
This is the move that relinquishes self altogether. It is not by confidence in oneself that one will discover the truth about God. And notice that by the end of this verse he is able to suggest what the name is: no longer does he ask what the name is; now he asks whether the name is Love. The suggestion comes from himself, not from the silent stranger. And now is the moment of truth dawning:
Verse 9
’Tis Love! ’tis Love! Thou diedst for me!
I hear Thy whisper in my heart;
The morning breaks, the shadows flee,
Pure, universal love Thou art;
To me, to all, Thy bowels move;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.
Here he discovers the answer. This is the end of the long dark night of struggling.
"To me, to all, thy bowels move". All hymn books that include this verse rewrite this line. The options are to replace bowels with mercies (NEH and most others) or "heart" (Public School Hymn Book). Of the two "heart" is clearly much better. The bowels are the bowels of compassion, because traditionally love and tender feelings were placed in the lower intestines, whereas the heart was the location of the intellect. This is the Aristotelian anatomy, and was normal into the Middle Ages; but it has since been replaced by a more modern anatomy in which the intellect is placed in the head and the tender feelings are placed in the heart.
So to have one's bowels move is to be moved by emotion, to love. That is fine (we do use the idea of being moved by something in just this way). But there's a problem with simply replacing bowels with "heart" to cope with the fact that we no longer think we love with outr bowels, because we don't normally speak of our heart moving ("To me, to all, thy heart doth move" is not obviously meaningful). But then nor does it mean anything to say "To me, to all, thy mercies move", since the whole point was to express an exclamation of having discovered that God feels love towards me and towards all.
I don't see an easy answer to this, except to learn to read the text as it should be read, as referring to the bowels of compassion, and to learn to read that word as a term for the emotions, in just the way that we use "guts" to refer to courage, and yet find no difficulty in also speaking (in other contexts) of our guts as the location of various unpleasant bodily functions.
Verses 10-14
My prayer hath power with God; the grace
Unspeakable I now receive;
Through faith I see Thee face to face,
I see Thee face to face, and live!
In vain I have not wept and strove;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.
I know Thee, Savior, who Thou art.
Jesus, the feeble sinner’s friend;
Nor wilt Thou with the night depart.
But stay and love me to the end,
Thy mercies never shall remove;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.
The Sun of righteousness on me
Hath rose with healing in His wings,
Withered my nature’s strength; from Thee
My soul its life and succor brings;
My help is all laid up above;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.
Contented now upon my thigh
I halt, till life’s short journey end;
All helplessness, all weakness I
On Thee alone for strength depend;
Nor have I power from Thee to move:
Thy nature, and Thy name is Love.
Lame as I am, I take the prey,
Hell, earth, and sin, with ease o’ercome;
I leap for joy, pursue my way,
And as a bounding hart fly home,
Through all eternity to prove
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.
These four verses are usually omitted by the hymnals. They are important because they express the joy and the weakness combined. The Christian is completely drained of physical strength. He "halts upon his thigh" (an allusion to Jacob who "halted upon his thigh" 32:31). He can't actually move away, he is now dependent upon God. But notice the repetitive refrains of discovery: Thy nature and thy name is love. For this discovery, achieved in a long dark night of loneliness, he now leaps for joy.
Wesley also rejects the implication (in Jacob's story) that the stranger leaves him alone again in the morning.
No.
For Wesley what we discover is that we are not alone: we remain unable to move away because we are now reliant on God for strength. And God no longer tries to escape from our grasp.
Wesley also invites us to approach death with enthusiasm. "And as a bounding hart fly home". Of course this longing for death ("till life's short journey end" implies that one is nearly there by this stage) is not much to the taste of modern hymn books, so we wouldn't expect to find them offering us any of the joyful attitude with which this hymn concludes.
But notice the reminiscences in verse 12 of Wesley's own hymn Hark the Herald Angels sing: "Hail the sun of righteousness, risen with healing in his wings". Here it is personalised: The sun of righteousness on me hath rose with healing in his wings.
So the birth of Christ is located here in the discovery of the name and nature of that unknown traveller with whom we wrestle in our inner being.
4 The words
Here are the full words unspoiled:
Come, O thou Traveler unknown,
Whom still I hold, but cannot see!
My company before is gone,
And I am left alone with Thee;
With Thee all night I mean to stay,
And wrestle till the break of day.
I need not tell Thee who I am,
My misery and sin declare;
Thyself hast called me by my name,
Look on Thy hands, and read it there;
But who, I ask Thee, who art Thou?
Tell me Thy name, and tell me now.
In vain Thou strugglest to get free,
I never will unloose my hold!
Art Thou the Man that died for me?
The secret of Thy love unfold;
Wrestling, I will not let Thee go,
Till I Thy name, Thy nature know.
Wilt Thou not yet to me reveal
Thy new, unutterable Name?
Tell me, I still beseech Thee, tell;
To know it now resolved I am;
Wrestling, I will not let Thee go,
Till I Thy Name, Thy nature know.
’Tis all in vain to hold Thy tongue
Or touch the hollow of my thigh;
Though every sinew be unstrung,
Out of my arms Thou shalt not fly;
Wrestling I will not let Thee go
Till I Thy name, Thy nature know.
What though my shrinking flesh complain,
And murmur to contend so long?
I rise superior to my pain,
When I am weak, then I am strong
And when my all of strength shall fail,
I shall with the God-man prevail.
My strength is gone, my nature dies,
I sink beneath Thy weighty hand,
Faint to revive, and fall to rise;
I fall, and yet by faith I stand;
I stand and will not let Thee go
Till I Thy Name, Thy nature know.
Yield to me now, for I am weak,
But confident in self-despair;
Speak to my heart, in blessings speak,
Be conquered by my instant prayer;
Speak, or Thou never hence shalt move,
And tell me if Thy Name is Love.
’Tis Love! ’tis Love! Thou diedst for me!
I hear Thy whisper in my heart;
The morning breaks, the shadows flee,
Pure, universal love Thou art;
To me, to all, Thy bowels move;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.
My prayer hath power with God; the grace
Unspeakable I now receive;
Through faith I see Thee face to face,
I see Thee face to face, and live!
In vain I have not wept and strove;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.
I know Thee, Savior, who Thou art.
Jesus, the feeble sinner’s friend;
Nor wilt Thou with the night depart.
But stay and love me to the end,
Thy mercies never shall remove;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.
The Sun of righteousness on me
Hath rose with healing in His wings,
Withered my nature’s strength; from Thee
My soul its life and succor brings;
My help is all laid up above;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.
Contented now upon my thigh
I halt, till life’s short journey end;
All helplessness, all weakness I
On Thee alone for strength depend;
Nor have I power from Thee to move:
Thy nature, and Thy name is Love.
Lame as I am, I take the prey,
Hell, earth, and sin, with ease o’ercome;
I leap for joy, pursue my way,
And as a bounding hart fly home,
Through all eternity to prove
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.
Acknowledgements to the Cyberhymnal web site for information without which this Blog entry would have been impossible.
The topic for today, then: Come, O thou traveller unknown.
Words by Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems, 1742.
There are fourteen verses in the original poem. I shall append the whole lot complete at the end of this entry. Four were included in the English Hymnal, BBC Hymn Book and Songs of Praise, five in the New English Hymnal and Hymns A and M, six in the Public School Hymnal, seven in the Congregational Hymnal. Any advance on seven? I haven't found anything. So none of us has ever sung more than half of this hymn (actually I doubt most of us have ever sung more than about a third).
1 The background:
Genesis 32:24-32. Jacob trying to appease Esau his brother sends on his servants and kinsfolk ahead of him, south towards Seir, with gifts (what gifts! See Genesis 32.13). Jacob himself remains on the north side of the Jabbok river and spends the night there entirely alone.
Except that he is not alone.
He is visited by an unknown stranger who wrestles with him the whole night until the break of day.
Jacob struggles all night with the stranger and towards the break of day, the stranger, finding he is not winning the fight, touches Jacob's thigh and puts it out of joint.
Then there follows this exchange of conversation between Jacob and his mysterious companion:
Stranger: Let me go, for the day breaketh.
Jacob: I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.
Stranger: What is thy name?
Jacob: Jacob.
Stranger: Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.
Jacob: Tell me, I pray thee, thy name?
Stranger: Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name?
Then the stranger blesses Jacob and is gone. Jacob then gives a name to the place: "Peniel", says the author of Genesis, adjusting the name Penuel to get an etymology that has something to do with God's face. "For I have seen God face to face and my life is preserved," says Jacob, to explain the act of naming.
And as he passed over Penuel the sun rose upon him, and he halted upon his thigh (verse 31).
Even for the writer of Genesis we can see that the traditional motif of the struggle with a mythical beast or demon that will vanish at dawn, and the need to know his name in order to achieve power over him, has been transformed into an allegorical struggle with God. The need to know a person's name in order to have power over him has been transformed into the need to know a person's name in order to bless him. But the God of the Old Testament will not reveal his name. This is an uneven struggle in which one participant is in a position to give the blessing and the other is not.
The stranger does not stop to be blessed by Jacob, but he also implies that Jacob already knows who he is. He does not need to be told. "Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name?" says the stranger. The story reminds us of the disciples on the road to Emmaus: "did not out heart burn within us?" they ask when they recognise the Lord at the moment when he blesses the bread, and find that they have been debating the theology of the crucifixion with the man himself (Luke 24:32).
Jacob earns the title Israel (God persists) because he did not yield in the struggle, but endured to the break of day against a God who persists in testing him to the bitter end.
2 Charles Wesley's reflections
Wesley responds to the Jacob story with a reflection on the Christian struggle, perhaps his own in particular. It is said that John Wesley, Charles's brother, broke down in tears as he tried to expound this hymn shortly after Charles's death: he broke down at the third line "My company before is gone, and I am left alone with thee." We may assume that for John this line was not just about Charles's life-long lonely struggle with the God of love, but here John saw his own struggle too. His brother has been sent on before into the far country beyond the river, and now he is left to wrestle alone with the stranger god.
In our Christian life, we encounter a God who does not reveal his name or his nature. We struggle with him throughout our life—indeed the struggle seems to be a struggle to keep hold of him, to prevent him from slipping away from our grasp. It is the fear of being abandoned by God that haunts the Christian in this hymn, the fear of being alone. Time and again we are close to exhaustion, but even in exhaustion and despair we refuse to give up and let go. As we struggle we come to realise in our hearts who it is that we are engaged with, and the realisation yields peace and security at last.
Who is it? The answer is an inspirational Christian take on the Jacob story: the identity of that strange God can only be love. "Thy nature and thy name is love": this refrain features as the last line of each one of the last six verses. That is what we discover-- but we don't discover it because he tells us. We discover it because it dawns on us in the course of a life that is both compelling and demanding.
Finally we become fully aware of the truth of who it was we were engaged with as day breaks: day break in Wesley's poem is the moment of the dawning of truth. 'The morning breaks, the shadows flee, pure universal love thou art' (verse 9). To know the truth is to end the struggle, but not in failure or submission but in success, since the struggle was itself a struggle to find out the name and the nature of the object of one's encounter.
But then there is the lameness, the crippled thigh: God has lamed us in the struggle, and we are now wholly dependent upon God for strength (but joyful with it). "Contented now upon my thigh I halt, till life's short journey end; all helplessness, all weakness I on thee alone for strength depend."
3 Exegesis
Besides that brief summary of what I take to be the general purport of the poem, I now want to offer a small amount of detailed exegesis on particular bits that seem to me to be particularly fine or striking, verse by verse.
Verse 1
Come, O thou Traveller unknown,
Whom still I hold, but cannot see!
My company before is gone,
And I am left alone with Thee;
With Thee all night I mean to stay,
And wrestle till the break of day.
The speaker is, as it were, Jacob. "My company before is gone" refers to the occasion on which Jacob has sent his servants and family on ahead. "And he rose up that night and took his two wives, and his two womenservants, and his eleven sons, and passed over the ford Jabbok. And he took them, and sent them over the brook, and sent over that he had. And Jacob was left alone." Genesis 32:22-4.
The traveller unknown is the stranger who wrestles with Jacob all night "And there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day" Genesis 32.24.
Wesley picks up on the determination and persistence theme in Genesis: he announces his intention to persist in the struggle till dawn from the first: "With thee all night I mean to stay..."
Verse 2
I need not tell Thee who I am,
My misery and sin declare;
Thyself hast called me by my name,
Look on Thy hands, and read it there;
But who, I ask Thee, who art Thou?
Tell me Thy name, and tell me now.
The speaker (ourselves now) dissents from the Genesis version: in Jacob's case the stranger had to ask him his name.
Here, by contrast, God does not need to ask us who we are, nor what our name is.
For firstly our condition declares who we are in terms of nature: our nature is misery and sin.
And secondly our name was given by God himself. "Look on thy hands and read it there": God has our name written on his own hands, perhaps (I suppose) because he made us.
"But who, I ask thee, who art thou?" This introduces the real struggle: we want to find out about God. That is the task. It is not a struggle for God to come to know us, but it is a struggle for us to come to know God.
Verse 3
In vain Thou strugglest to get free,
I never will unloose my hold!
Art Thou the Man that died for me?
The secret of Thy love unfold;
Wrestling, I will not let Thee go,
Till I Thy name, Thy nature know.
The exclamation mark in line 2 is important to the dialogue. It's missing in the NEH.
Again the Jacob story and the Christian one are intertwined. Now it is the stranger who is trying to escape (but that is also hinted at in Jacob's story, for it is the stranger who says "Let me go for the day breaketh" and Jacob demands that he bless him first). Here Wesley envisages us demanding that Christ identify himself: we will not let him go until he has given up the secret of his love.
Art thou the Man that died for me? This has no counterpart in the Jacob story: it alerts us to the fact that we are reading Jacob's wrestling as our wrestling with the Christian faith. And it reminds us of those intimations in the Gospels (and in Christian mythology) that one may meet Christ in the most unlikely characters who turn up at our door unannounced, the poor and the outcasts. Here it is the stranger whose identity is both compelling and worrying. Who are you, stranger? Are you the man who died for me? I know and yet I don't know. I have to find out what the secret is.
Verse 4
Wilt Thou not yet to me reveal
Thy new, unutterable Name?
Tell me, I still beseech Thee, tell;
To know it now resolved I am;
Wrestling, I will not let Thee go,
Till I Thy Name, Thy nature know.
