My Kind of Hymn

How Great Thou Art

O, Lord, my God,
When I in awesome wonder
Consider all the worlds thy hands have made
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder
Thy power throughout the universe displayed
Then sings my soul, my saviour God, to Thee
How great Thou art, how great Thou art,
Then sings my soul, my saviour God, to Thee
How great Thou art, how great Thou art

FOR celebrating the sheer glory of God there can be no greater hymn than How great Thou art, and probably no one has ever sung it better than Aled Jones when he was a choirboy. It is a hymn of adoration and worship without the usual petition tacked on the end.

For me it carries also a very personal memory. The late Cardinal Hume, who will one day, I believe, be canonised as a saint, came to my fiftieth birthday party in the House of Commons and said grace. As a thank you to him for his presence, I arranged for a highly talented soloist to sing How great Thou art. Now whenever I hear the hymn, I think of him.

It is the kind of hymn which cries out to be sung on mountain tops when the glory of creation lies all around. I have sung it from the top deck of a cruise ship at three in the morning, surrounded by the breathtaking beauty of the Arctic glaciers. I can imagine others giving voice to it in woods and fields, on tors and tundra, in deserts and wastelands.

Its penultimate verse, which marvels that the God of such power should have sent His Son to die for us, is a wonderful restorer of a sense of proportion in times of stress while the final verse, a yearning for rather than a fearing of, the last days and the Judgement is the essential statement of Christian hope.

A good hymn should be powerful, haunting, uplifting. It should cause one to pause and listen whenever it is heard. Its tune should be memorable, but dignified rather than “catchy”. The purpose of a hymn is not to cause one’s foot to tap but to direct one’s thoughts to Almighty God.

How great Thou art has a wonderful range. It begins by celebrating awesome manifestations, such as stars and thunder, progresses to gentler experiences such as singing birds, passes to the wonder of Salvation and ends with a vision of eternal joy.

It is a hymn for solo choirboys and for full-throated Evangelical congregations. I loved it from the moment I first heard it as a child attending an Evangelical rally, and still listen awestruck now. When I think of retirement I think of walking Dartmoor, looking round to make sure no one is listening to my tone-deaf notes and singing How great Thou art from the top of every tor. I am always saddened that the author of so beautiful and powerful a hymn should be unknown, but I have a feeling he would have wanted it that way, would have wanted to pale into nothingness in the midst of God’s glory.

Ann Widdecombe is Conservative MP for Maidstone and the Weald.

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Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence

I SUSPECT I may be on a losing wicket here. This hymn is as uncompromisingly un-trendy as they get. It is very old – or at least its roots are. The words are adapted from the “Divine Liturgy of James the Apostle and Brother of God”, which is said to be the oldest Christian liturgy there is. The liturgy is still used by those curious and romantic bits of the Church whose origins are shrouded by the mists of history (like the Syrian Orthodox Church of India), so when you sing these verses you can – if you allow your imagination free rein – feel a sense of connection with the mysterious early days of evangelism in the East. The hymn powerfully evokes the paradoxes of Christ’s divinity (“King of Kings yet born of Mary … Lord of Lords in human vesture”), before celebrating his coming with unashamedly grand religious imagery (“Rank on rank the host of heaven/Spreads its vanguard on the way”, etc). The cherubim and a six-winged seraph get an outing, too – a rare event in public worship today – which adds to the general sense that singing this hymn is a bit like contemplating some huge medieval or Renaissance altar piece.

I think it also appeals especially to the masculine taste. It may be that I simply imagine that because of the very masculine circumstances in which I first heard it. It was often sung at Sunday Mass in the Abbey Church of the Benedictine monastery of Ampleforth, where I was a pupil at what was then an all-male boarding school, and the sound of 600 teenage boys and several dozen monks intoning their way through this at maximum volume and minimum speed was unforgettable.

