Hymn Blog - June 27, 2010

June 27, 2010

VU 394 – Moved by the Gospel, Let Us Move. Ruth Duck, United Church of Christ minister, theological educator and hymn poet wrote this hymn celebrating the role of the arts in worship at the request of Janet Pearson Roth, a designer of robes and stoles, who was born in Toronto. It was published in Duck’s 1992 collection “Dancing in the Universe.” The tune, BETHLEHEM, was composed by Gottfried W. Fink in 1843, and has been used in many 20^th century hymn books.

MV 154 – Deep in Our Hearts. Author John Oldham served as a United Church minister for many years in Manitoba, including 14 years at Donnelly United Church in Winnipeg. While there, he developed a deep respect and affinity for native spirituality and how it relates to the Christian tradition. The music is by Ron Klusmeier, prolific Canadian composer of hymn tunes and prominent United Church music leader.

MV 102 – Jesus, Your Spirit in Us. Our prayer response comes to us from the Taizé Community, an ecumenical monastic community in Taizé, France, which welcomes thousands of pilgrims each year from around the world to times of retreat and worship. The Taizé Community began experimenting in the late 1950s and early 1960s with new musical forms for worship, simple songs intended as vehicles for prayer, written primarily in Latin at first and increasingly in the languages of the many pilgrims who attend each year. Songs from Taizé are now widely sung in churches throughout the world.

God of Pilgrimage and Passage – I wrote this hymn in 2003, to celebrate the contribution of members leaving our church community to study in Newfoundland. It is set to PLEADING SAVIOUR, an American folk melody, popularized as a camp meeting song as early as the 1830’s.  It first appeared in a hymnbook entitled Christian Lyre (1830) to the text “Now the Saviour stands a-pleading”.

VU 962 – May the Blessing of God Go Before You. This beautiful sung blessing is by Miriam Therese Winter, Professor of Liturgy, Worship, Spirituality, and Feminist Studies at Hartford Seminary. A Medical Mission Sister, Winter has been writing and publishing songs and hymns since Vatican II in the 1960’s. Her early recordings with The Medical Mission Sisters were widely popular, bringing a fresh, dynamic musical context to bible stories and simple songs of faith. Many of her later texts bring feminist theological perspectives to our hymnody, in beautiful poetry and melody. “Mother and God” (VU 280) and “Wellspring of Wisdom” (VU287) are two of her hymns in Voices United which we have frequently used at TSP.

Since shared summer services begin next week, this will be the last weekly hymn blog until September.