Verses 3, 4,and 5 all end "till I thy name, thy nature know". It is important to have the full set of verses at this stage of the poem, since the length of the struggle (a whole night or a whole lifetime) is measured by this repetitive exchange. The stranger never replies: he just wrestles endlessly to get free. The monologue is the Christian's struggle through the darkness and loneliness: struggling with a silent stranger who never replies. But the Christian never gives up: he demands and demands. He tells the stranger that he will not give up until he knows. It is the determination to continue and never to give in that is captured by these demanding verses. Tell me, I still beseech thee, tell!
"Thy new unutterable name" is crucial to the OT/NT parallel that is being set up. In the Old Testament God had an unutterable name ("I am", or words to that effect) and the unutterability or unknowability of his name is part of the theme in this passage of Genesis. Humans cannot know God's name, nor can they see his face and live. Jacob knows that he has been face to face with God well enough to name the place Peniel on account of it, but he does not discover the name.
But here instead the "new unutterable name" of God is his new testament name. That name is love, though he never tells us so.
Deus caritas est. That fact is for us to deduce. He will not tell us so.
And it is the name of the new covenant because Jesus gave us a new commandment, the commandment to love, on the night before he died. It is that new unutterable name that Wesley suggests we struggle to discover in the stranger who wrestles with us all night until dawn breaks.
Verse 5
’Tis all in vain to hold Thy tongue
Or touch the hollow of my thigh;
Though every sinew be unstrung,
Out of my arms Thou shalt not fly;
Wrestling I will not let Thee go
Till I Thy name, Thy nature know.
"Or touch the hollow of my thigh" alludes, of course, to Jacob's story, where the stranger puts Jacob's thigh out of joint and then the sinew shrivels up and he is lamed.
Wesley goes on "Though every sinew be unstrung..." In other words, he means to say, it is vain to try to overpower me and test my faith by physical trials. Even if every sinew were dislocated, I would still persist. The perseverance is endless. I will not let thee go, not whatever you do to me.
Verse 6
What though my shrinking flesh complain,
And murmur to contend so long?
I rise superior to my pain,
When I am weak, then I am strong
And when my all of strength shall fail,
I shall with the God-man prevail.
The theme of resisting depsite physical exhaustion continues in this and the following verse.
The shrinking flesh alludes to Jacob's thigh: "Therefore the children of Israel eat not of the sinew which shrank, which is upon the thigh, unto this day: because he touched the hollow of Jacob's thigh in the sinew that shrank." (32:32).
Here the pain in the flesh is conceived as complaining and urging the man to stop the struggle, but he continues none the less. "I rise superior to my pain".
Indeed, he now sees that the more his strength fails the closer he is to winning the fight, and when all of his strength fails that is when he will prevail. In other words the destruction of physical strength is part and parcel of acquiring an understanding of the nature of love. There is no accidental connection between frailty in the body and strength in the understanding of God's love.
Verses 7-8
My strength is gone, my nature dies,
I sink beneath Thy weighty hand,
Faint to revive, and fall to rise;
I fall, and yet by faith I stand;
I stand and will not let Thee go
Till I Thy Name, Thy nature know.
Yield to me now, for I am weak,
But confident in self-despair;
Speak to my heart, in blessings speak,
Be conquered by my instant prayer;
Speak, or Thou never hence shalt move,
And tell me if Thy Name is Love.
These two verses complete the process of declining strength in the physical sense and increasing strength in faith.
In verse 7 we get the first hint that faith is what keeps him going as he becomes totally weakened in bodily strength: "I fall and yet by faith I stand". He is still clinging on, but not by any physical strength now.
In verse 8 he no longer has any self-confidence. He is confident in self-despair: that is he is confident precisely because he has given up hope in himself.
Notice that the punctuation of this line is correct here, without a comma, and not in the NEH ("but confident, in self despair").
This is the move that relinquishes self altogether. It is not by confidence in oneself that one will discover the truth about God. And notice that by the end of this verse he is able to suggest what the name is: no longer does he ask what the name is; now he asks whether the name is Love. The suggestion comes from himself, not from the silent stranger. And now is the moment of truth dawning:
Verse 9
’Tis Love! ’tis Love! Thou diedst for me!
I hear Thy whisper in my heart;
The morning breaks, the shadows flee,
Pure, universal love Thou art;
To me, to all, Thy bowels move;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.
Here he discovers the answer. This is the end of the long dark night of struggling.
"To me, to all, thy bowels move". All hymn books that include this verse rewrite this line. The options are to replace bowels with mercies (NEH and most others) or "heart" (Public School Hymn Book). Of the two "heart" is clearly much better. The bowels are the bowels of compassion, because traditionally love and tender feelings were placed in the lower intestines, whereas the heart was the location of the intellect. This is the Aristotelian anatomy, and was normal into the Middle Ages; but it has since been replaced by a more modern anatomy in which the intellect is placed in the head and the tender feelings are placed in the heart.
So to have one's bowels move is to be moved by emotion, to love. That is fine (we do use the idea of being moved by something in just this way). But there's a problem with simply replacing bowels with "heart" to cope with the fact that we no longer think we love with outr bowels, because we don't normally speak of our heart moving ("To me, to all, thy heart doth move" is not obviously meaningful). But then nor does it mean anything to say "To me, to all, thy mercies move", since the whole point was to express an exclamation of having discovered that God feels love towards me and towards all.
I don't see an easy answer to this, except to learn to read the text as it should be read, as referring to the bowels of compassion, and to learn to read that word as a term for the emotions, in just the way that we use "guts" to refer to courage, and yet find no difficulty in also speaking (in other contexts) of our guts as the location of various unpleasant bodily functions.
Verses 10-14
My prayer hath power with God; the grace
Unspeakable I now receive;
Through faith I see Thee face to face,
I see Thee face to face, and live!
In vain I have not wept and strove;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.
I know Thee, Savior, who Thou art.
Jesus, the feeble sinner’s friend;
Nor wilt Thou with the night depart.
But stay and love me to the end,
Thy mercies never shall remove;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.
The Sun of righteousness on me
Hath rose with healing in His wings,
Withered my nature’s strength; from Thee
My soul its life and succor brings;
My help is all laid up above;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.
Contented now upon my thigh
I halt, till life’s short journey end;
All helplessness, all weakness I
On Thee alone for strength depend;
Nor have I power from Thee to move:
Thy nature, and Thy name is Love.
Lame as I am, I take the prey,
Hell, earth, and sin, with ease o’ercome;
I leap for joy, pursue my way,
And as a bounding hart fly home,
Through all eternity to prove
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.
These four verses are usually omitted by the hymnals. They are important because they express the joy and the weakness combined. The Christian is completely drained of physical strength. He "halts upon his thigh" (an allusion to Jacob who "halted upon his thigh" 32:31). He can't actually move away, he is now dependent upon God. But notice the repetitive refrains of discovery: Thy nature and thy name is love. For this discovery, achieved in a long dark night of loneliness, he now leaps for joy.
Wesley also rejects the implication (in Jacob's story) that the stranger leaves him alone again in the morning.
No.
For Wesley what we discover is that we are not alone: we remain unable to move away because we are now reliant on God for strength. And God no longer tries to escape from our grasp.
Wesley also invites us to approach death with enthusiasm. "And as a bounding hart fly home". Of course this longing for death ("till life's short journey end" implies that one is nearly there by this stage) is not much to the taste of modern hymn books, so we wouldn't expect to find them offering us any of the joyful attitude with which this hymn concludes.
But notice the reminiscences in verse 12 of Wesley's own hymn Hark the Herald Angels sing: "Hail the sun of righteousness, risen with healing in his wings". Here it is personalised: The sun of righteousness on me hath rose with healing in his wings.
So the birth of Christ is located here in the discovery of the name and nature of that unknown traveller with whom we wrestle in our inner being.
4 The words
Here are the full words unspoiled:
Come, O thou Traveler unknown,
Whom still I hold, but cannot see!
My company before is gone,
And I am left alone with Thee;
With Thee all night I mean to stay,
And wrestle till the break of day.
I need not tell Thee who I am,
My misery and sin declare;
Thyself hast called me by my name,
Look on Thy hands, and read it there;
But who, I ask Thee, who art Thou?
Tell me Thy name, and tell me now.
In vain Thou strugglest to get free,
I never will unloose my hold!
Art Thou the Man that died for me?
The secret of Thy love unfold;
Wrestling, I will not let Thee go,
Till I Thy name, Thy nature know.
Wilt Thou not yet to me reveal
Thy new, unutterable Name?
Tell me, I still beseech Thee, tell;
To know it now resolved I am;
Wrestling, I will not let Thee go,
Till I Thy Name, Thy nature know.
’Tis all in vain to hold Thy tongue
Or touch the hollow of my thigh;
Though every sinew be unstrung,
Out of my arms Thou shalt not fly;
Wrestling I will not let Thee go
Till I Thy name, Thy nature know.
What though my shrinking flesh complain,
And murmur to contend so long?
I rise superior to my pain,
When I am weak, then I am strong
And when my all of strength shall fail,
I shall with the God-man prevail.
My strength is gone, my nature dies,
I sink beneath Thy weighty hand,
Faint to revive, and fall to rise;
I fall, and yet by faith I stand;
I stand and will not let Thee go
Till I Thy Name, Thy nature know.
Yield to me now, for I am weak,
But confident in self-despair;
Speak to my heart, in blessings speak,
Be conquered by my instant prayer;
Speak, or Thou never hence shalt move,
And tell me if Thy Name is Love.
’Tis Love! ’tis Love! Thou diedst for me!
I hear Thy whisper in my heart;
The morning breaks, the shadows flee,
Pure, universal love Thou art;
To me, to all, Thy bowels move;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.
My prayer hath power with God; the grace
Unspeakable I now receive;
Through faith I see Thee face to face,
I see Thee face to face, and live!
In vain I have not wept and strove;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.
I know Thee, Savior, who Thou art.
Jesus, the feeble sinner’s friend;
Nor wilt Thou with the night depart.
But stay and love me to the end,
Thy mercies never shall remove;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.
The Sun of righteousness on me
Hath rose with healing in His wings,
Withered my nature’s strength; from Thee
My soul its life and succor brings;
My help is all laid up above;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.
Contented now upon my thigh
I halt, till life’s short journey end;
All helplessness, all weakness I
On Thee alone for strength depend;
Nor have I power from Thee to move:
Thy nature, and Thy name is Love.
Lame as I am, I take the prey,
Hell, earth, and sin, with ease o’ercome;
I leap for joy, pursue my way,
And as a bounding hart fly home,
Through all eternity to prove
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.
Acknowledgements to the Cyberhymnal web site for information without which this Blog entry would have been impossible.
Sunday, March 12, 2006
All my hope on God is founded
Unfortunately I missed the sermon on this hymn today (and I missed singing the hymn) because I was instructing the children in the parish room. So forgive me if what I say here betrays ignorance of what was said in the pulpit.
There's nothing wrong with this hymn in the New English Hymnal (thankfully) but in the absence of any horrors to report about that book today I thought I might say a bit about verse 2 of All my hope, and request information from those who have access to bad hymn books that bowdlerise that verse. I know that I've been to places where the words are badly mangled.
The hymn is by Robert Bridges (published 1899), inspired by, but by no means translating, Meine Hoffnung stehet feste by Joachim Neander.
One thing that clearly causes confusion is this (in verse 2):
Pride of man and earthly glory,
Sword and crown betray his trust;
What with care and toil he buildeth,
Tower and temple fall to dust.
Now who are the 'he' and the 'his' in this verse?
In the first verse "he" was God (He doth still my trust renew... through change and chance He guideth...He alone calls my heart to be His own).
Some hymnals (including those on the internet: those are the only examples I've found, but as I say I don't have immediate access to the likely culprits such as Hymns Old and New or Mission Praise)--some hymnals, as I say, put in some capital letters to help us to see whether 'he' refers to God or not at various places in this hymn. Well that's all fine and helpful, or it would be, if they didn't put a capital H on both 'his' and 'he' in this verse.
But alas they do.
And that's plainly wrong.
"What with care and toil he buildeth" clearly refers to man: it's man who builds towers and temples with toil and care, and then they fall to dust. In contrast to that, says Bridges, "God's power, hour by hour, is my temple and my tower." Introducing that with "But" shows that this is in contrast to the towers and temples that others put such effort into.
So we should understand that the efforts of human beings are worthless when they build temples that are destined to fall to dust (unlike the temple that is God's power). "He", then, in that sentence should not have a capital H, for it is not God who puts care and toil into building towers, is it?
(I suppose there's another interpretation that says that we men are the temple that God builds with care and then (to his disappointment) we fall to dust--but surely that is far too hopeless a picture of God's powerlessness to save, and anyway it's betrayed as false by the reference to God by name in "But God's power..." which shows that we were not talking about God in the previous sentence. ----Previous sentence it would be if the NEH had a full stop there, as is required by the sense.)
What about the previous "his" in line 2 of verse 2? "Sword and crown betray his trust." Should that have a capital H (or be rewritten as "betray God's trust": I've seen that somewhere)? Let's think about it.
If we read that as God's trust, then we are saying that the human endeavours in which we take earthly pride, including warfare and political power (sword and crown) betray God's trust in us. We have to understand that there is something we are trusted to do by God, and all those actions of ours let him down. What is that? I see no indication that there is any mention of God trusting us. Rather the hymn is about us trusting God.
Better then to read "betray his trust" to mean "betray man's trust". That is, we put our trust in earthly glory, in princes and armies, in things that we think won't let us down or will save us from trouble. But all these things betray our trust. Our towers and temples fall to dust. It is our trust that is betrayed not God's, but if we trust in God, he will not let us down. This then makes clear sense of why the next "he" is also man.
What's more it's obvious that this has to be the sense if we look at the passage of I Timothy 6.17 from which Neander, and thence Bridges, got his inspiration. This is what he is paraphrasing: "As for the rich in this world, charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on uncertain riches but on God who richly furnishes us with everything to enjoy."
So the thought is "Don't rely on the powers that be here, but on the power of God, because the powers that be here on earth let you down, but God doesn't".
So there should be no capital letter on 'he' or 'his'. Both refer to man, not God.
As for the version of this hymn that you can find at http://www.hos3.com/hos3/archives/2005/12/219r_all_my_hop.html, aaaagh!
There's nothing wrong with this hymn in the New English Hymnal (thankfully) but in the absence of any horrors to report about that book today I thought I might say a bit about verse 2 of All my hope, and request information from those who have access to bad hymn books that bowdlerise that verse. I know that I've been to places where the words are badly mangled.
The hymn is by Robert Bridges (published 1899), inspired by, but by no means translating, Meine Hoffnung stehet feste by Joachim Neander.
One thing that clearly causes confusion is this (in verse 2):
Pride of man and earthly glory,
Sword and crown betray his trust;
What with care and toil he buildeth,
Tower and temple fall to dust.