However, I heard the hymn most recently at a First Holy Communion Mass in the very different environment of an urban parish church in south London, and I had a distinct impression that the fathers, uncles and godfathers were enjoying it rather more than their female counterparts. The tune – “Picardy”, an old French carol melody – is reverential, but it has got just a hint about it of one of those anthems (like Jerusalem, Swing low, sweet chariot, or Guide me, O Thou Great Redeemer) which men seem to delight in singing together. Let all mortal flesh keep silence at a football or rugby match? Perhaps not, but you never know.

Let me, in a final desperate attempt to sway your votes, turn to the demotic language of marketing; this hymn “does what it says on the tin”. It instructs you to “ponder nothing earthly-minded” and then lifts you out of yourself with its unique mixture of musical emotion, solemn poetry and mystical theology – just the mixture needed to send you off to Sunday lunch with a sense that you have taken some time away from the world.

Edward Stourton is a presenter of Radio 4’s Today programme.

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Dear Lord and Father of Mankind

Dear Lord and Father of mankind,
Forgive our foolish ways,
Reclothe us in our rightful mind,
In purer lives thy service find,
In deeper reverence, praise.

TRY and say it as if you haven’t got a smell under your nose, said the producer in my earphones. I was standing in for the regular presenter on Radio 2’s Good Morning Sunday show and, during a pre-programme run-through, was practising my introduction to the weekly “Pick-a-Hymn” slot. Listeners are given three choices, cast their votes and the winner is played the following week.

It was, I’d already decided, one of the cheesier features of the show and something to be endured, not enjoyed. My personal Road to Damascus came in two stages. First there was the unexpected joy of sitting in the studio – microphone off, I hope – and singing along at 7.15 in the morning to that week’s chosen hymn.

“Stirring stuff.” I said afterwards, the smell dissipated. And then on subsequent Sundays, when I was again drafted in as stand-in, there was the experience of reading the listeners’ letters that came with their votes. They made me aware of just how accurately hymns sum up feelings that we struggle to put into words.

I suppose I’d always known it. At funerals when I sing the words of the standard hymns, I always find myself praying with real feeling: “Please God, let it be as these words say it will be”. But those letters brought it home. So, if I had to pick a hymn it would undoubtedly be “Dear Lord and Father of mankind”. There are the usual sentimental reasons. We had it at our wedding, 10 years ago, and at first my mother’s and then my father’s funerals.

But it goes deeper than its power to bring a tear to my all-too-easily watering eyes. Liturgy, when well done, has the power to touch another dimension, bring moments of transcendence when we fleetingly glimpse that there is something more to existence than the here and now.“Dear Lord and Father”, as part of any liturgy and indeed as I sit here humming it to myself, does that for me. Written in the second half of the nineteenth century by John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892), a distinguished American Quaker and campaigner for the abolition of slavery, it sums up a yearning for God that is otherwise ineffable. The fact that Whittier was both a poet and a lyricist is a clue as to its power.

As you sing you can feel yourself brushing against something other and better. And in its final verse, there is a reassurance and a challenge that – even when sung at the end of 10 o’clock family Mass with all the children at the point of meltdown – always makes me want to weep in gratitude and expectation.“Breathe through the heats of our desire/thy coolness and thy balm;/let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;/speak through the earthquake, wind and fire,/O still, small voice of calm!/O still, small voice of calm!”

Peter Stanford is a Tablet columnist.

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Be Thou My Vision

Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart,
Be all else but naught to me save
that thou art
Be thou my best thought in the day
and the night
Both waking and sleeping, thy presence
my light

ACCORDING TO MORI, parents cite commercial pressure as the single most difficult aspect of raising children today. And it’s not just a case of being urged to buy trendy trainers or cool clothes. The market would like to determine all our priorities – at home, at school, at work or play. Nothing is immune.

Scripture tells us: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” But we do have a vision, and it comes not from the marketplace. Our true worth does not lie in what we own, how we look, where we live or the kind of job we have. Our fulfilment lies in who we are and whose we are. Here is an ancient hymn, fresh with insight.

