Semicolon

Lyrics: George Matheson, 1882.
Music: ST. MARGARET (PEACE) by Albert Peace, 1884.
Or here for the Christopher Minor tune/version. We sing this one at my church.
Theme: Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. Romans 6:8

David Phelps singing these lyrics to the traditional tune:

1. O Love that wilt not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee;
I give thee back the life I owe,
That in thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.

2. O light that followest all my way,
I yield my flickering torch to thee;
My heart restores its borrowed ray,
That in thy sunshine’s blaze its day
May brighter, fairer be.

3. O Joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee;
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
And feel the promise is not vain,
That morn shall tearless be.

4. O Cross that liftest up my head,
I dare not ask to fly from thee;
I lay in dust life’s glory dead,
And from the ground there blossoms red
Life that shall endless be.

George Matheson was the eldest of eight children. When he was twenty years old, he became blind, but he studied for the ministry anyway and became a pastor in Edinburgh, Scotland. O Love That WIlt Not Let Me Go is the only one of his lyrics that has lasted to this day. He said of its genesis:

“It was the night of my sister’s marriage, and the rest of the family were staying overnight in Glasgow. Something happened to me, which was known only to myself, and which caused me the most severe mental suffering. The hymn was the fruit of that suffering. It was the quickest bit of work I ever did in my life. I had the impression of having it dictated to me by some inward voice rather than of working it out myself. I am quite sure that the whole work was completed in five minutes, and equally sure that it never received at my hands any retouching or correction. I have no natural gift of rhythm. All the other verses I have ever written are manufactured articles; this came like a dayspring from on high.”

For quite a bit more biographical information on Mr. Matheson, aka The Blind Preacher, try this informative blog post.

Lyrics: Darlene Zschech
Music: Darlene Zschech.
Theme:

I’m copying the entire song lyrics here even though I think it’s still under copyright —you can find the lyrics posted in full all over the internet. I’m as fuzzy about copyright law and what constitutes “fair use” as I am about the difference between a hymn, a gospel song, and a worship song. You can read a discussion of the latter issue here at Conjubilant With Song (see the comments).

Anyway, this contemporary worship song/hymn is beautiful, and I remember when I first heard it. Eldest Daughter came home from a retreat and taught me this song that she learned. That was probably ten or more years ago. I’ve enjoyed singing it ever since.

The Chosen by Chaim Potok. An amazing book about fathers and sons and friendship and tradition and the pull of change. What really drew me into the story was the authentic detail about Jewish and Hassidic life and belief. I loved it so much that I had to find the sequel and read it next.

The Promise by Chaim Potok. A worthy follow-up to a great novel.

Alligator Bayou by Donna Jo Napoli. Semicolon review here.

Confetti Girl by Diana Lopez. Semicolon review here.

The Arrow Over the Door by Joseph Bruchac. Semicolon review here.

Family Reminders by Julie Danneberg. Semicolon review here.

Escape Under the Forever Sky by Eve Yohalem. Semicolon review here.

Things Change by Patrick Jones. Semicolon review here.

The Adventurous Deeds of Deadwood Jones by Helen Hemphill. Semicolon review here.

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation:
Volume 1: The Pox Party
Volume 2: The Kingdom on the Waves
by M.T. Anderson. Semicolon review here.

North of Beautiful by Justina Chen Headley. Semicolon review here.

Singin’ Texas by Edward Abernethy Francis. I really sort of skimmed this one, still doing research for my Texas history/literature class in the fall.

Abide With Me: The World of VIctorian Hymns by Ian C. Bradley.

Lady of Milkweed Manor by Julie Klassen. Too many implausible coincidences and unreasonable acts made this novel difficult to finish. I did enjoy the period details, but the story and characters were not believable and therefore not very enjoyable.

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. Great story. Way, way too much graphic, violent, gratuitous sexual details. Mr. Follett seemed at times to be obsessed with the subject of rape —or maybe I just have a low tolerance for reading about the details of such a crime. I finished the whole 973 page epic, but had they asked me to edit, I could have taken it down to about 800 pages without losing anything significant.

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula LeGuin. Semicolon review here.

Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean. This book raises interesting questions about memory and the role it plays in our lives and in our survival. In it, a Russian survivor of the siege of Leningrad (WW2) uses her memories to cope with her incipient Alzheimer’s in ways that her children cannot understand.

101 Hymn Stories by Kenneth W. Osbeck.

101 More Hymn Stories by Kenneth W. Osbeck.

Then Sings My Soul by Robert Morgan.

Hymn research and reading for the 48-hour Book Challenge shaped a lot of my reading this month. The best adult fiction I read was, hands down, The Chosen by Chaim Potok. The best of the children’s/young adult fiction: The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation.

Just in time for the Fourth of July:

Lyrics: Julia Ward Howe, 1861.
Music: JOHN BROWN’S BODY, possibly by John William Steffe.
Theme:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword;
His truth is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch fires of a hundred circling camps
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps;
His day is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! His day is marching on.

I have read a fiery Gospel writ in burnished rows of steel;
“As ye deal with My contemners, so with you My grace shall deal”;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with His heel,
Since God is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Since God is marching on.