Now who are the 'he' and the 'his' in this verse?
In the first verse "he" was God (He doth still my trust renew... through change and chance He guideth...He alone calls my heart to be His own).
Some hymnals (including those on the internet: those are the only examples I've found, but as I say I don't have immediate access to the likely culprits such as Hymns Old and New or Mission Praise)--some hymnals, as I say, put in some capital letters to help us to see whether 'he' refers to God or not at various places in this hymn. Well that's all fine and helpful, or it would be, if they didn't put a capital H on both 'his' and 'he' in this verse.
But alas they do.
And that's plainly wrong.
"What with care and toil he buildeth" clearly refers to man: it's man who builds towers and temples with toil and care, and then they fall to dust. In contrast to that, says Bridges, "God's power, hour by hour, is my temple and my tower." Introducing that with "But" shows that this is in contrast to the towers and temples that others put such effort into.
So we should understand that the efforts of human beings are worthless when they build temples that are destined to fall to dust (unlike the temple that is God's power). "He", then, in that sentence should not have a capital H, for it is not God who puts care and toil into building towers, is it?
(I suppose there's another interpretation that says that we men are the temple that God builds with care and then (to his disappointment) we fall to dust--but surely that is far too hopeless a picture of God's powerlessness to save, and anyway it's betrayed as false by the reference to God by name in "But God's power..." which shows that we were not talking about God in the previous sentence. ----Previous sentence it would be if the NEH had a full stop there, as is required by the sense.)
What about the previous "his" in line 2 of verse 2? "Sword and crown betray his trust." Should that have a capital H (or be rewritten as "betray God's trust": I've seen that somewhere)? Let's think about it.
If we read that as God's trust, then we are saying that the human endeavours in which we take earthly pride, including warfare and political power (sword and crown) betray God's trust in us. We have to understand that there is something we are trusted to do by God, and all those actions of ours let him down. What is that? I see no indication that there is any mention of God trusting us. Rather the hymn is about us trusting God.
Better then to read "betray his trust" to mean "betray man's trust". That is, we put our trust in earthly glory, in princes and armies, in things that we think won't let us down or will save us from trouble. But all these things betray our trust. Our towers and temples fall to dust. It is our trust that is betrayed not God's, but if we trust in God, he will not let us down. This then makes clear sense of why the next "he" is also man.
What's more it's obvious that this has to be the sense if we look at the passage of I Timothy 6.17 from which Neander, and thence Bridges, got his inspiration. This is what he is paraphrasing: "As for the rich in this world, charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on uncertain riches but on God who richly furnishes us with everything to enjoy."
So the thought is "Don't rely on the powers that be here, but on the power of God, because the powers that be here on earth let you down, but God doesn't".
So there should be no capital letter on 'he' or 'his'. Both refer to man, not God.
As for the version of this hymn that you can find at http://www.hos3.com/hos3/archives/2005/12/219r_all_my_hop.html, aaaagh!
Sunday, March 05, 2006
Forty Days and Forty Nights
PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS ENTRY IS PARTLY WRONG, BECAUSE I USED A BAD SOURCE FOR SMYTTAN'S ORIGINAL WORDS. I HOPE TO REVISE THE ENTRY AND REISSUE IT AS A SECOND EDITION AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.
The first sunday in Lent wouldn't be the first sunday in Lent if we didn't have Forty days and forty nights on the hymn list. And this year, being the year of Mark in the Lectionary, it fits quite well, with its emphasis on Christ's superhuman fasting and endurance during his period in the Wilderness, rather than on the more human side of the temptations that we were looking at in connection with Lead Us Heavenly Father Lead Us (see above, January 15th).
The hymn that we know and love is a composite created originally for Hymns A&M in its first edition (1861). It is partly based on some verses by G.H. Smyttan (1822-70) but heavily altered by Francis Pott (1832-1909). Smyttan published his verses in the Penny Post in 1856, but it's hard to discover exactly what he wrote, and what has been re-written by others. Several of the hymnals on the Web claim to be giving us words by Smyttan, but they actually give us words that are identical to the ones we know, revised by Pott. By contrast, the only one I've found that appears to have Smyttan's original words for verse 3 is a powerpoint file of the hymn downloadable at familyfriendlychurches.org.uk/midihymns/HP130.ppt. But that claims, rather oddly, that the words it gives are by Smyttan and Pott.
Verse 3 is clearly the one that everyone thinks they must have a go at improving.
Here's what I believe Smyttan wrote for verse 3:
Shall not we thy sorrow share,
Learn thy discipline of will,
And, like thee, by fast and prayer
Wrestle with the powers of ill?
There's actually not much wrong with that. It seems to express something of the idea that the lenten discipline is to be modelled on a discipline that was meaningful to Christ himself, in a life in which fasting and prayer were part and parcel of a struggle against evil. Perhaps the phrase "the powers of ill" is not awfully felicitous, but the point it is making is a good one.
Francis Pott offered a re-write of that verse as follows:
Shall not we thy sorrow share,
And from earthly joys abstain,
Fasting with unceasing prayer,
Glad with thee to suffer pain?
In the English Hymnal 'sorrow' in the first line of that Pott verse has become 'watchings', and in many hymnals 'sorrow' has become 'sorrows'. In one or other of those variants, this is the verse that most of us habitually sing, if we were brought up on Hymns A&M, the English Hymnal, the Public School Hymn Book or whatever.
Theologically, I think it has to be said that the verse by Pott is less good, than the verse by Smyttan. There is no indication of why we should want to engage in these kinds of abstinence and pain (other than solidarity with the apparently pointless sufferings Jesus was undergoing at the time). There is no hint that it might be part of a programme of wrestling against the powers of evil. So in that sense it does appear just to glorify the fun of pain for the sake of pain, and abstinence from earthly joys as if there was something obviously wrong with them.
But as poetry I think there is much to be said for Pott's verse, especially in the version with 'watchings' that appeared in the English Hymnal. The first line has a pleasing pair of alliterations on the sh and w sounds ("Shall not we thy watchings share"). The juxtaposition of the rejection of earthly joys in line 2 and with the notion of taking up pains gladly in the last line, which points up the contrast between the apparent joys of earthly things and the real joys of spiritual commitment, is nicely done; indeed the very oxymoronic structure of the last line, starting with 'glad' and ending with 'pain' is a treat. And the third line, "fasting with unceasing prayer", is neat and comfortable: it fits the metre and rhyme scheme smoothly and without any grammatical awkwardness.
The New English Hymnal follows Songs of Praise in rejecting both Pott's re-write, and Smyttan's original for verse 3, and susbstituting instead something that was created by Percy Dearmer (though the NEH doesn't admit that). For the last appearance of Percy Dearmer in this Blog see above, 12th February. Actually probably the NEH is right not to name Dearmer, but just to put in a double dagger, because they can't even bring themselves to leave that version alone either.
Here's what Dearmer wrote for verse 3:
Let us thy endurance share
And from earthly greed abstain,
With thee watching unto prayer,
With thee strong to suffer pain.
Here we are not glad to suffer pain with Jesus, but rather strong to suffer our own pain perhaps (and do I sense that we get our strength from him, rather than trying to be strong for him?).
We do not abstain from earthly joys but from earthly greed, which is presumably an excessive desire for earthly pleasures. So this is not asceticism or lenten fasting but merely standard virtue, not being greedy. I think that rather reduces the significance of Jesus's fasting in the wilderness: it was perhaps more than just a rejection of greed, no?
And the watchings or sorrows have gone, and have become 'endurance' instead. So again there is less active engagement in extra disciplines— we are not so much invited to share in Jesus's expedition into the wilderness but rather to see our everyday lives as providing opportunities for endurance of suffering and pain (though this is slightly modified by the idea of watching unto prayer in line 3).
And notice the hiatus in the first line of Dearmer's verse: "thy endurance" is not easy to sing without ending up with a word that seems to be "yendurance".
The editors of the NEH have chosen Dearmer's verse, which seems to me, of the three the worst both poetically and theologically. However, they have eliminated the hiatus in the first line by changing 'thy' to 'thine'.
They've also got rid of the greed and put back the joys by changing line 2 to say "And awhile from joys abstain". But that's a disaster too because surely it isn't all joys we abstain from (after all, as Pott had taught us to sing, we are glad and take pleasure in the spiritual endeavours that we can share with Christ). So we needed that 'earthly joys' phrase because it showed that we are not miserable people and kill-joys—we are just checking ourselves and re-orienting ourselves to the real joys, the joys of being a disciple and taking upon ourselves the discipline that goes with that.
Those thoughts, about the worthless joys that we give up and the worthwhile joys that we obtain thereby, were put into this hymn by Francis Pott. They were not the work of Smyttan (it seems, if I've reconstructed this correctly). But they do have something to tell us about the meaning of the lenten fast. But do I detect in the NEH editors' preference for the verse by Dearmer some kind of inability to understand either the poetry of Pott's version, or its delight in ascetic commitment?
Do they perhaps think that abstaining from joy is what it's all about?
How sad! No wonder they think we only want to do it for a while.
.
The first sunday in Lent wouldn't be the first sunday in Lent if we didn't have Forty days and forty nights on the hymn list. And this year, being the year of Mark in the Lectionary, it fits quite well, with its emphasis on Christ's superhuman fasting and endurance during his period in the Wilderness, rather than on the more human side of the temptations that we were looking at in connection with Lead Us Heavenly Father Lead Us (see above, January 15th).
The hymn that we know and love is a composite created originally for Hymns A&M in its first edition (1861). It is partly based on some verses by G.H. Smyttan (1822-70) but heavily altered by Francis Pott (1832-1909). Smyttan published his verses in the Penny Post in 1856, but it's hard to discover exactly what he wrote, and what has been re-written by others. Several of the hymnals on the Web claim to be giving us words by Smyttan, but they actually give us words that are identical to the ones we know, revised by Pott. By contrast, the only one I've found that appears to have Smyttan's original words for verse 3 is a powerpoint file of the hymn downloadable at familyfriendlychurches.org.uk/midihymns/HP130.ppt. But that claims, rather oddly, that the words it gives are by Smyttan and Pott.
Verse 3 is clearly the one that everyone thinks they must have a go at improving.
Here's what I believe Smyttan wrote for verse 3:
Shall not we thy sorrow share,
Learn thy discipline of will,
And, like thee, by fast and prayer
Wrestle with the powers of ill?
There's actually not much wrong with that. It seems to express something of the idea that the lenten discipline is to be modelled on a discipline that was meaningful to Christ himself, in a life in which fasting and prayer were part and parcel of a struggle against evil. Perhaps the phrase "the powers of ill" is not awfully felicitous, but the point it is making is a good one.
Francis Pott offered a re-write of that verse as follows:
Shall not we thy sorrow share,
And from earthly joys abstain,
Fasting with unceasing prayer,
Glad with thee to suffer pain?
In the English Hymnal 'sorrow' in the first line of that Pott verse has become 'watchings', and in many hymnals 'sorrow' has become 'sorrows'. In one or other of those variants, this is the verse that most of us habitually sing, if we were brought up on Hymns A&M, the English Hymnal, the Public School Hymn Book or whatever.
Theologically, I think it has to be said that the verse by Pott is less good, than the verse by Smyttan. There is no indication of why we should want to engage in these kinds of abstinence and pain (other than solidarity with the apparently pointless sufferings Jesus was undergoing at the time). There is no hint that it might be part of a programme of wrestling against the powers of evil. So in that sense it does appear just to glorify the fun of pain for the sake of pain, and abstinence from earthly joys as if there was something obviously wrong with them.
But as poetry I think there is much to be said for Pott's verse, especially in the version with 'watchings' that appeared in the English Hymnal. The first line has a pleasing pair of alliterations on the sh and w sounds ("Shall not we thy watchings share"). The juxtaposition of the rejection of earthly joys in line 2 and with the notion of taking up pains gladly in the last line, which points up the contrast between the apparent joys of earthly things and the real joys of spiritual commitment, is nicely done; indeed the very oxymoronic structure of the last line, starting with 'glad' and ending with 'pain' is a treat. And the third line, "fasting with unceasing prayer", is neat and comfortable: it fits the metre and rhyme scheme smoothly and without any grammatical awkwardness.
The New English Hymnal follows Songs of Praise in rejecting both Pott's re-write, and Smyttan's original for verse 3, and susbstituting instead something that was created by Percy Dearmer (though the NEH doesn't admit that). For the last appearance of Percy Dearmer in this Blog see above, 12th February. Actually probably the NEH is right not to name Dearmer, but just to put in a double dagger, because they can't even bring themselves to leave that version alone either.
Here's what Dearmer wrote for verse 3:
Let us thy endurance share
And from earthly greed abstain,
With thee watching unto prayer,
With thee strong to suffer pain.
Here we are not glad to suffer pain with Jesus, but rather strong to suffer our own pain perhaps (and do I sense that we get our strength from him, rather than trying to be strong for him?).
We do not abstain from earthly joys but from earthly greed, which is presumably an excessive desire for earthly pleasures. So this is not asceticism or lenten fasting but merely standard virtue, not being greedy. I think that rather reduces the significance of Jesus's fasting in the wilderness: it was perhaps more than just a rejection of greed, no?
And the watchings or sorrows have gone, and have become 'endurance' instead. So again there is less active engagement in extra disciplines— we are not so much invited to share in Jesus's expedition into the wilderness but rather to see our everyday lives as providing opportunities for endurance of suffering and pain (though this is slightly modified by the idea of watching unto prayer in line 3).
And notice the hiatus in the first line of Dearmer's verse: "thy endurance" is not easy to sing without ending up with a word that seems to be "yendurance".
The editors of the NEH have chosen Dearmer's verse, which seems to me, of the three the worst both poetically and theologically. However, they have eliminated the hiatus in the first line by changing 'thy' to 'thine'.
They've also got rid of the greed and put back the joys by changing line 2 to say "And awhile from joys abstain". But that's a disaster too because surely it isn't all joys we abstain from (after all, as Pott had taught us to sing, we are glad and take pleasure in the spiritual endeavours that we can share with Christ). So we needed that 'earthly joys' phrase because it showed that we are not miserable people and kill-joys—we are just checking ourselves and re-orienting ourselves to the real joys, the joys of being a disciple and taking upon ourselves the discipline that goes with that.
Those thoughts, about the worthless joys that we give up and the worthwhile joys that we obtain thereby, were put into this hymn by Francis Pott. They were not the work of Smyttan (it seems, if I've reconstructed this correctly). But they do have something to tell us about the meaning of the lenten fast. But do I detect in the NEH editors' preference for the verse by Dearmer some kind of inability to understand either the poetry of Pott's version, or its delight in ascetic commitment?