We address our Creator as Vision, Wisdom, Word, Power, Treasure, Dignity, Delight, Best Thought. It’s almost like being surprised by the endless generosity of a loving parent. Is this our inheritance? And the answer is: Yes. Images from hymns can accompany us through our lives. They surface in unexpected places, helping us re-define our experience. Someone once told me that, during a time when she was sure she had lost her faith, she was haunted by an unrecognised fragment of melody. Then one day she heard the hymn “Be thou my vision”. The fragment was suddenly clear,“Thou in me dwelling, and I with thee one”.

Written by an Irish Christian, this poem of faith dates from the eighth century, though some place it earlier with a contemporary of St Columba. The modern translation by the Dublin linguist Mary E. Byrne (1880-1931) first appeared in the journal Erin, published in 1905. It was versified by Eleanor H. Hull (1860-1935) in her Poem Book of the Gael (1912). The tune was first published in Patrick Joyce’s Old Irish Folk Music Songs (1909). Text and tune came together in the Irish Church Hymnal of 1919. Re-named “Slane”, it has characteristics often associated with Irish folk melodies: a wide range, four-phrase structure without repetition, and infectious singability.“Slane” is the name of a hill in Co. Meath where St Patrick defied the Druids in 433. Beltane law forbade anyone but the high king to start a bonfire before the Spring Festival. But Patrick lit one on the eve of Easter, and he and his small band were arrested as predicted. After facing the Druids, under threat of death, he had to answer to King Laoghaire. Patrick somehow gained his respect and with it the freedom to preach Christianity across the land.

That one small act of lighting a fire ignited the faith of generations. Hymns should light a fire. This one touches my very being, strengthening me as I live in the tension between this world and the one I long to see. Most of all it challenges me, urges me to be like Patrick, standing there on Slane Hill, wanting to risk everything to bring that new world into being.

Bernadette Farrell is the writer of many hymns, including “Christ, Be Our Light”, “O God, You Search Me”, and“Bread of Life”

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Now The Green Blade Riseth

EVER since I was a little girl my family used to say prayers and sing together every night before we went to bed. Each of us three children and my parents would choose a hymn in turn, sometimes several, and then we would all sing it. We did this for as long as I can remember, including the years we spent living on a sailboat. When we were sailing in the Bahamas we would often anchor in a shallow bay along the shore of a deserted island with no other people about, with only the sounds of the fading night calls of the birds and the lapping of the waves against the boat’s hull.

The memory of gathering together in the boat’s little cabin, my sister and brother and me snuggled up with my parents on the biggest bunk, as the sun sank over the horizon, saying our prayers and singing hymns, is a very happy and potent memory. After our worship time, we would kiss and hug our parents and then sleepily go and climb into our own individual bunks, where we would be gently rocked to sleep by the waves.

I especially love Now The Green Blade Riseth, words by John Macleod Campbell Crum (1872-1958) and sung to the music of a traditional French melody. It speaks of resurrection, life and renewed hope in a beautiful, yet powerful, way. Jesus is very simply and tenderly referred to as “Love” in the hymn, and the last line of each of the four verses is “Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green”. The image of a blade of wheat pushing through the bare earth, with its comparison
to the risen Lord, is a vivid and moving image.

The two middle verses speak of “Love” first being laid in the grave, having been slain by hatred, with people thinking he would “never wake again”, only to come forth at Easter “like the risen grain”. It is a picture of Love being dead and buried, only to spring forth, eternally triumphant over all death and pain. The last verse explicitly refers to human suffering. “When our hearts are wintry, grieving or in pain, your touch can call us back to life again; fields of our hearts, that dead and bare have been: Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.” These words inspire me not to give up, no matter what, and always to remain open to the love of God being born afresh in my heart. The lilting melody makes me want to dance.

Singing this hymn reminds me of our very real struggles and challenges, but it always leaves me willing to hope again, with renewed faith in the ultimately irrepressible
strength and power of God’s love. Just to think of it makes me happy!