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment seat;
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet;
Our God is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free!
While God is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! While God is marching on.

He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is wisdom to the mighty, He is honor to the brave;
So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of wrong His slave,
Our God is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Our God is marching on.

OK, so the story I remember is that Ms. Howe heard the soldiers singing John Brown’s Body, a popular song about the abolitionist John Brown, and thought the tune ought to have better lyrics. So she sat down and wrote The Battle Hymn of The Republic. That’s the gist of the story as told here at about.com.

Mrs. Howe later wrote:

I went to bed and slept as usual, but awoke the next morning in the gray of the early dawn, and to my astonishment found that the wished-for lines were arranging themselves in my brain. I lay quite still until the last verse had completed itself in my thoughts, then hastily arose, saying to myself, I shall lose this if I don’t write it down immediately. I searched for an old sheet of paper and an old stub of a pen which I had had the night before, and began to scrawl the lines almost without looking, as I learned to do by often scratching down verses in the darkened room when my little children were sleeping. Having completed this, I lay down again and fell asleep, but not before feeling that something of importance had happened to me.”

Here the inimitable Orson Welles tells the story of the origin of The Battle Hymn of the Republic:

The Yankees loved it. The defeated Southerners, not so much. But we (I do consider myself a Southerner, even though I’m from West Texas) have come around in the last hundred years or so. I would estimate Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn is nearly as popular down here in Dixie as it is up North nowadays.

Back in the day before we had an official one, Theodore Roosevelt suggested that The Battle Hymn of the Republic would make a fine national anthem. However, not everyone agreed:

“THE “Battle Hymn of the Republic ” is fine, sonorous, and has an undoubted gait and march to it. What will keep it from any popular acceptance is that its march, however captivating, will not offset the fact that its words mean nothing, convey no impression, and, as a matter of fact, never have been used except as tour de force when somebody ordered or procured them to be sung. ~Frank Carpenter, New York Times, August 8, 1908.

One of my survey participants says this song must be sung by an all-male choir, and another informs me the tune is called CANAAN’S HAPPY LAND. I don’t know, but here’s the male choir:

Sources:
Julia Ward Howe: Beyond the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
The Atlantic Online: Flashbacks.

lathe: a machine for shaping a piece of material, such as wood or metal, by rotating it rapidly along its axis while pressing a fixed cutting or abrading tool against it.

The Lathe of Heaven is about dreams and dreaming, about playing God, and about getting by with a little help from my friends. It’s about time travel in a one sense, but also about changes and how the past changes the future and how each person’s actions change the both the past and the future. It’s about the elusive nature of memory. And, of course, like all good books it’s about LOST.

OK, not all good books relate to LOST, but The Lathe of Heaven appeared on my reading list because I saw it on a list of LOST-related books. And the relationship is both obvious and intriguing.

Benjamin Linus to John Locke: Let me put it so you’ll understand. Picture a box. You know something about boxes, don’t you John? What if I told you that, somewhere on this island, there is a very large box and whatever you imagined, whatever you wanted to be in it when you opened that box, there it would be? What would you say about that, John?

One answer that Locke could have given to Ben’s question is that one should be very careful about one imagines into such a (metaphorical) box. In The Lathe of Heaven, the protagonist, George, has “effective dreams,” dreams that alter the future by also altering the past and making it as if it had always been on the trajectory that the dream imaged. The characters also change history by imagining or dreaming. As they travel in time their actions change was has been, or what will be, maybe, and make it as if it had always been the way it is. The problem in The Lathe of Heaven is that George has no control over his dreams; the dreams change things in sometimes good, sometimes horribly immoral and detrimental ways.

So George gets a psychiatrist to help him quit dreaming, but the psychiatrist, instead of finding a way to eliminate the effective dreams, tries to control them, to improve the world by suggesting to George what he should dream. “Dream about peace.” “Dream an end to pollution.” Just as our waking actions have unforeseen consequences, George’s dreams don’t turn out exactly as planned.

I think the LOSTies are going to have to deal in the last season next year with unforeseen consequences of their attempts to “fix” the past. They really don’t know enough about the way the Island works or about time travel or about Destiny to be blowing stuff up in hopes of resetting the future into a more palatable, or even moral, universe. Perhaps one of the “morals” of LOST, and of The Lathe of Heaven, is that human beings don’t know enough to play God. Rose and Bernard seem to have learned this lesson, and they have opted for withdrawal, cultivating their own garden, not trying to rescue or change things or save anyone.

Does the Island itself grant wishes? Healing? Is that a good thing, or perhaps does that very changing of events disturb the balance of the universe in ways that are destructive and ultimately harmful? What will it take to fix what Jack and Juliet and the others have done in the final episode of season 5? Is the “loophole” that Jacob’s enemy exploits to get to him a result of the time-tinkering that the LOSTies have been doing?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. However, just as The Lathe of Heaven ends on a somewhat ambiguous and confusing note, I predict that LOST’s ending will not satisfy everyone. Some questions will be answered definitively; other answers will be obscure with more than one possible meaning and open to interpretation; and still other questions and answers will be notably absent.