Do they perhaps think that abstaining from joy is what it's all about?
How sad! No wonder they think we only want to do it for a while.
.
Monday, February 27, 2006
Addendum on NEH438: "man" rhymes with "plan"
Rather than re-write what I wrote yesterday, I might as well add this observation separately.
It struck me as I was shutting down my computer last night that I'd missed the most obvious piece of incompetence on the part of the NEH editors, the one that will really make you laugh (or squirm). How's this for poetry? Compare these two quatrains:
(a) verse 3 of NEH 438
Praise to God whose Word incarnate
Glorified the flesh of man,
Deeds and words and death and rising
Tell the grace in heaven's plan.
(b) verse 4 of NEH 438
Praise to God who through his Spirit
Ever speaks his word to man;
Spirit, dwelling deep within us,
Show us all the Father's plan.
Were they a bit stuck for rhymes? Man, plan, man, plan... Or are they obsessed with the idea that God has a plan? This is bureaucratic business planning taken to extremes! The incarnation is a corporate presentation demonstrating to potential customers that the organisation has aims and objectives, a corporate strategy and is meeting its targets. Or are they determined that we must remember that the word 'man' can be used generically to refer to the human race and not just to male individuals, so they think it is necessary to add it, several times over, to a hymn that had been rather keen to avoid even calling God 'he' let alone implying that we were all of the masculine gender. And having added man all over the place, they had to find something to rhyme with it so they put in "plan" all over the place?
None of that unimaginative doggerel in the original of course. On the contrary Brooks himself wrote this of the incarnation:
Thanks to God whose Word incarnate
heights and depths of life did share.
Deeds and words and death and rising,
grace in human form declare.
and this, of the spirit
Thanks to God whose Word is answered
by the Spirit's voice within.
Here we drink of joy unmeasured,
life redeemed from death and sin.
Now who would you say was the better poet (and better theologian)?
It struck me as I was shutting down my computer last night that I'd missed the most obvious piece of incompetence on the part of the NEH editors, the one that will really make you laugh (or squirm). How's this for poetry? Compare these two quatrains:
(a) verse 3 of NEH 438
Praise to God whose Word incarnate
Glorified the flesh of man,
Deeds and words and death and rising
Tell the grace in heaven's plan.
(b) verse 4 of NEH 438
Praise to God who through his Spirit
Ever speaks his word to man;
Spirit, dwelling deep within us,
Show us all the Father's plan.
Were they a bit stuck for rhymes? Man, plan, man, plan... Or are they obsessed with the idea that God has a plan? This is bureaucratic business planning taken to extremes! The incarnation is a corporate presentation demonstrating to potential customers that the organisation has aims and objectives, a corporate strategy and is meeting its targets. Or are they determined that we must remember that the word 'man' can be used generically to refer to the human race and not just to male individuals, so they think it is necessary to add it, several times over, to a hymn that had been rather keen to avoid even calling God 'he' let alone implying that we were all of the masculine gender. And having added man all over the place, they had to find something to rhyme with it so they put in "plan" all over the place?
None of that unimaginative doggerel in the original of course. On the contrary Brooks himself wrote this of the incarnation:
Thanks to God whose Word incarnate
heights and depths of life did share.
Deeds and words and death and rising,
grace in human form declare.
and this, of the spirit
Thanks to God whose Word is answered
by the Spirit's voice within.
Here we drink of joy unmeasured,
life redeemed from death and sin.
Now who would you say was the better poet (and better theologian)?
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Praise God for his open word
Annie e-mailed me today to observe that she (and the Selwyn choir) had been singing in Peterborough yesterday and had encountered a hymn she didn't know, number 438 in the New English Hymnal.
The hymn (whose first line is "Praise to God whose word was spoken") is set to St Raphael in the NEH. The metre is 87 87 47 (same metre as Cwm Rhondda). Selwyn choir were agreed (I gather) that they liked the hymn.
But it has a double obelus in the NEH, so Annie's suspicions were aroused. Should we like this hymn as it is or should we prefer it as it ought to be?
Well I've done a little research. It's not easy because they've changed the first word of the first line, so you can't readily find it in the index of first lines of other resources, but a bit of help from dear Google enabled me to make progress, and I can now report the following.
The real hymn goes
Thanks to God whose Word was spoken
in the deed that made the earth.
His the voice that called a nation;
his the fires that tried her worth.
God has spoken:
praise God for his open word.
This is followed by a further four verses tracing the idea of God's Word as creative (verse 1), Incarnate (verse 2), delivered in scripture (verse 3), delivered orally throughout the world (verse 4) and continuing to speak to us today (verse 5). Each verse finishes with "God has spoken, Praise God for his open word", except the last one which goes "God is speaking: praise God for his open word."
The hymn was written in 1954 by a URC minister called Reginald Thomas Brooks, for the 150th anniversary of the Bible Society. Hence the theme of thanks for the Word of God, and the idea of the "open word", open for us to read. It is a teaching hymn, as Frank Colquhoun points out (A hymn companion page 146): "The virtue of the hymn lies in its teaching character. It helps us to understand what is meant by the 'Word of God'".
It's not clear to me who is responsible for the massive re-writing that has happened to this hymn en route to the New English Hymnal. That book attributes copyright to precisely the same owner of copyright as the original words (which can be found on the Oremus Hymnal at http://www.oremus.org/hymnal/t/t062.html ). It doesn't confess to the fact that the editors have written something rather different, although the Oremus Hymnal evidently understand that the NEH owns copyright of the new words and they therefore don't supply the NEH words online.
So what have the NEH editors done? Here are some of the things:
They've changed "thanks" to "praise" in the first line of every verse. That's why I couldn't find it to begin with.
They've changed "Praise God for his open word" to "Praise him for his saving word" in the last line of each verse, adding a capital letter on "Word" in the verse about the incarnate word.
They've cut out one verse (the one about the word spread orally throughout the world).
They've changed the order of the verses so that we get the one about the scriptures before the one about the incarnate Word. This is interesting theologically: I'll come back to it.
They've rewritten the fourth line of the Incarnation verse, stupidly, so it no longer spells out the significance of the incarnation, nor makes grammatical sense (though they only needed to retain the full stop that it had originally to remedy the latter fault). Now we are told "Deeds and words and death and rising Tell the grace in heaven's plan" whereas Brooks wrote "Deeds and words and death and rising, Grace in human form declare."
They've rewritten the last verse fairly heavily to make it talk about God speaking to us through his spirit, not our spirit within responding to God speaking to us direct. In the course of this they've added some gratuitous man-speak, and they've put in a silly bit about showing us the Father's plan — compare these:
Original:
Thanks to God whose Word is answered
by the Spirit's voice within.
Here we drink of joy unmeasured,
life redeemed from death and sin.
God is speaking, God is speaking:
praise God for his open word.
New English Hymnal substitute:
Praise to God who through his Spirit
Ever speaks his word to man;
Spirit dwelling deep within us,
Show us all the Father's plan.
God is speaking:
Praise him for his saving word.
Now (taking up the thought I left hanging earlier) why did they move the scriptures to before the incarnation? Well, I suppose they thought that chronologically, God was speaking to us through the scriptures before Jesus was born, so the order of events goes creation and the law (verse 1), then some written words of scripture, then the incarnate word, and then us.
But that's not as clear as all that, because (a) it's a bit limiting to think only of chronological order, and the more significant thing is the order of priority in the Godhead, and also a sort of order of increasing spread outwards from God. God the creator is, as it were, the first move towards making his word accessible and open to the world. Then there's the giving of his very self into the world in the incarnation. Then there's the distribution in the scriptures, as the written word, spoken by him but not as close to being God himself as the incarnate word. And then there's our distribution of the oral word at second hand. In a sense those are also chronologically ordered in the same way, since the canon of scripture for Christianity was only assembled after the Incarnation, even if it includes some texts written earlier.
So I see no good reason to intervene and change those verses round. It's either pointless interference or it's theologically suspect.
But if it's a nice hymn (let's agree it might be a nice hymn, especially if sung to a good tune) then I think it's probably even nicer if sung in the original words with their biblical theme, and not messed up by the editors of that new hymn book.
The hymn (whose first line is "Praise to God whose word was spoken") is set to St Raphael in the NEH. The metre is 87 87 47 (same metre as Cwm Rhondda). Selwyn choir were agreed (I gather) that they liked the hymn.
But it has a double obelus in the NEH, so Annie's suspicions were aroused. Should we like this hymn as it is or should we prefer it as it ought to be?
Well I've done a little research. It's not easy because they've changed the first word of the first line, so you can't readily find it in the index of first lines of other resources, but a bit of help from dear Google enabled me to make progress, and I can now report the following.
The real hymn goes
Thanks to God whose Word was spoken
in the deed that made the earth.
His the voice that called a nation;
his the fires that tried her worth.
God has spoken:
praise God for his open word.
This is followed by a further four verses tracing the idea of God's Word as creative (verse 1), Incarnate (verse 2), delivered in scripture (verse 3), delivered orally throughout the world (verse 4) and continuing to speak to us today (verse 5). Each verse finishes with "God has spoken, Praise God for his open word", except the last one which goes "God is speaking: praise God for his open word."
The hymn was written in 1954 by a URC minister called Reginald Thomas Brooks, for the 150th anniversary of the Bible Society. Hence the theme of thanks for the Word of God, and the idea of the "open word", open for us to read. It is a teaching hymn, as Frank Colquhoun points out (A hymn companion page 146): "The virtue of the hymn lies in its teaching character. It helps us to understand what is meant by the 'Word of God'".
It's not clear to me who is responsible for the massive re-writing that has happened to this hymn en route to the New English Hymnal. That book attributes copyright to precisely the same owner of copyright as the original words (which can be found on the Oremus Hymnal at http://www.oremus.org/hymnal/t/t062.html ). It doesn't confess to the fact that the editors have written something rather different, although the Oremus Hymnal evidently understand that the NEH owns copyright of the new words and they therefore don't supply the NEH words online.
So what have the NEH editors done? Here are some of the things:
They've changed "thanks" to "praise" in the first line of every verse. That's why I couldn't find it to begin with.
They've changed "Praise God for his open word" to "Praise him for his saving word" in the last line of each verse, adding a capital letter on "Word" in the verse about the incarnate word.
They've cut out one verse (the one about the word spread orally throughout the world).
They've changed the order of the verses so that we get the one about the scriptures before the one about the incarnate Word. This is interesting theologically: I'll come back to it.
They've rewritten the fourth line of the Incarnation verse, stupidly, so it no longer spells out the significance of the incarnation, nor makes grammatical sense (though they only needed to retain the full stop that it had originally to remedy the latter fault). Now we are told "Deeds and words and death and rising Tell the grace in heaven's plan" whereas Brooks wrote "Deeds and words and death and rising, Grace in human form declare."
They've rewritten the last verse fairly heavily to make it talk about God speaking to us through his spirit, not our spirit within responding to God speaking to us direct. In the course of this they've added some gratuitous man-speak, and they've put in a silly bit about showing us the Father's plan — compare these:
Original:
Thanks to God whose Word is answered
by the Spirit's voice within.
Here we drink of joy unmeasured,
life redeemed from death and sin.
God is speaking, God is speaking:
praise God for his open word.
New English Hymnal substitute:
Praise to God who through his Spirit
Ever speaks his word to man;
Spirit dwelling deep within us,
Show us all the Father's plan.
God is speaking:
Praise him for his saving word.
Now (taking up the thought I left hanging earlier) why did they move the scriptures to before the incarnation? Well, I suppose they thought that chronologically, God was speaking to us through the scriptures before Jesus was born, so the order of events goes creation and the law (verse 1), then some written words of scripture, then the incarnate word, and then us.
But that's not as clear as all that, because (a) it's a bit limiting to think only of chronological order, and the more significant thing is the order of priority in the Godhead, and also a sort of order of increasing spread outwards from God. God the creator is, as it were, the first move towards making his word accessible and open to the world. Then there's the giving of his very self into the world in the incarnation. Then there's the distribution in the scriptures, as the written word, spoken by him but not as close to being God himself as the incarnate word. And then there's our distribution of the oral word at second hand. In a sense those are also chronologically ordered in the same way, since the canon of scripture for Christianity was only assembled after the Incarnation, even if it includes some texts written earlier.
So I see no good reason to intervene and change those verses round. It's either pointless interference or it's theologically suspect.
But if it's a nice hymn (let's agree it might be a nice hymn, especially if sung to a good tune) then I think it's probably even nicer if sung in the original words with their biblical theme, and not messed up by the editors of that new hymn book.
Sunday, February 19, 2006
Let all that dwell above the sky
Today was a good day for hymns with very little noticeable interference from the editors as far as I could see.
However, there was a single dagger on the hymn "Come let us join our cheerful songs" so I thought I'd better look it up and see what had been changed there.
Actually I can't see that they've done anything except leave out one of Isaac Watts's original verses (there were once five but we normally only get four). The missing one, verse 4 out of 5, goes thus:
Let all that dwell above the sky,
And air and earth and seas,
Conspire to lift thy glories high,
And speak thine endless praise.
I'm not sure I'm very impressed with this verse.
I don't think 'seas' rhymes at all well with 'praise'.
And I'm not entirely sure who the creatures are that dwell above the sky (angels, I presume), but it seems unnecessary to add that they also dwell above the air and earth and seas, since the sky is, I think, always above those other things, and hence if you live above the sky it goes without saying that you live above the rest.
Also it would be more appropriate to think that the angels were going to "conspire" with those of us who live on the earth and in the air and under the seas.
That would lead nicely into the last verse (The whole creation join in one...).
So I don't think Isaac really managed to say what he wanted to say in verse 4. Perhaps it is, all things considered, kinder to leave it out.
But of course, I should be more than delighted to hear from anyone who can persuade me that there's more merit in the verse than I'm currently seeing.
However, there was a single dagger on the hymn "Come let us join our cheerful songs" so I thought I'd better look it up and see what had been changed there.
Actually I can't see that they've done anything except leave out one of Isaac Watts's original verses (there were once five but we normally only get four). The missing one, verse 4 out of 5, goes thus:
Let all that dwell above the sky,
And air and earth and seas,
Conspire to lift thy glories high,
And speak thine endless praise.
I'm not sure I'm very impressed with this verse.
I don't think 'seas' rhymes at all well with 'praise'.
And I'm not entirely sure who the creatures are that dwell above the sky (angels, I presume), but it seems unnecessary to add that they also dwell above the air and earth and seas, since the sky is, I think, always above those other things, and hence if you live above the sky it goes without saying that you live above the rest.