Christina Rees is a member of the General Synod of the Church of England.

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When I Survey the Wondrous Cross

THE English poet John Betjeman once smilingly trounced a supercilious young television interviewer who was insisting that hymns were worthless doggerel. “Ah, I see what you mean,” the Poet Laureate said mildly, and quoted this:

His dying crimson like a robe
Spreads o’er his body on the Tree.
Then am I dead to all the globe,
And all the globe is dead to me.

The young man was silenced.
The verse is from When I survey the wondrous cross by Isaac Watts, a hymn which expresses both profound emotion and complex theology in a form which only the ignorant or the truly pretentious would deny is art. I love it. The contemporary songwriter Graham Kendrick put his finger on the source of its power. “It is all about wonder,” he said, “wonder at the seemingly mad extremes of divine love that chooses a crucifixion to atone for evil and conquer death.”

No hymn captures so brilliantly and so movingly the timeless paradoxes of what happened on that Cross. Here we have an instrument of torture which is also in some extraordinary sense “wondrous”, the entire realm of nature constituting too small an offering in the face of such a sacrifice, the richest gain counting for nothing at all, a love being demonstrated which demands nothing less than everything.

Familiarity can shrivel these complex ideas into platitudes; in Isaac Watts’s hands they are reworked with deceptively simple freshness, yet with a scope which gives the hymn truly epic grandeur. This offer of “my soul, my life, my all” instigated something of a sea-change in Church worship. As a young man preparing to be a Dissenting minister among congregations who thought it frivolous to sing anything but psalms in church services, it took courage for Isaac Watts to produce hymns Which allowed the singer to address God directly, and personally.

But the trend caught on, and he wrote nearly 600 in the end, many of them among the most loved in the canon. This is surely the finest. I heard it sung recently by the Caernarvon Male Voice Choir to the glorious tune“Morte Christe”, which I had never encountered before. The blend of harmonies was spine-tinglingly beautiful, soaring to such a moving climax with the words, Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all – that there was barely a breath in Bangor Cathedral As the last note died away.

From Glorious Things: My Hymns for Life, by Sally Magnusson, published by Continuum Books, June 2004, £9.99.
Adapted by the author.

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Praise to the Holiest

Praise to the Holiest in the height
And in the depth be praise
In all His words most wonderful
Most sure in all His ways!

THAT LEAPING arpeggio seems to have been with me all my life. It was a popular hymn in my childhood before the Second Vatican Council, when opportunities for Catholics to sing hymns were more limited than they are now. It has survived the liturgical upheaval to remain one of the most popular hymns not only among Catholics but with all denominations.

Yet like many familiar and seemingly unchangeable objects, there is more to the hymn than meets the eye. John Henry Newman did not write it as a congregational hymn at all, but as an episode in The Dream of Gerontius, produced in a frenzy of activity in 1865. What Newman wrote was not just the seven verses we sing today, but a mini-epic of 35 stanzas, divided between five angelic choirs, which sets out the whole story of the Fall, the Incarnation and the Redemption, up to the death of Jesus. It ends at to suffer and to die. Death, after all, is what Gerontius is about.

Catholics who think of the hymn as their possession may be affronted to learn that it was first published in Hymns Ancient and Modern in 1868, with the demure tune by J.B. Dykes that everyone else thinks of as the “right” one. It was the A&M editors who formed it as a hymn, selecting the verses and repeating the first at the end. Its first Catholic appearance was in Arundel Hymns (1902), but only with the Westminster Hymnal of 1912 did the “Catholic” tune emerge. Richard Runciman Terry wrote dozens of hymns but this is his masterpiece, a genuinely popular tune that stands up to rough treatment by enthusiastic congregations.