And that continuum of elucidation will again make LOST a lot like Life.

Lyrics: Fanny Crosby.
Music: REDEEMED by William J. Kirkpatrick.

Music courtesy of Friendship Baptist Church and Hymnary.org.
The tune I learned as an alternate for this hymn and the one I actually prefer is by A.L. Butler, and I learned it out of the 1975 Baptist Hymnal. It doesn’t seem to be very well known, but it’s the tune that loads into my right brain when ever I think of these lyrics. I have to dredge to come up with the primary tune, REDEEMED, even though we sang both at my church growing up. This guy, Jack Marti, sings almost all of the verses in a down-home, informal but tuneful rendition.

Theme:

Redeemed, how I love to proclaim it!
Redeemed by the blood of the Lamb;
Redeemed through His infinite mercy,
His child and forever I am.

Refrain:
Redeemed, redeemed,
Redeemed by the blood of the Lamb;
Redeemed, redeemed,
His child and forever I am.

Redeemed, and so happy in Jesus,
No language my rapture can tell;
I know that the light of His presence
With me doth continually dwell.

I think of my blessèd Redeemer,
I think of Him all the day long:
I sing, for I cannot be silent;
His love is the theme of my song.

I know I shall see in His beauty
The King in whose law I delight;
Who lovingly guardeth my footsteps,
And giveth me songs in the night.

I know there’s a crown that is waiting,
In yonder bright mansion for me,
And soon, with the spirits made perfect,
At home with the Lord I shall be.

I’m glad this Fanny Crosby hymn made the list. I think it’s my second favorite of her hymns, mostly because it’s so familiar and joyful and true. I AM redeemed through His infinite mercy, and His love is the theme of my song.

“What a delicious thing reading is-not to be you anymore but to flow throughout the whole universe you’re reading about.”
~Gustave Flaubert

Welcome to this week’s Saturday Review of Books.

Here’s how it usually works. Find a review on your blog posted sometime this week of a book you’re reading or a book you’ve read. The review doesn’t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can just write your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.

Now post a link here to the specific post where you’ve written your book review. Don’t link to your main blog page because this kind of link makes it hard to find the book review, especially when people drop in later after you’ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book you’re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews they’re most interested in reading.

Thanks to everyone for participating.

Lyrics: Horatius Bonar, 1846.
Music: VOX DILECTI by John Dykes, 1868.
KINGSFOLD from a folk melody arranged by Ralph Vaughn Williams.
THere are also three more alternate tunes for this hymn at Hymn Time, none of which I recognize. I prefer the Vaughn WIlliams version.
Theme: Jesus said: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Matthew 11:28-20

I heard the voice of Jesus say, “Come unto Me and rest;
Lay down, thou weary one, lay down Thy head upon My breast.”
I came to Jesus as I was, weary and worn and sad;
I found in Him a resting place, and He has made me glad.

I heard the voice of Jesus say, “Behold, I freely give
The living water; thirsty one, stoop down, and drink, and live.”
I came to Jesus, and I drank of that life giving stream;
My thirst was quenched, my soul revived, and now I live in Him.

I heard the voice of Jesus say, “I am this dark world’s Light;
Look unto Me, thy morn shall rise, and all thy day be bright.”
I looked to Jesus, and I found in Him my Star, my Sun;
And in that light of life I’ll walk, till traveling days are done.

I heard the voice of Jesus say, “My Father’s house above
Has many mansions; I’ve a place prepared for you in love.”
I trust in Jesus—in that house, according to His word,
Redeemed by grace, my soul shall live forever with the Lord.

Horatius Bonar was known as the Prince of Scottish Hymn Writers. He wrote more than 600 hymns.

This hymn was the first one on Brown Bear Daughter’s top ten list.

The boy soprano in this video is Anthony Way, and he’s singing this hymn to the Vaughan Williams tune.

Rabbit trailing furiously, I noticed that young Mr. Way, according to Wikipedia, “has . . . starred as Tom Long in 2000’s film version of Tom’s Midnight Garden. Ummm, in case you didn’t know, Tom’s Midnight Garden by Phillippa Pearce is a fine fantasy classic. I haven’t seen the movie.

I know I run the risk of being accused of not letting Susan grow up, but this is the best of Michael Jackson, as far as I’m concerned:

May he rest in peace, and may the Lord have mercy on his soul.

Lyrics: ELizabeth P. Prentiss.
Music: William H. Doane.
Theme: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. Mark 12:30.

Mrs. Prentiss: “To love Christ more, is the deepest need, the constant cry of my soul…Out in the woods and on my bed and out driving, when I am happy and busy, and when I am sad and idle, the whisper keeps going up for more love, more love, more love!”

Mrs Prentiss, who struggled with physical illness and tragedy for much of her life, wrote the devotional classic, Stepping Heavenward. I’ve always intended to read her book, but I’ve never done so. Have any of you read it?

Sources: Suite 101: Understanding More Love to Thee O Christ.
Osbeck, Kenneth. 101 More Hymn Stories.