Also it would be more appropriate to think that the angels were going to "conspire" with those of us who live on the earth and in the air and under the seas.
That would lead nicely into the last verse (The whole creation join in one...).
So I don't think Isaac really managed to say what he wanted to say in verse 4. Perhaps it is, all things considered, kinder to leave it out.
But of course, I should be more than delighted to hear from anyone who can persuade me that there's more merit in the verse than I'm currently seeing.
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Hobgoblin nor foul fiend
Today's hymn is not quite the usual story.
When Percy Dearmer and his companions were inventing the English Hymnal in 1906, they included a version of the poem "Who would true valour see" from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Prior to the English Hymnal no one had used Bunyan's poem as a hymn. It didn't appear in Hymns Ancient and Modern until the second supplement of 1916, ten years after the English Hymnal had invented it.
However, Percy Dearmer didn't exactly include Bunyan's poem just like that. Rather he wrote a new hymn, loosely based on Bunyan's words and rhythm. His hymn goes "He who would valiant be, 'gainst all disaster..." instead of "Who would true valour see, let him come hither...." Dearmer made it into a hymn to be sung by us about our own pilgrimage, rather than a song by Bunyan calling us to admire the steadfastness of Mr Valiant-for Truth (the character in Pilgrim's Progress).
Meanwhile, Ralph Vaughan Williams was also busy adapting an English Folk Song to be the melody for Percy Dearmer's Bunyan-like hymn. He came up with a tune called Monks Gate, based on a song called "Our Captain Calls" which he had collected from a Mrs Verral in the village of Monks Gate (West Sussex, near Horsham). This also went into the English Hymnal. Dearmer's words and VW's tune are what you find at EH 402, although it says there that the words are by "J.Bunyan, 1628-88, and others".
Some of us, who were brought up in good homes, have therefore grown up loving Dearmer's words. However, while we were learning those words at our mothers' knees, others were busy rescuing more or less accurate versions of Bunyan's original. The Hymns A and M second supplement of 1916 has discovered Bunyan's poem (but not VW's tune) and prints it with only one minor intervention in verse 3 (which I'll be coming on to). Presumably this is due to copyright constraints which meant that they couldn't have Dearmer's hymn. So in this case, unusually, we have Hymns A and M to thank for initiating a move towards a text that has had less intervention.
From 1916 onwards the two hymns run in parallel, though Vaughan Williams definitely won on the tune (has anyone ever sung the hymn to Bunyan or Remember O thou Man?). Songs of Praise has Dearmer's hymn; but then, if I remember rightly, Dearmer (1867-1936) was involved in the editorial work on Songs of Praise which was published in 1931, and also by Oxford University Press. The Mirfield Mission Hymn Book (1948) likewise. By contrast The BBC Hymn Book (1951 and also Oxford University Press) has Bunyan's words (unadulterated) with Monks Gate for the tune, as does the Public School Hymn Book in its 1949 edition and its successor, Hymns for Church and School (1965).
The New English Hymnal, therefore faced a choice: to include the Bunyan hymn or to include the Dearmer hymn. They chose the Dearmer hymn, and rightly attributed the words to Dearmer by name (or rather they say that the words are by John Bunyan and Percy Dearmer, which is perhaps true).
What do we miss of Bunyan if we sing the Dearmer version? Well the lion has gone from verse 2. "No lion can him fright; He'll with a giant fight;" has become "No foes shall stay his might, though he with giants fight". And the hobgoblin and foul fiend have gone from verse 3: "Hobgoblin nor foul fiend can daunt his spirit; He knows he at the end shall life inherit" has become in Dearmer's hymn "Since Lord thou dost defend us with thy spirit, We know we at the end shall life inherit," so that it is for us that fancies fly away, not for the pilgrim whom Bunyan was commending to us as our role model.
So the hymn is a little less picturesque: and the "fancies" that fly away are less obvious than they were in Bunyan. For surely the fancies that fly away must include the fantastic fears, such as hobgoblins and foul fiends, that were the subject at the start of that verse in Bunyan's hymn. I think it's also fair to say that Bunyan's "let him come hither" is a great deal more elegant than Dearmer's “’Gainst all disaster”.
Bunyan wrote "Hobgoblin nor foul fiend can daunt his spirit." Hymns A and M, in all editions, have continued to change that to "No goblin nor foul fiend can daunt his spirit." Presumably this is because we have to understand a negative for Hobgoblin to precede the "nor", and that can seem a little confusing (though not very, I'd have thought). I mean it's fairly obvious what it means. And I rather like Hobgoblins. So it's a shame to eliminate that poetical omission of the negative, and lose the hobgoblins with it. That's what I think anyway.
As for whether I think Percy Dearmer did a worthwhile job, well I'm not sure. But what I think we do need to see is that he wrote a different hymn for us, not an adaptation of Bunyan. And we might still occasionally want Bunyan himself instead.
When Percy Dearmer and his companions were inventing the English Hymnal in 1906, they included a version of the poem "Who would true valour see" from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Prior to the English Hymnal no one had used Bunyan's poem as a hymn. It didn't appear in Hymns Ancient and Modern until the second supplement of 1916, ten years after the English Hymnal had invented it.
However, Percy Dearmer didn't exactly include Bunyan's poem just like that. Rather he wrote a new hymn, loosely based on Bunyan's words and rhythm. His hymn goes "He who would valiant be, 'gainst all disaster..." instead of "Who would true valour see, let him come hither...." Dearmer made it into a hymn to be sung by us about our own pilgrimage, rather than a song by Bunyan calling us to admire the steadfastness of Mr Valiant-for Truth (the character in Pilgrim's Progress).
Meanwhile, Ralph Vaughan Williams was also busy adapting an English Folk Song to be the melody for Percy Dearmer's Bunyan-like hymn. He came up with a tune called Monks Gate, based on a song called "Our Captain Calls" which he had collected from a Mrs Verral in the village of Monks Gate (West Sussex, near Horsham). This also went into the English Hymnal. Dearmer's words and VW's tune are what you find at EH 402, although it says there that the words are by "J.Bunyan, 1628-88, and others".
Some of us, who were brought up in good homes, have therefore grown up loving Dearmer's words. However, while we were learning those words at our mothers' knees, others were busy rescuing more or less accurate versions of Bunyan's original. The Hymns A and M second supplement of 1916 has discovered Bunyan's poem (but not VW's tune) and prints it with only one minor intervention in verse 3 (which I'll be coming on to). Presumably this is due to copyright constraints which meant that they couldn't have Dearmer's hymn. So in this case, unusually, we have Hymns A and M to thank for initiating a move towards a text that has had less intervention.
From 1916 onwards the two hymns run in parallel, though Vaughan Williams definitely won on the tune (has anyone ever sung the hymn to Bunyan or Remember O thou Man?). Songs of Praise has Dearmer's hymn; but then, if I remember rightly, Dearmer (1867-1936) was involved in the editorial work on Songs of Praise which was published in 1931, and also by Oxford University Press. The Mirfield Mission Hymn Book (1948) likewise. By contrast The BBC Hymn Book (1951 and also Oxford University Press) has Bunyan's words (unadulterated) with Monks Gate for the tune, as does the Public School Hymn Book in its 1949 edition and its successor, Hymns for Church and School (1965).
The New English Hymnal, therefore faced a choice: to include the Bunyan hymn or to include the Dearmer hymn. They chose the Dearmer hymn, and rightly attributed the words to Dearmer by name (or rather they say that the words are by John Bunyan and Percy Dearmer, which is perhaps true).
What do we miss of Bunyan if we sing the Dearmer version? Well the lion has gone from verse 2. "No lion can him fright; He'll with a giant fight;" has become "No foes shall stay his might, though he with giants fight". And the hobgoblin and foul fiend have gone from verse 3: "Hobgoblin nor foul fiend can daunt his spirit; He knows he at the end shall life inherit" has become in Dearmer's hymn "Since Lord thou dost defend us with thy spirit, We know we at the end shall life inherit," so that it is for us that fancies fly away, not for the pilgrim whom Bunyan was commending to us as our role model.
So the hymn is a little less picturesque: and the "fancies" that fly away are less obvious than they were in Bunyan. For surely the fancies that fly away must include the fantastic fears, such as hobgoblins and foul fiends, that were the subject at the start of that verse in Bunyan's hymn. I think it's also fair to say that Bunyan's "let him come hither" is a great deal more elegant than Dearmer's “’Gainst all disaster”.
Bunyan wrote "Hobgoblin nor foul fiend can daunt his spirit." Hymns A and M, in all editions, have continued to change that to "No goblin nor foul fiend can daunt his spirit." Presumably this is because we have to understand a negative for Hobgoblin to precede the "nor", and that can seem a little confusing (though not very, I'd have thought). I mean it's fairly obvious what it means. And I rather like Hobgoblins. So it's a shame to eliminate that poetical omission of the negative, and lose the hobgoblins with it. That's what I think anyway.
As for whether I think Percy Dearmer did a worthwhile job, well I'm not sure. But what I think we do need to see is that he wrote a different hymn for us, not an adaptation of Bunyan. And we might still occasionally want Bunyan himself instead.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Another link
James has a brief disquisition on the hymn "The Lord is come! In every heart" and there are some replies and comments on his livejournal post here.
Some recent comments on this blog
Since I circulated news of this Blog to the LSM social mailing list I've had a couple of responses by e-mail. Here are some extracts from the e-mails.
Michael Waring writes (from Pauanui in New Zealand)
Thanks for your email and the link to your blog which I read with interest here in my Godless bit of paradise. I sympathise greatly with what you say, and rather regret that I probably won't be there to see you go red in the face when LSM sing NEH 139 'Come Thou holy parachute' on Whitsunday because I have to examine a Ph.D in Sweden. Mind you, you would have more than apoplexy if you were subjected to the ghastly stuff that they sort of try to sing at the little community church here in Pauanui. The New Zealand liturgy is an appalling travesty and the hymn book arguably worse. I have to confess, mea culpa, that I have now practically abandoned it altogether because I can't stand it any more, though the church is manifestly dying on its feet and even in my state of advanced rust I could play the organ for them such that it might be possible to sing.
Ann Gustard writes
Can I share my own personal hymn word pet hate?
When I first learnt that marvellous passion-tide hymn 'When I survey the wondrous cross' I learnt it from the Methodist hymn book, and the final verse read:
'Were the whole realm of nature mine
That were an offering far too small
Love so amazing, so divine
demands my soul, my life, my all.'
I was very dismayed to find the second line has become 'that were a present far too small' in both EH and NEH.
Neither Alan Loader nor I have been able to find which is the original version, but 'offering' seems a much better, stronger word to use and I always sing it regardless!
Unfortunately when I checked out the truth for Ann I discovered (to her disappointment) that 'present' is the original. Here's my reply on that topic:
"Present" is Isaac Watts's original. In general, as a rule of thumb, one
can assume that if the EH differs from something else, the EH is the
poet's original wording. The source of most widespread corruptions is
Hymns A and M, and the NEH often follows that.
Ian Bradley says "In the second line of the fifth verse the word
'present' is sometimes changed to 'offering'".
I'm not sure what the objection to 'present' is, but it may be
something like what you feel about it. Perhaps the sense of "present"
has become rather trivialised by its association with Christmas
presents (socks, ties, soap and cheap electronic gadgets that don't
last long...).
Ann is not happy with Watts's choice of "present", and thinks offering just sounds better, but admits that that might be just bias (due presumably to the associations it has from her methodist upbringing and so on). Does anyone else have a view on this? Of course I like 'present', but perhaps I'm biased too?
Michael Waring writes (from Pauanui in New Zealand)
Thanks for your email and the link to your blog which I read with interest here in my Godless bit of paradise. I sympathise greatly with what you say, and rather regret that I probably won't be there to see you go red in the face when LSM sing NEH 139 'Come Thou holy parachute' on Whitsunday because I have to examine a Ph.D in Sweden. Mind you, you would have more than apoplexy if you were subjected to the ghastly stuff that they sort of try to sing at the little community church here in Pauanui. The New Zealand liturgy is an appalling travesty and the hymn book arguably worse. I have to confess, mea culpa, that I have now practically abandoned it altogether because I can't stand it any more, though the church is manifestly dying on its feet and even in my state of advanced rust I could play the organ for them such that it might be possible to sing.
Ann Gustard writes
Can I share my own personal hymn word pet hate?
When I first learnt that marvellous passion-tide hymn 'When I survey the wondrous cross' I learnt it from the Methodist hymn book, and the final verse read:
'Were the whole realm of nature mine
That were an offering far too small
Love so amazing, so divine
demands my soul, my life, my all.'
I was very dismayed to find the second line has become 'that were a present far too small' in both EH and NEH.
Neither Alan Loader nor I have been able to find which is the original version, but 'offering' seems a much better, stronger word to use and I always sing it regardless!
Unfortunately when I checked out the truth for Ann I discovered (to her disappointment) that 'present' is the original. Here's my reply on that topic:
"Present" is Isaac Watts's original. In general, as a rule of thumb, one
can assume that if the EH differs from something else, the EH is the
poet's original wording. The source of most widespread corruptions is
Hymns A and M, and the NEH often follows that.
Ian Bradley says "In the second line of the fifth verse the word
'present' is sometimes changed to 'offering'".
I'm not sure what the objection to 'present' is, but it may be
something like what you feel about it. Perhaps the sense of "present"
has become rather trivialised by its association with Christmas
presents (socks, ties, soap and cheap electronic gadgets that don't
last long...).
Ann is not happy with Watts's choice of "present", and thinks offering just sounds better, but admits that that might be just bias (due presumably to the associations it has from her methodist upbringing and so on). Does anyone else have a view on this? Of course I like 'present', but perhaps I'm biased too?
Sunday, February 05, 2006
And prove thine acceptable will
"Forth in thy name, O Lord, I go" is one of the best hymns in the book. Better still in partnership with Gibbons's lovely tune (Angel's Song) which has a particularly interesting structure: a change of time signature that speeds it up from a stately 4/4 in the first line, to some kind of skipping triple time (or better still, one in a bar) for the last three lines. And then there's a dramatic syncopation in the last line (well, James called it a hemiola this morning, which it kind of is because it turns a 6/8 into three bars of 2/4). I've never forgotten being taught how to perform this tune correctly, at a choir practice of the Anglican Choir for one of the annual conferences of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, at St Swithun's School Winchester in the summer of 1990—but unfortunately the name of the choir mistress to whom I owe this revelation temporarily escapes me.
There are three problems with what the hymn books do to this hymn, though only two of them afflict the New English Hymnal.