Near the end of his life Newman was deeply touched to receive a copy of Gerontius which had belonged to General Gordon and contained annotations made by him as he was awaiting his fate in Khartoum. Elgar at his wedding was given another copy to which Gordon’s notes had been added, which set him on the track that was to lead to his own setting of the work. Another admirer of Praise to the Holiest was W.E. Gladstone, who had it read to him on his deathbed and sung at his funeral. It was sung at the funerals of both Cardinal Winning and Cardinal Hume. I would like it sung at mine. We sing hymns first because their tunes beguile us into doing so, and then spend a lifetime getting to know and love the words.

I have come to regard the first verse of Praise to the Holiest as one of the greatest in English hymnody. What can be added to this paean of praise? Only the story of redemption, of course, the wisest, the generous love. True, it does not reach the Resurrection, but that is explained by its original purpose. In our parish we sing it on Good Friday, where its strength and confidence, bolstered by Terry’s leaping tune, express as well as anything the Triumph of the Cross.

Stephen Dean is music adviser to the East Anglia diocese. He is also a composer and editor of the hymnbook Laudate.

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Immortal, Invisible

Immortal, invisible, God only wise,
In light inaccessible hid from our eyes,
Most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days,
Almighty, victorious, thy great name we praise.

WHAT fabulous images these words conjure up! For ever and everywhere – unseen, hidden from our eyes by an inaccessible light. Words describing God who neither rests nor hastes nor wants nor wastes. The glorious, the almighty! Powerful words describing a powerful God. I first sang this hymn as a child in church, and was struck by the amazingly long words. Just to sing “inac- ces-si-ble” was good enough for me – knowing the meaning came much later.

Walter Chalmers Smith, the lyricist, wrote 12 hymns, and this is the only one still in use. He was a pastor in the Free Scottish Churches, and served as their oderator during its jubilee year in 1893. His inspiration for the hymn is 1 Timothy 1:17: “Now unto the king eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honour and glory for ever and ever”.

The reference to “the Ancient of Days” in the third line of verse one comes from Daniel 7:9: “As I watched, thrones were set in place, and an Ancient One took his throne”, while the third line of verse two echoes Psalm 36:6: “Thy righteousness is like the great mountains”. So – a very biblically based hymn. My mother was Welsh and all my childhood holidays were spent with relatives in Wales where chapel-going was the Sunday routine.

There’s something even now which moves me to tears when I hear a Welsh choir in full flight. So it’s not surprising that I love the tune to this hymn as it was written by a very Welsh Welshman, John Roberts, also, for some strange reason, known as Ieuan Gwyllt (John Wild). The tune – “St Denio” – also known as “Joanna” – is based on a Welsh folk song, probably a ballad from 1810. It was first introduced into mainstream hymnody by Gustav Holst in The English Hymnal in 1906.

I’m really surprised that this hymn made it into The Tablet poll – as it isn’t in the Songs of Praise Top 40 – but it’s a great favourite here on Premier, especially a modern version by the American singer Cynthia Clawson which manages to do the almost impossible – give an old hymn a modern feel without losing anything in translation!

Cindy Kent presents a show from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. weekdays on Premier Christian Radio.

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Soul of My Saviour

PEN these words in support not so much of what is a splendid hymn but of what is a great feast.

As a young Dominican back in the Eighties, I vividly recall 1 November was the last day when the brethren were to be seen clad in white before the onset of All souls. On 2 November, out came the black capes and hoods (both admittedly a welcome extra layer for winter) and thus it remained until the Gloria of the Easter Vigil when the black garments were cast down on the choir stalls, the bells rang out and white ruled once more, ushering in the hope that all things would be made anew.

In the darkest recesses of mid-autumn, with its ever-shortening days, For All The Saints is a beacon in the gloom of a church liturgical calendar limping on towards the promise of an Advent which stills seems way too remote. At this time of the year we desperately need a kick start! Vaughan Williams’s rousing melody which ccompanies the 1864 text of William Walsham How, a Shropshire rector and future Anglican bishop, does just the job.

