Music notes: Proper 17

2020.08.30

Last week, with Christ’s reply to Peter’s confession in mind, we sang that the Church is ‘on the Rock of Ages founded’ [522]. This week, we similarly sing ‘The Church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord’ [525].

The hymn was written at a time of particular controversy (several, actually) within the Anglican Communion. Then as now, the Church would do well to take to heart this Sunday’s Epistle portion, part of a whole passage in which St Paul exhorts the Romans (and us) to ‘Love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor... live in harmony with one another’, and many other things besides. With this passage in mind, both last week and this we have sung versions of ‘Ubi caritas et amor’ (‘Where charity and love [are], God is there’), a sort of hymn appointed for Maundy Thursday (when Our Lord taught us to love one another) but appropriate at any time. Last week we heard the proper chant melody and translation made to fit it as found in the Hymnal [606]. This week we sing another, freer but very beautiful, version, ‘Where charity and love prevail’ [581]. In the Hymnal it is set to the equally beautiful tune ‘Cheshire’, first published in a metrical Psalter in 1592 and typical of English Psalm-tunes of this period. (The third Hymnal version of ‘Ubi caritas’ is ‘God is love, and where true love is...’, printed with two different modern tunes [576/7]).

If the Epistle and ‘Ubi caritas’ focus mainly upon the internal life of the Christian community, they nevertheless – as the Christan life always must – point us outward: ‘extend hospitality to strangers...if your enemies are hungry, feed them’, says St Paul; ‘let us in sincerity love all people’, or, ‘Love can exclude no race nor creed if honored be God’s Name’, says ‘Ubi caritas’ in our two translations. More pointedly, Jesus teaches that to confess him as Lord (as St Peter did last week) and to follow him does not leave one in a kind of protective bubble (as the same Peter seems to wish this week, prompting a swift and stinging rebuke), but rather requires self-denial, perhaps even to the ultimate degree. The source of our anthem text, ‘I have decided to follow Jesus’ – a nineteenth-century Christian martyr from the Indian state of Assam – understood this, as he was said to have quoted either this Sunday’s Gospel or John 12.26 as he went to his death.

This week we begin our countdown of favorite hymns of the parish. Our first, ‘I want to walk as a child of the light’, is also the newest song among our finalists, dating from 1966. Somewhat unusually for traditional hymnody (though perhaps not for religious song of the last 50-plus years; compare, for example, three other items in the Hymnal written and composed – also by women – within the same period: ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God’, ‘I am the bread of life’, and ‘The first one ever, oh, ever to know’), the text and tune were written by the same person, Kathleen Thomerson.

The text draws richly upon Scriptural light-imagery: the phrase ‘children of light’ is found in several places in both Gospels and Epistles; the stars naturally figure in several of the creation accounts (not only in Genesis but in the Psalms as well). Christ calls himself the Morning Star in Revelation 22.16, and the author of II Peter speaks of the morning star rising in the hearts of his readers (1.19). The refrain furthermore draws upon I John 1.5, Psalm 139.11, and Revelation 21.23, and ‘Sun of righteousness’ is a phrase from Malachi 4.2 found in several texts in the Hymnal. A language of discipleship and its ultimate goal also runs through the text: in stanza 1 ‘walk’ and ‘follow’; in 2, ‘path’ and ‘way’; in 3, ‘run...the race’.

Along with using a straightforward register, the text, like many modern English-language hymns and religious songs, eschews rhyme; like many folk songs, it does not use an entirely regular syllabic pattern (compare both ‘Be thou my vision’ and ‘Lord of all hopefulness’ and the way in which these texts, in a fairly similar poetic meter to ‘I want to walk’, fit their tune, which is in the same musical meter as the present setting). The melody is unified by reappearances of the opening motif, given grace and ease of singing by the use of many small intervals (seconds and thirds), and given shape and movement by the shift to the upper half of the scale at the beginning of the refrain (a leap upward of a fourth at this point being presaged by another rising fourth in the last line of the verse) and finally by the climax, one note above the upper tonic, at the beginning of the third line of the refrain (the leap of a fifth to this highest note being the skillful and slightly surprising mirror image of the drop of a fifth at the beginning of the previous line).

Though ‘I want to walk’ is, naturally enough, associated with a broad category of religious song – and religion in general – originating in the 1960s and 1970s, the well-crafted melody (and perhaps its presentation with four-part harmony), drawing upon both folk and classical tradition, has helped ‘I want to walk’ to transcend its origins and secure a place in both the official repertory and the hearts of the people.