The one it is not guilty of is cutting out my favourite verse, the one that goes:
Preserve me from my calling's snare,
And hide my simple heart above,
Above the thorns of choking care,
The gilded baits of worldly love.
Apparently, even Charles Wesley's brother John Wesley saw fit to omit that verse when he included the hymn in his collection The Large Hymn Book in 1780 (the hymn had originally been published, with all its verses, in Charles Wesley's Hymns and Sacred Poems of 1749). You'll find that it is missing from the text in the online Oremus Hymnal (http://www.oremus.org/hymnal/f/f240.html) but it is there in the Cyberhymnal (http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/f/o/forinthy.htm). I suppose John Wesley thought that this verse was just about Charles Wesley's own calling, and the snares that he encountered? But surely it is something that all of us need to say, for all of us who work can be tempted into the choking care of a day job, and the baits of worldly love that go with ambition and the desire for money, not to mention the snares of being in a highly respected position, and the temptation to think that one is important for that reason. That's why we need to hang onto a simple heart, to have it held high above these thorns that will entangle it.
But, as I said, the NEH allows us to keep that verse. So let's get onto the things that it doesn't do right.
First there's the music. I said above that Gibbons's tune starts in four time and then becomes a lilting series of triplets from the second line. The poem cleverly matches this rhythm. (Was it written for this tune? I don't know but it seems difficult to believe it was not). Each verse begins with a rather slow and ponderous thought (Forth in thy name, O Lord, I go... The task thy wisdom hath assigned... Preserve me from my calling's snare... Thee may I set at my right hand... Give me to bear thy easy yoke... etc) but then as the tune skips on at one and a half times the speed, it betrays a kind of enthusiasm and joy about the task of skipping out into the world of work with God's support: My daily labour to pursue... O let me cheerfully fulfil... whose eyes my inmost substance see... etc. And then, with the hemiola in the last line we get a disruption of the skipping, and a confusion of the metre, as we slow down dramatically into two time again. Well that's how it should be. Although the English Hymnal prints the second part in 3/4 and not as triplets or 6/8 time, it does indicate that one should hold a pause on the last note of the first line and then go "slightly faster" in the 3/4 section. The NEH does nothing of the sort. Instead it tries to write the second half of the tune in the same 4/4 time signature of the first half, with no change of tempo. It adds a rest at the beginning of each line, so that the three notes of the first bar become not a triplet but the second third and fourth beats of a 4/4 bar. And then (without a word) it gives a mixture of 6/4 and 2/4 bars for the remainder, including the hemiola, so as to conceal as far as possible any sense of the compound time, triplets or syncopation. How to eliminate a joyful tune and make it into a boring one, in one easy move.
Well, of course it's clear that they don't understand the rhythm, or what makes it exciting. And that shows up in their treatment of line 4 of verse 2. Wesley wrote
In all my works thy presence find
And prove thine acceptable will.
(I think: more on this later).
According to Ian Bradley "All hymn-books substitute the phrase 'thy good and perfect will' for 'thy acceptable will' in the last line of the second verse, a change which was made partly for musical and partly for theological reasons." He doesn't say who made up this new text. Nor (apparently) is he aware that the English Hymnal did not make that substitution, which is why those of us brought up in good homes still automatically sing what Wesley wrote. I have just discovered that of all the other hymn books that I currently have in my possession, those that have this hymn and include this verse do without exception substitute "thy good and perfect will", and that goes for the online hymnals too.
As for the musical reasons, Bradley does not explain what they are, but we may guess from what the editors of the New English Hymnal say in their introduction: "Occasionally minor adjustments have been made to secure a better musical accentuation." Well, yes, if you don't understand how the three time breaks into two time at that point in the music, you might think there was a problem with the accentuation of 'acceptable' (first beat of the bar on 'ac' and 'ab' and an extra long note on 'ble'). But if, instead of giving up, you think about how to accentuate 'acceptable' and then look at the music, you can see how the music should be sung—which is not, of course how it looks on the page in any of the notation we have with bar lines—and then the whole thing becomes thrilling, instead of dull. Actually, 'acceptable' is probably a better fit with the music than any of the other last lines.
What about the theological reasons for changing these words? I must admit I'm a bit in the dark here. Any suggestions would be most welcome. I take it that Charles Wesley means to say that we test whether God's will is acceptable by putting it into practice and finding that it is indeed so. So effectively the line means "And prove (test) the acceptability of thy will, and find it acceptable." That it is 'acceptable' I take it means that it is possible to live by it, that is that it is a physical possibility to put it into practice. I don't see a theological problem with that thought.
I do see a theological problem with the replacement text however. I do not see any way in which we can test the goodness and perfection of the will of God. That, it seems to me, we must take on trust. It is neither tested nor proved to be good and perfect by the fact that we put it into practice in our lives. So the line no longer says anything. It becomes empty. we no longer understand what we are asked to prove about it, or why we are asked to prove it, since nothing that we can do will be relevant.
"Thy acceptable will," or "Thine acceptable will"? The EH gives us "thine". The Penguin Book of Hymns gives us 'thy'. That's why I said "I think" Wesley wrote "Thine acceptable will." But there seems to be no consistency on these things: EH gives "my inmost substance" and "thy easy yoke", but the Cyberhymnal gives "mine inmost substance", and since that seems to be the lectio difficilior I'm suspicious that there might have been more 'thine' and 'mine's than they're telling us about.
But on the loss of 'thine' and 'mine' see my last post.
There are three problems with what the hymn books do to this hymn, though only two of them afflict the New English Hymnal.
The one it is not guilty of is cutting out my favourite verse, the one that goes:
Preserve me from my calling's snare,
And hide my simple heart above,
Above the thorns of choking care,
The gilded baits of worldly love.
Apparently, even Charles Wesley's brother John Wesley saw fit to omit that verse when he included the hymn in his collection The Large Hymn Book in 1780 (the hymn had originally been published, with all its verses, in Charles Wesley's Hymns and Sacred Poems of 1749). You'll find that it is missing from the text in the online Oremus Hymnal (http://www.oremus.org/hymnal/f/f240.html) but it is there in the Cyberhymnal (http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/f/o/forinthy.htm). I suppose John Wesley thought that this verse was just about Charles Wesley's own calling, and the snares that he encountered? But surely it is something that all of us need to say, for all of us who work can be tempted into the choking care of a day job, and the baits of worldly love that go with ambition and the desire for money, not to mention the snares of being in a highly respected position, and the temptation to think that one is important for that reason. That's why we need to hang onto a simple heart, to have it held high above these thorns that will entangle it.
But, as I said, the NEH allows us to keep that verse. So let's get onto the things that it doesn't do right.
First there's the music. I said above that Gibbons's tune starts in four time and then becomes a lilting series of triplets from the second line. The poem cleverly matches this rhythm. (Was it written for this tune? I don't know but it seems difficult to believe it was not). Each verse begins with a rather slow and ponderous thought (Forth in thy name, O Lord, I go... The task thy wisdom hath assigned... Preserve me from my calling's snare... Thee may I set at my right hand... Give me to bear thy easy yoke... etc) but then as the tune skips on at one and a half times the speed, it betrays a kind of enthusiasm and joy about the task of skipping out into the world of work with God's support: My daily labour to pursue... O let me cheerfully fulfil... whose eyes my inmost substance see... etc. And then, with the hemiola in the last line we get a disruption of the skipping, and a confusion of the metre, as we slow down dramatically into two time again. Well that's how it should be. Although the English Hymnal prints the second part in 3/4 and not as triplets or 6/8 time, it does indicate that one should hold a pause on the last note of the first line and then go "slightly faster" in the 3/4 section. The NEH does nothing of the sort. Instead it tries to write the second half of the tune in the same 4/4 time signature of the first half, with no change of tempo. It adds a rest at the beginning of each line, so that the three notes of the first bar become not a triplet but the second third and fourth beats of a 4/4 bar. And then (without a word) it gives a mixture of 6/4 and 2/4 bars for the remainder, including the hemiola, so as to conceal as far as possible any sense of the compound time, triplets or syncopation. How to eliminate a joyful tune and make it into a boring one, in one easy move.
Well, of course it's clear that they don't understand the rhythm, or what makes it exciting. And that shows up in their treatment of line 4 of verse 2. Wesley wrote
In all my works thy presence find
And prove thine acceptable will.
(I think: more on this later).
According to Ian Bradley "All hymn-books substitute the phrase 'thy good and perfect will' for 'thy acceptable will' in the last line of the second verse, a change which was made partly for musical and partly for theological reasons." He doesn't say who made up this new text. Nor (apparently) is he aware that the English Hymnal did not make that substitution, which is why those of us brought up in good homes still automatically sing what Wesley wrote. I have just discovered that of all the other hymn books that I currently have in my possession, those that have this hymn and include this verse do without exception substitute "thy good and perfect will", and that goes for the online hymnals too.
As for the musical reasons, Bradley does not explain what they are, but we may guess from what the editors of the New English Hymnal say in their introduction: "Occasionally minor adjustments have been made to secure a better musical accentuation." Well, yes, if you don't understand how the three time breaks into two time at that point in the music, you might think there was a problem with the accentuation of 'acceptable' (first beat of the bar on 'ac' and 'ab' and an extra long note on 'ble'). But if, instead of giving up, you think about how to accentuate 'acceptable' and then look at the music, you can see how the music should be sung—which is not, of course how it looks on the page in any of the notation we have with bar lines—and then the whole thing becomes thrilling, instead of dull. Actually, 'acceptable' is probably a better fit with the music than any of the other last lines.
What about the theological reasons for changing these words? I must admit I'm a bit in the dark here. Any suggestions would be most welcome. I take it that Charles Wesley means to say that we test whether God's will is acceptable by putting it into practice and finding that it is indeed so. So effectively the line means "And prove (test) the acceptability of thy will, and find it acceptable." That it is 'acceptable' I take it means that it is possible to live by it, that is that it is a physical possibility to put it into practice. I don't see a theological problem with that thought.
I do see a theological problem with the replacement text however. I do not see any way in which we can test the goodness and perfection of the will of God. That, it seems to me, we must take on trust. It is neither tested nor proved to be good and perfect by the fact that we put it into practice in our lives. So the line no longer says anything. It becomes empty. we no longer understand what we are asked to prove about it, or why we are asked to prove it, since nothing that we can do will be relevant.
"Thy acceptable will," or "Thine acceptable will"? The EH gives us "thine". The Penguin Book of Hymns gives us 'thy'. That's why I said "I think" Wesley wrote "Thine acceptable will." But there seems to be no consistency on these things: EH gives "my inmost substance" and "thy easy yoke", but the Cyberhymnal gives "mine inmost substance", and since that seems to be the lectio difficilior I'm suspicious that there might have been more 'thine' and 'mine's than they're telling us about.
But on the loss of 'thine' and 'mine' see my last post.
Sunday, January 29, 2006
Jesus calls us: o'er the tumult
Here's another hymn we sang two weeks ago: "Jesus calls us! O'er the tumult Of our life's wild restless sea..."
In the New English Hymnal it has a single dagger, meaning that some small change has been made to the author's original. The words are by Mrs C.F. Alexander, and were originally written in 1852. I'm not quite sure what the dagger is for.
It might be for the punctuation in the first line. The NEH have given us the exclamation mark and a new sentence at "o'er the tumult". As far as I can see the original was probably written with a colon there, not an exclamation mark (that's what we get in the Penguin Book of Hymns by Ian Bradley which is the most authoritative source for the original words that I've found so far). Unfortunately the Oremus Hymnal and the Cyberhymnal on the web, which are supposed to give us the original copyright-free words are not very reliable, and are not authentic on this hymn.
Mrs Alexander herself made some other changes to the words which explain some of the small divergences that we find in different hymn books. We're accustomed to "Day by day his sweet voice soundeth" in the third line, but (so Ian Bradley informs us, The Penguin Book of Hymns page 209) Alexander revised the hymn in 1881 and changed that to "Day by day his voice is sounding" which is what the NEH have chosen. I must say that I think the latter is prosaic and plodding, and the former much more fitting and inspired.
There's also a puzzle about verse 5. Originally Cecil Frances Alexander wrote "Give our hearts to thine obedience." In 1881 she revised it to "Give our hearts to thy obedience."
Why do that, I wonder? 'Thine' is more correct before a vowel, as in "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord". It's certainly a whole lot easier to sing: the hiatus between 'thy' and 'obedience' is not easy to maintain on a change from a y to an o, and tends to lead us to put in a consonant 'y'. "Give our hearts to thy yobedience." Not nice.
I suppose that Mrs Alexander thought it was hard to understand 'thine'. Perhaps she thought people could only understand 'thine' to mean 'yours' and not 'your'. But of course, the more you remove the proper use of thine before a vowel, the more the people become unfamiliar with it, and the more degenerate the language becomes. Hymns are a good way to keep such archaic language in the popular vocabulary.
It is to be regretted, I think, that both the EH and the NEH chose 'thy obedience' and not the more correct 'thine obedience'. They are neglecting their duty of educating the public in the full range of English possessive pronouns. Sad.
In the New English Hymnal it has a single dagger, meaning that some small change has been made to the author's original. The words are by Mrs C.F. Alexander, and were originally written in 1852. I'm not quite sure what the dagger is for.
It might be for the punctuation in the first line. The NEH have given us the exclamation mark and a new sentence at "o'er the tumult". As far as I can see the original was probably written with a colon there, not an exclamation mark (that's what we get in the Penguin Book of Hymns by Ian Bradley which is the most authoritative source for the original words that I've found so far). Unfortunately the Oremus Hymnal and the Cyberhymnal on the web, which are supposed to give us the original copyright-free words are not very reliable, and are not authentic on this hymn.
Mrs Alexander herself made some other changes to the words which explain some of the small divergences that we find in different hymn books. We're accustomed to "Day by day his sweet voice soundeth" in the third line, but (so Ian Bradley informs us, The Penguin Book of Hymns page 209) Alexander revised the hymn in 1881 and changed that to "Day by day his voice is sounding" which is what the NEH have chosen. I must say that I think the latter is prosaic and plodding, and the former much more fitting and inspired.
There's also a puzzle about verse 5. Originally Cecil Frances Alexander wrote "Give our hearts to thine obedience." In 1881 she revised it to "Give our hearts to thy obedience."
Why do that, I wonder? 'Thine' is more correct before a vowel, as in "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord". It's certainly a whole lot easier to sing: the hiatus between 'thy' and 'obedience' is not easy to maintain on a change from a y to an o, and tends to lead us to put in a consonant 'y'. "Give our hearts to thy yobedience." Not nice.