The sign of one’s own feelings about hymns is always the tell-tale subjective reaction to matching the numbers up there on the wooden display board with the hymnal in the pew. Often you groan quietly to yourself as you contemplate your sixth laborious rendering of Soul of My Saviour in as many weeks. Many hymns suffer from overfamiliarity. They become the Beethoven symphonies of our liturgical practice. But not so my selection. It seldom gets out of the starting blocks, but that is no bad thing; for when it does there is something so uplifting about the sheer generality of this hymn’s (and the feast’s) devotion that sets it apart from the crowd.

For that great tune focuses not on this individual or that, but on “the Apostles’ glorious company” and “blest communion, fellowship divine”. When I sing these words to this music, my hair stands on end (not bad in your mid-40s); I still “tingle”, knowing that it isn’t this saint or that event that we praise, but the whole Communion of the Church. In praising nobody, we praise past, present and future all in one.

Its optimism knows no bounds. And what underlies it is a truly egalitarian beatific vision. I am not extolling the virtues of a half-baked, Tawney-esque earthly socialism here, but appealing to you to consider this most piercing truth revealed in the message of this hymn. That the historical squabblings and debates over hierarchies and vertical power structures in our Christian history simply melt away when we dare, for just the five minutes of singing this hymn, to contemplate our joint presence together in the redeeming and transforming love of the Creator who underpins all of life itself.

Mark Dowd is a television producer and presenter. His latest programme, Hallowed Be Thy Game, examines the relationship between religion and football

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Christ, Be Our Light

Longing for light, we wait in darkness.
Longing for truth, we turn to you.
Make us your own, your holy people,
Light for the world to see…

THE MUSIC of Bernadette Farrell has always found a special place in my spiritual journey. She is clearly a fellow-pilgrim on this way of faith we all travel. Her compositions, including “Christ, Be Our Light”, reveal such life-giving images of God, images that are rooted strongly in our Jewish- Christian tradition. Her hymns have a “humanness” to them that captures my imagination and helps me to enter into their prayer. I love “Christ, Be Our Light” because of the contrast it sets up between the darkness of our longing and the One who comes into that darkness with saving light.

The verses, set primarily in their minor key, speak of the hungers of our humanity. But as the piece moves towards the refrain it modulates into a major key, which is like the sun rising from the darkness. It is in this joyous, majestic refrain that we proclaim Christ to be our light. To me it is almost like the moment the morning sun breaks forth over the horizon as its light races across the landscape. Her lyrics are so powerful and filled with images that call us to live as people of the light.

My all-time favourite Bernadette Farrell hymn is “O God, You Search Me”. This hymn, found on the same recording as“Christ, Be Our Light”, is a setting of Psalm 139, which in itself secures a special place for this hymn in my heart. Bernadette’s husband, Owen Alstott, wrote the text for this piece and, for me, it is an exquisite expression of the psalm’s inner soul. When wedded to Bernadette’s hauntingly lovely tune, the result is something that helps one to feel the presence of God in its beauty. I find it difficult to sing this hymn straight through without having to choke back the emotion I feel.

But this hymn is my favourite not just for its musical and lyrical beauty, but because it captures two images of God that are so important to me. The first is that of a God who knows us through and through, a God who knows “my resting and my rising” and who is “with me beyond my understanding”. To me, as I try to discover who I am and where God is calling me, it is tremendously consoling to imagine God as the One who knows me better than I know myself. Before I even speak, God knows the prayers and longings of my soul.

The second image in this hymn is that of a God who “besieges” me. This God doesn’t just wait in the wings until I might be ready to make a move but is, rather, a God who pursues me. The God of this psalm, and of Bernadette’s hymn, is One who is so in love with us and can’t bear to be apart from us, even when we try to escape the grasp of that love. This gives me such hope as I try, in my small, awkward way, to respond to that love with a generous heart.

Dan Schutte is the composer of a number of popular hymns including“Here I Am, Lord”. He is composer in residence at the University of San Francisco and director of music for the Office of University Ministries.

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