Forty Days and Forty Nights

George Hunt Smyttan, 1856

For a lot of people before the advent of modern medicine, and for many people still, our Word of the Week, season, didn’t suggest blooms on the cherry trees, or corn as high as an elephant’s thigh, or leaves in scarlet and gold, or Jack Frost sending down the wonders of the snowflake, no two alike. Or I should say that it did suggest those things, but it suggested something else too, in this life of ours that feels all too short — and doesn’t it?

Certain seasons suggested instead that if you could, you ought to get out of sinkholes of heat and humidity where malaria or other diseases were common, such as the Maremma in Italy, in the lowlands of the Arno River just before its mouth, or in the swampy areas where the mighty Po distributes itself across many mouths before they finally reach the Adriatic Sea. I mention it for two reasons. The first reason is that it applies both to today’s composer and to today’s poet. Martin Herbst, composer of the melody we use in our Hymn of the Week, Forty Days and Forty Nights, died at the tender age of 27 when the plague came through Eisleben, or rather when the plague, which had sunk into Europe three hundred years before, went into one of its periodic or seasonal surges. Meanwhile, the poet and clergyman who wrote the text for our hymn, George Hunt Smyttan, had to retire for reasons of health from his curacy in England, even though he was only 48, and, possibly while traveling to the Alps to get to the cleaner air, he died in Frankfurt in 1870. None of the local German people knew who he was, so they buried him in a pauper’s grave, under the lone name “Smyttan.” Soon, somebody else was buried there, and all trace of the man’s place of rest was obliterated.

When I was searching about for one of the books Reverend Smyttan wrote, a volume of poetry called Thoughts in Verse for the Afflicted, I happened on someone writing, in his church’s bulletin, that Smyttan must have been a man of “grim disposition,” because he wrote this very hymn we’ve got today. I don’t see that at all. The young man grew up in India, where his father was a missionary, and the experiences in that land seem to have given him a heart for the afflicted. That’s not grimness. It’s sympathy: literally, to suffer with someone; that word with the Greek root is an exact counterpart of our word with the Latin root, compassion. And that’s what I think the hymn calls for us to feel and to practice. Our season now, of course, is Lent, and we are encouraged to consider the forty days and forty nights that Jesus spent in the desert, fasting and praying, and to join him there.

I don’t claim to be at all good at fasting, and Lord knows, I let myself get a little lazy in prayer. Fast and prayer go against the grain when you live in a pleasure-seeking comfort-demanding world. But when I was a small boy, quite a lot of days were marked out as days of abstinence: as I’ve mentioned here, I remember the calendar my grandmother got from La Rosa’s grocery store, and the symbol of the fish for those days. They included all the Wednesdays and Fridays of Lent, all Fridays generally, the first and last Saturday of Lent, and a few other days. (I hope I have gotten that right; my memory is not clear about the details.) But if you were a workingman, you and your family were permitted to eat meat on almost all of those days, nor did the rule apply if you were a child, or if you were of advanced years, or if you were in poor health. We mustn’t think of it as an invitation to eat fancy seafood. Lobster was hardly available to the great majority of people. Instead, it was a way in which all the people, regardless of their wealth, knew they were sharing the same plain fare, with the same discipline. It is good for the wealthy to feel the pinch now and again.

But the real purpose was to follow, in this small but deliberate way, the steps of Christ. He wasn’t in the desert for the sake of his health, or to take photographs of it to show at a party later on. He was there to experience in his flesh a deprivation of earthly food, and he himself would be, as he later said to his disciples, the food from heaven, the manna of eternal life. In his suffering for man, he also suffered with man, and that is one very good reason why we should bind our sufferings to his. I guess it’s what Paul would call “out of season” to say such a thing now, because the main way we deal with suffering these days is to keep it as far away from our eyes as possible. But love, true love, does not turn aside. And that is why I find our hymn today not “grim,” but bold and warm-hearted. We could use more like it — at least, I certainly can! Nor does the season end with Lent. Lent is for Eastertide: its end, but also its fulfillment in glory.

Forty days and forty nights
Thou wast fasting in the wild;
Forty days and forty nights,
Tempted, and yet undefiled.

Shall we not thy sorrow share
And from worldly joys abstain,
Fasting with unceasing prayer,
Strong with thee to suffer pain?

Then if Satan on us press,
Flesh or spirit to assail,
Victor in the wilderness,
Grant we may not faint nor fail!

So shall we have peace divine,
Holier gladness ours shall be;
Round us, too, shall angels shine,
Such as ministered to thee.

Keep, O keep us, Savior dear,
Ever constant by thy side,
That with thee we may appear
At the eternal Eastertide.

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