I suppose that Mrs Alexander thought it was hard to understand 'thine'. Perhaps she thought people could only understand 'thine' to mean 'yours' and not 'your'. But of course, the more you remove the proper use of thine before a vowel, the more the people become unfamiliar with it, and the more degenerate the language becomes. Hymns are a good way to keep such archaic language in the popular vocabulary.
It is to be regretted, I think, that both the EH and the NEH chose 'thy obedience' and not the more correct 'thine obedience'. They are neglecting their duty of educating the public in the full range of English possessive pronouns. Sad.
Sunday, January 22, 2006
Arabia's desert ranger
There's a superb Epiphany hymn written in 1821 by James Montgomery (1771-1854) that begins "Hail to the Lord's Anointed". We should have sung it last week (which was the second sunday of Epiphany), and, indeed, we did sing some of it: those verses of it that have survived into the New English Hymnal.
There were eight verses in the original hymn. They'd already been hacked about in most hymn books, even before the NEH came on the scene. For instance, the English Hymnal, which includes more of the original than most recent books, had omitted verse 3 and amalgamated the first half of verse 6 with the first half of verse 7 (to make a composite verse, omitting four lines of verse 6 and four lines of verse 7). It did, however, keep in the whole of the very beautiful verse 5, which begins "Arabia's desert ranger to him shall bow the knee". It's that verse I want to write about here.
You can find the original 1821 verses by Montgomery in full on the Cyberhymnal link given here (but note that the tune there is not the one we usually sing!). http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/h/a/haillord.htm
The hymn is a paraphrase, quite a close paraphrase, of psalm 72 'Give the king thy judgements, O God' (which is a psalm we always sing around Epiphany. It's set for the principal service on Epiphany itself in the Common Worship Lectionary). The first two lines of the hymn ("Hail to the Lord's Anointed, Great David's greater son!") pick up on the opening of the psalm, "Give the King thy judgements, O God : and thy righteousness unto the King's son", the King here being King David, and the King's Son being Christ ("The Anointed")—he, of course, being of the house and lineage of David. The paraphrase gets closer as the hymn goes on: "He shall keep the simple folk by their right : defend the children of the poor, and punish the wrong doer" (ps 72:4) has become "He comes in succour speedy to those who suffer wrong; To help the poor and needy, And bid the weak be strong," and verse 6 in the psalm ("He shall come down like the rain into a fleece of wool: even as the drops that water the earth") has become "He shall come down like showers Upon the fruitful earth" (verse 4 of the original lines as written by Montgomery).
The reason why this hymn is set for Epiphany is exactly the same reason as the reason why psalm 72 is set for Epiphany. The Christian Church has always seen in psalm 72 an uncanny prediction of the events associated with Christ's manifestation. Not only do we hear a prediction of the coming of a Son of David who will bring succour to the poor and needy, a saviour who will be a prince of peace, and one whose kingdom will be from the one sea to the other, but more particularly we hear that kings from foreign lands will come to do him worship: The kings of Tharsis and of the Isles shall give presents, says the psalmist; the kings of Arabia and Saba shall bring gifts. All kings shall fall down before him : all nations shall do him service. There and only there —never so explicitly in the Gospels— do we get the origin of the tradition of the gentiles ("all nations") arriving at the stable in Bethlehem in the form of three kings (three kings? Why, of course—one from Tharsis and the Isles (probably the Western Mediterranean identified with the settlement of Tartessus in Spain), one from Arabia (probably to be identified with the Sheba from which the Queen of Sheba came) and one from Saba which appears to be Ethiopia.)
So the psalm is a psalm about Epiphany because we read it as a foretelling of the subsequent (first century AD) discovery of Christ's kingship by visitors from all parts of the world. The hymn, Montgomery's hymn is a paraphrase of that psalm and so it too is an Epiphany hymn because it expresses in English verse the psalmist's prediction of the (first century AD) discovery of Christ's kingship by visitors from all parts of the world, and, of course, also the subsequent discovery of Christ's kingship by generations of gentiles—all of us from all the nations of the world— during the two thousand years between that date and this.
Now, of course, when we sing the psalm (and the hymn) two funny things happen to time. We place ourselves at two points in past history simultaneously. On the one hand we sing with the psalmist of a time far in the future when the poor will be relieved and a saviour will come and be hailed as the Lord's anointed. On the other hand we transport ourselves to the time of Christ's coming to earth, which we re-enact as far as possible in real time from Christmas eve to Candlemas. And as part of that re-enactment we sing of the imminent arrival of the three kings, expressed as in the immediate future—like today or tomorrow if we sing the hymn on the day it should be sung—and also of the future arrival of generations of believers in the subsequent history of the spread of Christianity. So we put ourselves back to a time before Christ's earthly ministry had begun and we look forward from that position to the "light that will lighten the gentiles". That's why it makes sense to sing, in the future tense, "Arabia's desert ranger To him shall bow the knee, The Ethiopian stranger His glory come to see: With offerings of devotion, Ships from the isles shall meet, To pour the wealth of ocean In tribute at his feet."
Perhaps that kind of reliving of the days of our redemption in real time has become slightly lost to the modern world. It's been destroyed by the lunacy of a commercial Christmas—only this year and last has it become apparent to me that you can get mince pies in the supermarkets or the bakers all through November and December, but not at all in January when Christmas has actually arrived; for then you can only get Easter eggs and hot cross buns, not mince pies or Christmas puddings. But that undermines the whole sense that we have to wait: we wait with baited breath till the moment at midnight when Christ is born and *then*, then at last, we let loose the bonds and celebrate, for twelve days—for 40 days till Candlemas—because "hodie Christus natus est" (not because he was born two thousand years ago). So perhaps that sense of living in the present through events that happened in the past, and looking forward from the present to events that are still to come in liturgical time, but are past in historical time, has been partly lost. People are confused?
I say this because it seems to me that the editors of the hymn books must be confused if they choose to cut from an Epiphany hymn the most poetic verse— the one that actually makes this hymn a hymn for Epiphany—"Arabia's desert ranger to him shall bow the knee; the Ethiopian stranger His glory come to see."
A well-educated parishioner at a previous church I used to go to once expressed concern that that verse was somehow not 'politically correct'. I was rather shocked that someone with brains could so misunderstand it. But I fear the reason it has gone from the hymn books is due to precisely such a misunderstanding. People think, presumably, that we are speaking from our own time (1821 perhaps, or 2006) and saying that (sometime in the future) some poor benighted areas of the world (Arabia and Ethiopia and so on) will come to realise that they ought to bring tribute to our preferred deity; they think we speak of them as strangers, as not one of us, and they think that we think that we got there first and that those poor foreigners have yet to wake up to what we saw first. And that all smacks of a mixture of patronising racism and cultural imperialism. Embarrassing, no? Needs the thought police to come and remove it from the collective vocabulary? That, I suppose, is what they think.
But that is a misunderstanding of the first order. Alas, it betrays a failure not only to enter into the time frame of the hymn (we sing, from a point around the end of the first century BC, about the future arrival of worshippers at the cradle of a new born king, as I just explained), but also (it betrays a failure) to realise that the Ethiopian and the Arabian are the *first* on the scene, not the last. The Ethiopian is credited with recognising the truth many many generations before Christianity reached these northern shores. We, by contrast, though we were not there yet, seek some vicarious presence in so far as we can take *their* journey to visit the Christ child as somehow standing in for us, because *we* too are included in the "all nations shall adore him". We ourselves were rather late arriving: centuries later than the people of Ethiopia. So it is not to us that the Ethiopian is a stranger, but to Jesus deep in his Jewish heartland. What is spectacular about Epiphany is that some of us, from beyond the borders, did make it there at the beginning. We white folk, latecomers though we are, look to restore our credibility through this psalm that says that we are all included somehow, all of us, the gentiles. And that is because, after all, the visitors really are not strangers to us, though they were to the little Jesus in Bethlehem.
There's no reason, of course, why anyone should not be able to read this hymn correctly. No one has any difficulty in reading the psalm on which it is based, as far as I am aware. No one takes that to say that the kings of Arabia or Ethiopia have yet to come. And when we sing it at Epiphany, placed as we are in a liturgical re-enactment, it is even less likely that we should not be able to grasp the meaning of the future tenses.
Perhaps we have got too sophisticated (too reluctant to forget chronological time and to enter afresh year by year into liturgical time). Perhaps the problem is that we sing the hymn after Epiphany (and, like the shops, we can't remember by the next day that we are still in that liturgical season). Or perhaps we just aren't encouraged in the sermons and teaching of the church really to enter into the real-time replay of past events.
But whichever the fault is, it's a sad loss. It's not something that should be resolved by cutting the verses out. It should be solved by rediscovering that innocent pleasure of going back to Bethlehem and becoming one of the three kings. The symbolism is at the very heart of what it is to be still a believer in events that took place two thousand years ago. It's not because those events happened then. It's because they happen NOW.
There were eight verses in the original hymn. They'd already been hacked about in most hymn books, even before the NEH came on the scene. For instance, the English Hymnal, which includes more of the original than most recent books, had omitted verse 3 and amalgamated the first half of verse 6 with the first half of verse 7 (to make a composite verse, omitting four lines of verse 6 and four lines of verse 7). It did, however, keep in the whole of the very beautiful verse 5, which begins "Arabia's desert ranger to him shall bow the knee". It's that verse I want to write about here.
You can find the original 1821 verses by Montgomery in full on the Cyberhymnal link given here (but note that the tune there is not the one we usually sing!). http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/h/a/haillord.htm
The hymn is a paraphrase, quite a close paraphrase, of psalm 72 'Give the king thy judgements, O God' (which is a psalm we always sing around Epiphany. It's set for the principal service on Epiphany itself in the Common Worship Lectionary). The first two lines of the hymn ("Hail to the Lord's Anointed, Great David's greater son!") pick up on the opening of the psalm, "Give the King thy judgements, O God : and thy righteousness unto the King's son", the King here being King David, and the King's Son being Christ ("The Anointed")—he, of course, being of the house and lineage of David. The paraphrase gets closer as the hymn goes on: "He shall keep the simple folk by their right : defend the children of the poor, and punish the wrong doer" (ps 72:4) has become "He comes in succour speedy to those who suffer wrong; To help the poor and needy, And bid the weak be strong," and verse 6 in the psalm ("He shall come down like the rain into a fleece of wool: even as the drops that water the earth") has become "He shall come down like showers Upon the fruitful earth" (verse 4 of the original lines as written by Montgomery).
The reason why this hymn is set for Epiphany is exactly the same reason as the reason why psalm 72 is set for Epiphany. The Christian Church has always seen in psalm 72 an uncanny prediction of the events associated with Christ's manifestation. Not only do we hear a prediction of the coming of a Son of David who will bring succour to the poor and needy, a saviour who will be a prince of peace, and one whose kingdom will be from the one sea to the other, but more particularly we hear that kings from foreign lands will come to do him worship: The kings of Tharsis and of the Isles shall give presents, says the psalmist; the kings of Arabia and Saba shall bring gifts. All kings shall fall down before him : all nations shall do him service. There and only there —never so explicitly in the Gospels— do we get the origin of the tradition of the gentiles ("all nations") arriving at the stable in Bethlehem in the form of three kings (three kings? Why, of course—one from Tharsis and the Isles (probably the Western Mediterranean identified with the settlement of Tartessus in Spain), one from Arabia (probably to be identified with the Sheba from which the Queen of Sheba came) and one from Saba which appears to be Ethiopia.)
So the psalm is a psalm about Epiphany because we read it as a foretelling of the subsequent (first century AD) discovery of Christ's kingship by visitors from all parts of the world. The hymn, Montgomery's hymn is a paraphrase of that psalm and so it too is an Epiphany hymn because it expresses in English verse the psalmist's prediction of the (first century AD) discovery of Christ's kingship by visitors from all parts of the world, and, of course, also the subsequent discovery of Christ's kingship by generations of gentiles—all of us from all the nations of the world— during the two thousand years between that date and this.
Now, of course, when we sing the psalm (and the hymn) two funny things happen to time. We place ourselves at two points in past history simultaneously. On the one hand we sing with the psalmist of a time far in the future when the poor will be relieved and a saviour will come and be hailed as the Lord's anointed. On the other hand we transport ourselves to the time of Christ's coming to earth, which we re-enact as far as possible in real time from Christmas eve to Candlemas. And as part of that re-enactment we sing of the imminent arrival of the three kings, expressed as in the immediate future—like today or tomorrow if we sing the hymn on the day it should be sung—and also of the future arrival of generations of believers in the subsequent history of the spread of Christianity. So we put ourselves back to a time before Christ's earthly ministry had begun and we look forward from that position to the "light that will lighten the gentiles". That's why it makes sense to sing, in the future tense, "Arabia's desert ranger To him shall bow the knee, The Ethiopian stranger His glory come to see: With offerings of devotion, Ships from the isles shall meet, To pour the wealth of ocean In tribute at his feet."
Perhaps that kind of reliving of the days of our redemption in real time has become slightly lost to the modern world. It's been destroyed by the lunacy of a commercial Christmas—only this year and last has it become apparent to me that you can get mince pies in the supermarkets or the bakers all through November and December, but not at all in January when Christmas has actually arrived; for then you can only get Easter eggs and hot cross buns, not mince pies or Christmas puddings. But that undermines the whole sense that we have to wait: we wait with baited breath till the moment at midnight when Christ is born and *then*, then at last, we let loose the bonds and celebrate, for twelve days—for 40 days till Candlemas—because "hodie Christus natus est" (not because he was born two thousand years ago). So perhaps that sense of living in the present through events that happened in the past, and looking forward from the present to events that are still to come in liturgical time, but are past in historical time, has been partly lost. People are confused?
I say this because it seems to me that the editors of the hymn books must be confused if they choose to cut from an Epiphany hymn the most poetic verse— the one that actually makes this hymn a hymn for Epiphany—"Arabia's desert ranger to him shall bow the knee; the Ethiopian stranger His glory come to see."
A well-educated parishioner at a previous church I used to go to once expressed concern that that verse was somehow not 'politically correct'. I was rather shocked that someone with brains could so misunderstand it. But I fear the reason it has gone from the hymn books is due to precisely such a misunderstanding. People think, presumably, that we are speaking from our own time (1821 perhaps, or 2006) and saying that (sometime in the future) some poor benighted areas of the world (Arabia and Ethiopia and so on) will come to realise that they ought to bring tribute to our preferred deity; they think we speak of them as strangers, as not one of us, and they think that we think that we got there first and that those poor foreigners have yet to wake up to what we saw first. And that all smacks of a mixture of patronising racism and cultural imperialism. Embarrassing, no? Needs the thought police to come and remove it from the collective vocabulary? That, I suppose, is what they think.
