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Hallo again to all. Today is the Feast of All Saints, celebrated with special pomp in Pasadena and on Margaret Street, in Milwaukee and at Wickham Terrace. In our parish, it was a chance to sing hymns for which much of our congregation is off-book: For all the saints (Sine nomine), Who are these like stars appearing? (Zeuch mich, Zeuch mich), Jerusalem the golden (Ewing), and Ye watchers and ye holy ones (Lasst uns erfreuen). They're hymns for which we always wish there were a few more verses, a few more minutes to stand within familiar tunes and the memories they recall. Today is also a chance to sing a bouncy, modern hymn dismissed by many as a bit beyond twee, but loved so widely and so well that in 2003 it made AO's list of Top 20 Desert Island Hymns. The text is by Lesbia Scott, a talented writer whose first name we think must have been quite uncommon by the time of her death in 1986. Scott was an Englishwoman, a dramatist and poet, wife to a vicar, and mother to three children. She was also by all accounts someone whose creative work had at first a small, focused audience of just one nursery. She wrote this hymn and others as a way of teaching her young children, and also because they liked them. Reading slowly, though, without the famous tune by John Henry Hopkins, Jr.,* we find nothing truly twee or cloying here. The words are in fact hard words, tall promises to put in the mouths of grownups, let alone children.
Ought we not be frightened to sing the last two lines? They make us to admit in public something few of our friends would ever volunteer in conversation: a desire to be like St Luke, St Margaret of Scotland, St Joan of Arc. They put before us patience, bravery, truth, toil, fighting, living, dying—all with the saints, all of the saints, as examples.
During Scott's own long life, the hymn was included in the American Hymnbook for the Armed Forces. She wrote:
This, of course, is very much the point of it all. Children and soldiers are, like those who receive ordination or accept martyrdom, particular persons whom God's love makes strong. Whatever innate strength of character they have, its transformation into sanctity does not happen under their own steam. (Though, as the hymn reminds us on the teetering edge of semi-Pelagianism, it does require human will.) And the whole thing is tied up with a reminder that this mystery of saints of all sorts and conditions is not at all fixed in history.
We wonder what it says about our tradition that it should place these firm, careful, deeply astute theological words about sainthood in the mouths of babes and sucklings, whilst giving songs about golden cities, milk, honey, sweetness and eagerness to adults. Speculation about this curious distribution we will save for another week, though. Suffice it for now and during the Octave of All Saints to keep our eyes peeled and hearts open in school, or in church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea. We're quite sure that saints unknown are all around us, and glad for this annual reminder to sing about them and learn from them. See you next week. |
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