From the ends of the earth I call to you,
I call as my heart grows faint;
lead me to the rock that is higher than I.
For you have been my refuge,
a strong tower against the foe.
Psalm 61:2-3
My Jesus, My Savior,
Lord, there is none like You;
All of my days
I want to praise
The wonders of Your mighty love.
My comfort, my shelter,
Tower of refuge and strength;
Let every breath, all that I am
Never cease to worship You.
Shout to the Lord, all the earth,
Let us sing
Power and majesty, praise to the King;
Mountains bow down and the seas will roar
At the sound of Your name.
I sing for joy at the work of Your hands,
Forever I’ll love You, forever I’ll stand,
Nothing compares to the promise I have in You.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lyrics: Julia Ward Howe, 1861.
Music: JOHN BROWN’S BODY, possibly by John William Steffe.
Theme:
He trains my hands for battle;
my arms can bend a bow of bronze.
You give me your shield of victory,
and your right hand sustains me;
you stoop down to make me great.
Psalm 18:34-35
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 dealâ€;
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:
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.
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.â€
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.â€
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.â€
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.â€
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.
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!â€
More love to thee, O Christ, more love to thee!
Hear thou the prayer I make on bended knee.
This is my earnest plea: More love, O Christ, to thee;
more love to thee, more love to thee!
Once earthly joy I craved, sought peace and rest;
now thee alone I seek, give what is best.
This all my prayer shall be: More love, O Christ, to thee;
more love to thee, more love to thee!
Let sorrow do its work, come grief and pain;
sweet are thy messengers, sweet their refrain,
when they can sing with me: More love, O Christ, to thee;
more love to thee, more love to thee!
Then shall my latest breath whisper thy praise;
this be the parting cry my heart shall raise;
this still its prayer shall be: More love, O Christ, to thee;
more love to thee, more love to thee!
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?
I refer you to him to explain, but to play with this a bit: the modern hymn In Christ Alone has a syllabic meter of 8.8.8.8.8.8.8.8, also called Long Meter Double (L.M.D.) One old familiar hymn also has this meter: Sweet Hour of Prayer. However, I’m not too fond of the tune SWEET HOUR by William Bradbury. So, I can turn it around and sing Sweet Hour of Prayer to the tune that Stuart Townend wrote for In Christ Alone.
I like that a lot better.
The tune AMAZING GRACE is written in what is called Common Meter, 8.6.8.6. A lot of hymn tunes, and other tunes, are written with this meter, ergo “common.”
So, lots of hymns can be sung to the tune of Amazing Grace, and vice-versa. Here are just a few well-known hymns that fit the syllabic meter of Common Meter tunes:
O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing Joy to the World!
Alas and Did My Saviour Bleed
All Hail the Power of Jesus Name
There Is a Fountain
God Moves in a Mysterious Way
Majestic Sweetness Sits Enthroned
O God Our Help in Ages Past
. . . and many more.
Try singing Amazing Grace to the tunes usually associated with those hymn lyrics, or try singing the above hymn lyrics to the tune AMAZING GRACE.
Oh, and the rather haunting minor key tune to House of the Rising Sun is written in common meter, so it accommodates the lyrics to Amazing Grace and all the others.
Lyrics: Eugene M. Bartlett, 1939.
Music: Eugene M. Bartlett, 1939.
Theme: “Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?”
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.
But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. I Corinthians 15:55-57
Eugene Monroe Bartlett Senior was born on Christmas Eve of 1885. He wrote the words to this hymn — his last song — in 1939. Mr. Bartlett was well known as a gospel singer, writer, teacher, editor, and publisher. He was inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 1979.
I think of all the renditions of Victory in Jesus that I found on youtube, I liked this one best, because it’s real and honest and full of the victory that’s found in Jesus alone.
It’s an old, old story, but it keeps happening over and over again. God takes the most unlikely people and uses us to glorify His name.
I heard an old, old story,
How a Savior came from glory,
How He gave His life on Calvary
To save a wretch like me;
I heard about His groaning,
Of His precious blood’s atoning,
Then I repented of my sins;
And won the victory.
Chorus:
O victory in Jesus,
My Savior, forever.
He sought me and bought me
With His redeeming blood;
He loved me ere I knew Him,
And all my love is due Him,
He plunged me to victory,
Beneath the cleansing flood.
I heard about His healing,
Of His cleansing power revealing.
How He made the lame to walk again
And caused the blind to see;
And then I cried, “Dear Jesus,
Come and heal my broken spirit,”
And somehow Jesus came and brought
To me the victory.
I heard about a mansion
He has built for me in glory.
And I heard about the streets of gold
Beyond the crystal sea;
About the angels singing,
And the old redemption story,
And some sweet day I’ll sing up there
The song of victory.
The summer after I graduated from high school I left West Texas where I had lived all my life and went to the foreign country of Oklahoma (City) to serve as a summer missionary in the Baptist Mission Center in downtown, near the stockyards, OKC. There were several other college age missionaries serving there for the summer, too, and and most of them were from somewhere in Oklahoma. They began to tell me that at the end of the summer we would spend a week at a place called Falls Creek and that Gene Bartlett would be leading the music there.
I looked at them blankly and said something noncommittal. Then, they told me that Mr. Bartlett’s father was the author of the hymn Victory in Jesus. Unfortunately, I had never heard the hymn. I had never heard of Falls Creek nor of Mr. Bartlett. My fellow missionaries were not at all convinced that I had grown up in a Southern Baptist church nor that I even knew the Lord after that. What kind of pagan wouldn’t know about Falls Creek and Gene Bartlett? And not knowing Victory in Jesus? Impossible.
True story. I now know and love E.M. Bartlett’s old hymn of victory.