But that is a misunderstanding of the first order. Alas, it betrays a failure not only to enter into the time frame of the hymn (we sing, from a point around the end of the first century BC, about the future arrival of worshippers at the cradle of a new born king, as I just explained), but also (it betrays a failure) to realise that the Ethiopian and the Arabian are the *first* on the scene, not the last. The Ethiopian is credited with recognising the truth many many generations before Christianity reached these northern shores. We, by contrast, though we were not there yet, seek some vicarious presence in so far as we can take *their* journey to visit the Christ child as somehow standing in for us, because *we* too are included in the "all nations shall adore him". We ourselves were rather late arriving: centuries later than the people of Ethiopia. So it is not to us that the Ethiopian is a stranger, but to Jesus deep in his Jewish heartland. What is spectacular about Epiphany is that some of us, from beyond the borders, did make it there at the beginning. We white folk, latecomers though we are, look to restore our credibility through this psalm that says that we are all included somehow, all of us, the gentiles. And that is because, after all, the visitors really are not strangers to us, though they were to the little Jesus in Bethlehem.
There's no reason, of course, why anyone should not be able to read this hymn correctly. No one has any difficulty in reading the psalm on which it is based, as far as I am aware. No one takes that to say that the kings of Arabia or Ethiopia have yet to come. And when we sing it at Epiphany, placed as we are in a liturgical re-enactment, it is even less likely that we should not be able to grasp the meaning of the future tenses.
Perhaps we have got too sophisticated (too reluctant to forget chronological time and to enter afresh year by year into liturgical time). Perhaps the problem is that we sing the hymn after Epiphany (and, like the shops, we can't remember by the next day that we are still in that liturgical season). Or perhaps we just aren't encouraged in the sermons and teaching of the church really to enter into the real-time replay of past events.
But whichever the fault is, it's a sad loss. It's not something that should be resolved by cutting the verses out. It should be solved by rediscovering that innocent pleasure of going back to Bethlehem and becoming one of the three kings. The symbolism is at the very heart of what it is to be still a believer in events that took place two thousand years ago. It's not because those events happened then. It's because they happen NOW.
Monday, January 16, 2006
Sunday, January 15, 2006
Lone and dreary, faint and weary
Today was a bad day for bowdlerised hymns.
Let's begin with 'lone and dreary, faint and weary, through the desert thou didst go'.
This is perhaps the greatest scandal in the New English Hymnal, and one that it seems to be curiously proud of: the editors have excised these wonderful words from one of our best loved hymns, 'Lead us heavenly father lead us', by James Edmeston (1791-1867).
In their preface the editors actually boast of the deed:
Was it because of some theological objection to the idea that the Lord could have been alone? Or that he could have felt dreary? Or that he could have felt faint? Or that he could have felt weary?
But the hymn is precisely making the point that Our Lord not only could, but did, feel 'our keenest woe'. He was not immune from those sad times, and indeed when he went out into the desert it was precisely to experience the very depths of temptation. "All our weakness thou didst know..." : that bit we are still allowed to sing. But if Our Lord knew 'all our weakness' then he was allowed to feel what we feel (lone when alone, dreary when things are not going right and so on and so forth).
There's a variety of docetic heresy that attempts to protect the genuine (divine) Christ from undergoing any of the more human sufferings. In its extreme form the docetic heretics tried to maintain that Christ did not really suffer and die on the cross: it was only an effigy or human counterpart that did that, and "appeared" to the bystanders to be Jesus, but God the real God had retreated and got out before that happened. The reason for thinking that was that it seemed improper or unseemly for what is genuinely divine and all-powerful to be reduced to such weakness and indignity. Such a god would have emptied himself of all that the godhead is by definition, and hence he would no longer be god. Some other parts of the traditional story of Jesus (the agony in the garden, the temptations in the wilderness) also came to be explained away by such docetic thinkers, because they seemed to be unsuitable for the divine saviour.
Apparently the editors of the New English Hymnal share that view.
But that is odd. For the central part of the hymn is wholly incompatible with their docetic understanding of Christ's saving grace. The hymn is a trinitarian prayer: the first verse is addressed to God the Father ('lead us heavenly Father, lead us'); the second verse is addressed to God the Son ('saviour, breathe forgiveness o'er us...'); the third verse to the Holy Spirit ('Spirit of our God descending...'). But the middle verse is a succinct account of the orthodox understanding of the significance of the incarnation: it is a prayer for forgiveness, based on the idea that Christ is in a position to grant us forgiveness for our failings, precisely because he went through what we go through, because he did tread this earth before us. And not only did he tread this earth, but he trod it as one of us, and felt the very depths of human despair. He can forgive because he knows what it was like. That is what gives him the authority which he could never have if he had not been through it: he can speak for us, he can take our nature upon him in all its weakness, and that's how he can redeem it. If he doesn't take it upon him he cannot redeem it: that's the point of the orthodox understanding of the incarnation as a real 'becoming human', not a superficial appearing as if a human being.
So it's a puzzle why the editors keep verse 2 in at all, since it is entirely about the fact that Christ knew all our weakness. If they don't like that, then they should scrap the hymn altogether. And it's not obvious why one should be fussy about 'lone and dreary' if one believes in truth that he knew all our weakness, that he was 'lone and dreary' in just the way we are—indeed even more so than we usually are, presumably. That's precisely the point, and that's why those striking words are exactly what we need.
Well, that's what was right about the proper words. Now for what's wrong with the words that they have seen fit to put in their place. Prepare yourself...
What? Remember that this verse is a plea for forgiveness from a saviour who has felt all our weakness. The reason why he can forgive is that he has been through it: he knows what it is like to feel as we do. The last two lines need to continue the theme of Christ's identification with our weakness in temptation.
What do we get instead? "Self-denying"?
But that's just exactly what will not do.
It is not because he was self-denying that he can understand our inability to resist.
No it was because he was tempted, because he did feel the pull of desire, not because he resisted.
Okay, so he did succeed in resisting, but not without experiencing the real thing: that's the point of the hymn. So, no marks for that phrase. It is just way off the point.
But that's precisely where he isn't in it with us. It is not in defying death that Christ identifies with us in our human weakness. It is succumbing to death, in genuinely dying on the cross (not that Edmeston was, as it happens talking about Calvary, but let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that we are bringing Calvary into it...) it is in his vulnerability to death that he experiences our very weakness. That's not achieved by his overcoming death, but rather by his being genuinely put to death on the cross: he went through even that. He knows what it is, even to the point of understanding our vulnerability to death. That is true, and would be relevant.
But, alas, it is not what the substitute lines provide.
No. Unfortunately they send us off to the very opposite, to an aspect of Christ's divine nature, his defeat of death, an aspect which is utterly irrelevant to the sentiment required to complete this verse of the hymn.
The New English Hymnal recommends this hymn for Epiphany 2. Funny that. I suppose it is because it talks about Our Lord going out into the desert at the beginning of his life as a young man, discovering his destiny. We've got to that stage in tracing Our Lord's manifestation. What the editors seem to have failed to notice is that in their new version the hymn isn't about that any more.
How sad. How sad. And only a single obelus, for all that damage to a fine hymn.
How sad.
Let's begin with 'lone and dreary, faint and weary, through the desert thou didst go'.
This is perhaps the greatest scandal in the New English Hymnal, and one that it seems to be curiously proud of: the editors have excised these wonderful words from one of our best loved hymns, 'Lead us heavenly father lead us', by James Edmeston (1791-1867).
In their preface the editors actually boast of the deed:
"Some may be critical of revisions and alterations which we have made in original texts. We make no apology for this except where we may have done it badly; it is a process which has long been current... Well-known and popular hymns have rarely been amended, though we felt it desirable to abandon the description of our Lord as 'lone and dreary'."
(NEH page vi)
Oh, they did, did they? And why did they feel that was desirable?Was it because of some theological objection to the idea that the Lord could have been alone? Or that he could have felt dreary? Or that he could have felt faint? Or that he could have felt weary?
But the hymn is precisely making the point that Our Lord not only could, but did, feel 'our keenest woe'. He was not immune from those sad times, and indeed when he went out into the desert it was precisely to experience the very depths of temptation. "All our weakness thou didst know..." : that bit we are still allowed to sing. But if Our Lord knew 'all our weakness' then he was allowed to feel what we feel (lone when alone, dreary when things are not going right and so on and so forth).
There's a variety of docetic heresy that attempts to protect the genuine (divine) Christ from undergoing any of the more human sufferings. In its extreme form the docetic heretics tried to maintain that Christ did not really suffer and die on the cross: it was only an effigy or human counterpart that did that, and "appeared" to the bystanders to be Jesus, but God the real God had retreated and got out before that happened. The reason for thinking that was that it seemed improper or unseemly for what is genuinely divine and all-powerful to be reduced to such weakness and indignity. Such a god would have emptied himself of all that the godhead is by definition, and hence he would no longer be god. Some other parts of the traditional story of Jesus (the agony in the garden, the temptations in the wilderness) also came to be explained away by such docetic thinkers, because they seemed to be unsuitable for the divine saviour.
Apparently the editors of the New English Hymnal share that view.
But that is odd. For the central part of the hymn is wholly incompatible with their docetic understanding of Christ's saving grace. The hymn is a trinitarian prayer: the first verse is addressed to God the Father ('lead us heavenly Father, lead us'); the second verse is addressed to God the Son ('saviour, breathe forgiveness o'er us...'); the third verse to the Holy Spirit ('Spirit of our God descending...'). But the middle verse is a succinct account of the orthodox understanding of the significance of the incarnation: it is a prayer for forgiveness, based on the idea that Christ is in a position to grant us forgiveness for our failings, precisely because he went through what we go through, because he did tread this earth before us. And not only did he tread this earth, but he trod it as one of us, and felt the very depths of human despair. He can forgive because he knows what it was like. That is what gives him the authority which he could never have if he had not been through it: he can speak for us, he can take our nature upon him in all its weakness, and that's how he can redeem it. If he doesn't take it upon him he cannot redeem it: that's the point of the orthodox understanding of the incarnation as a real 'becoming human', not a superficial appearing as if a human being.
So it's a puzzle why the editors keep verse 2 in at all, since it is entirely about the fact that Christ knew all our weakness. If they don't like that, then they should scrap the hymn altogether. And it's not obvious why one should be fussy about 'lone and dreary' if one believes in truth that he knew all our weakness, that he was 'lone and dreary' in just the way we are—indeed even more so than we usually are, presumably. That's precisely the point, and that's why those striking words are exactly what we need.
Well, that's what was right about the proper words. Now for what's wrong with the words that they have seen fit to put in their place. Prepare yourself...
"Self denying, death defying, Thou to Calvary didst go."
What? Remember that this verse is a plea for forgiveness from a saviour who has felt all our weakness. The reason why he can forgive is that he has been through it: he knows what it is like to feel as we do. The last two lines need to continue the theme of Christ's identification with our weakness in temptation.
What do we get instead? "Self-denying"?
But that's just exactly what will not do.
It is not because he was self-denying that he can understand our inability to resist.
No it was because he was tempted, because he did feel the pull of desire, not because he resisted.
Okay, so he did succeed in resisting, but not without experiencing the real thing: that's the point of the hymn. So, no marks for that phrase. It is just way off the point.
"Death defying"?What?
But that's precisely where he isn't in it with us. It is not in defying death that Christ identifies with us in our human weakness. It is succumbing to death, in genuinely dying on the cross (not that Edmeston was, as it happens talking about Calvary, but let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that we are bringing Calvary into it...) it is in his vulnerability to death that he experiences our very weakness. That's not achieved by his overcoming death, but rather by his being genuinely put to death on the cross: he went through even that. He knows what it is, even to the point of understanding our vulnerability to death. That is true, and would be relevant.
But, alas, it is not what the substitute lines provide.
No. Unfortunately they send us off to the very opposite, to an aspect of Christ's divine nature, his defeat of death, an aspect which is utterly irrelevant to the sentiment required to complete this verse of the hymn.
"Thou to Calvary didst go."Well, Edmeston was not talking about Calvary. He was talking about Christ's earthly life, his humdrum daily existence as an ordinary man, and particularly his terrifying experience in the wilderness as a young man before he embarked on his ministry and his journey to death. Of course it would be okay to talk about Calvary, but it wouldn't be very helpful, because (after all) most of us are not, right now, being faced with crucifixion. When we gain comfort from the thought that Christ understands our difficulties, and that we can seek forgiveness because he feels what it is like for us to be weak in the face of misery and loneliness, the relevant thing is the temptations: the weakness that is part of the human condition, what it is to 'tread this earth' as a human being. It is not in the unusual punishments, but in the weakness of the flesh, that we see Christ as having a fully human nature.
The New English Hymnal recommends this hymn for Epiphany 2. Funny that. I suppose it is because it talks about Our Lord going out into the desert at the beginning of his life as a young man, discovering his destiny. We've got to that stage in tracing Our Lord's manifestation. What the editors seem to have failed to notice is that in their new version the hymn isn't about that any more.
How sad. How sad. And only a single obelus, for all that damage to a fine hymn.
How sad.
Sunday, January 08, 2006
Why, oh why?
Why, oh why, do the editors of hymns books think that it is a good idea to try to 'improve' on the poetry of the original hymn writers and poets? And why, oh why, do churches buy new hymn books that have ruined the old hymns and substituted garbage for fine words?
Some time, when I feel strong enough to face up to the enormity of the situation, I shall start sharing some of the sad cases in the New English Hymnal with you.
Some people are not aware that the New English Hymnal is not the same thing as the English Hymnal. Some people refer to the former as though it were the latter (just new copies of an old favourite). It would be as well to start by reminding you that the New English Hymnal is a wolf in sheep's clothing, and that it has chosen to dress itself in green covers just to deceive you.
Long live the good old English Hymnal, I say. Or rather bring back the good old English Hymnal (if there are any to bring back).
In what follows I shall not infrequently complain about the New English Hymnal (NEH for short). Those complaints are never about the English Hymnal (EH for short).
Some time, when I feel strong enough to face up to the enormity of the situation, I shall start sharing some of the sad cases in the New English Hymnal with you.
Some people are not aware that the New English Hymnal is not the same thing as the English Hymnal. Some people refer to the former as though it were the latter (just new copies of an old favourite). It would be as well to start by reminding you that the New English Hymnal is a wolf in sheep's clothing, and that it has chosen to dress itself in green covers just to deceive you.
Long live the good old English Hymnal, I say. Or rather bring back the good old English Hymnal (if there are any to bring back).
In what follows I shall not infrequently complain about the New English Hymnal (NEH for short). Those complaints are never about the English Hymnal (EH for short).
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