2025.10.05
Faith, discipleship, and stewardship – of many kinds of gifts – form a nexus of themes this Sunday as we move further into the autumn and the travel narrative of Luke’s Gospel.
This year’s stewardship theme in the parish I serve is ‘Tell out, my soul!’, inspired by Hymn 437/
438. This paraphrase of the Magnificat was written by Timothy Dudley-
Smith, an important English hymnist ( and later bishop ), in 1961. Inspired by the translation of the relevant passage in the then new New English Bible, he took its first line over as the first line of his poem, repeating the first four words at the beginning of each stanza, continuing each with various characteristics of God highlighted in the Magnificat. We will sing one stanza of ‘Tell out, my soul’ each week this month as the ‘other song of praise’ that may replace the Gloria in excelsis, and then sing the entire hymn at the ingathering of pledges, using the tune printed at 438, ‘Woodlands’. This tune combines a marchlike accompaniment with a wide-
ranging melody in a style familiar from other early-
twentieth-
century English hymn-
tunes such as ‘Sine Nomine’ and ‘Engelberg’. The opening phrase of the tune – three anacrustic quarter notes repeating the dominant scale degree, followed by a dotted half-
note on the upper tonic and then a cascading line consisting essentially of quarter notes on sol, la, mi, sol, re, mi – sets the shape and meaning of the text well. The particular rhythmic profile and melodic sweep of the tune, however, are a poor match for the many reversed feet found in subsequent lines of the text, and singers are left gasping for breath and scrambling to recommence singing at the midpoint. Speaking more broadly, a march – by definition, music to move to – does not suit a setting of a canticle, which is never a processional item ( at Mass or at its more usual Office ), and I would argue does not belong in the liturgy at all.*
Both the Gospel and the Epistle deal in some way with matters of faith and discipleship. Have true faith, and miracles will follow, says Our Lord; furthermore, do what is expected of a follower of Christ, and do not seek a reward. St Paul, writing to his protégé Timothy, urges him to hold to the Apostle’s teaching, to ‘guard the good treasure entrusted to you, with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us.’ These themes are picked up in some of our hymns and our Communion anthem: the second stanza of Georg Neumark’s ‘If thou but trust in God to guide thee’ ( ‘Wer nur den lieben Gott läßt walten’ [ 635 ] ) urges the singer–
listener to ‘Sing, pray, and keep [ God’s ] ways unswerving / so do thine own part faithfully.’ In ‘O Master, let me walk with thee’[ 660 ], we pray to follow Christ in service, patience, faith, trust, hope, and peace. ‘Gracious Spirit, dwell with me’, our Communion anthem, is a prayer to the Holy Spirit for the singer to be imbued with some of her actions and attributes: grace, healing, truthfulness, wisdom, holiness, strength. The modern setting by K. Lee Scott uses the hymn-
tune ‘Adoro devote’ ( ‘Humbly I adore thee’ [ 314 ] ), setting it not only in unison but also in canon and a partial augmentation canon. This anthem and a setting of ‘Adoro te’ by twentieth-
century French composer Henri Nibelle chosen to precede it, both ostensibly written for organ, each make use of textures, harmonic languages, and dynamic profiles perhaps better suited to the piano; the Nibelle piece in particular demonstrates its close links to a half a century or more of French piano music, and perhaps counterintuitively, the attack and decay of the piano’s sound makes greater sense of the slow pace than the organ might, as the listener waits expectantly for the next chord to sound. Whatever the piano’s rather bourgeois connotations that, among other qualities, might make it less obviously suitable for the liturgy, I find that playing this kind of music on the piano can bring a particular stillness to the room at Communion-
time, perhaps because the piano activates the acoustic of our space in a way that our organ’s rather stuffy tone does not.
Our semi-
continuous series of readings from the Hebrew Bible brings us to the beginning of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, a series of alphabetic acrostic poems concerning the exile of the Judeans in Babylon, familiar from their use in the liturgies of Holy Week. Appointed to follow the Lamentations is Psalm 137, which vividly ( too vividly in the case of the omitted vv. 7–
9 ) depicts the exiles’ response to the taunts of their captors: How can we sing a happy song of our homeland while in exile? they ask. Instead, we hang up our harps and weep: but may we be tongue-
tied and all thumbs if we forget Jerusalem!
Among the very early repertory of congregational song of the German-
speaking Reformation were some Psalm-
paraphrases ( which inspired, and in some cases became part of, the French-
language Calvinist Genevan Psalter as well ), including a version of this psalm, ‘An Wasserflüßen Babylon’. From among many polyphonic settings of this song, this week the choir sings a setting by Benedictus Ducis taken from a 1544 collection published for use in schools. In this attractive three-
voice, single-
strophe setting the melody appears, partly decorated, in long notes in the upper voice. The English translation we sing is taken from the first printed English-
language collection of religious song, the reforming bishop Myles Coverdale’s
Goostly Psalmes and Spirituall Songes ( 1535 ), which included this and adaptations of many other early German Reformation songs.
* cf. the use of ‘Sine Nomine’ for a paraphrase of the Pascha nostrum in Wonder, Love, and Praise, criticized in these pages previously ( 2021.04.04 ).