God of Grace and God of Glory

Harry Emerson Fosdick, 1930

I fell in love with our Hymn of the Week when we sang it at Saints Peter and Paul, in the old mill village of Phenix, Rhode Island. One of the night school students at the college where we taught gave us an old upright piano as a gift, and on it I would play hymns out of an old hymnal or two that we’d collected. We have a whole bookcase full of hymnals now, but back then I was still learning about these things. It’s hard to describe, and perhaps impossible to do it precisely, but certain hymns seem, in their tempo and their melody, to be fit for a procession or parade, because there’s a boldness to them, and maybe also a kind of masculine air, a muscularity — as I said, hard to describe. Puccini’s air, “O mio babbino caro,” which you can hear the incomparable coloratura Maria Callas singing here, is undoubtedly feminine, just as the Toreador march in Carmen is undoubtedly masculine. Ah, vive la difference!

Of course, I love all kinds of hymns, the sweet and gentle as well as the bold and bright; the glad, the sorrowful, the hopeful, the pleading, the song of petition, the hymn of high praise. But this week, just because of Memorial Day, my mind turns to this hymn, from the peace-loving fighter, Harry Emerson Fosdick. I don’t want to delve here into Reverend Fosdick’s life or his theology — there is much to admire in the former, and maybe even more to reject in the latter. That would distract us from the hymn. Caravaggio was a notorious sinner, but he did know that he was, and nobody ever painted more dramatic scenes from the New Testament than he did. It’s his art that counts, and for us today, it’s this hymn.

Near the end of his great novel Perelandra, about an “Adam” and “Eve” on the planet Venus, who resist the temptation, C. S. Lewis gives us a song of everything in the created world, from the angels to the least particle of matter without form, and each creature is seen, correctly, as at the center of all, as the prime cause for God’s creating the universe, and “let none gainsay it,” they repeat. It is the same with time, as Lewis also suggests, in Perelandra, That Hideous Strength, The Screwtape Letters: every moment is a corner to turn, a hinge, a crux, the fulcrum upon which, for countless souls, eternal joy or eternal loss hangs in the balance. So when we sing, in this hymn, “Grant us wisdom, grant us courage / For the facing of this hour,” we needn’t think of 1930, that year following the stock market crash, or the turbulence in Germany and Japan. This is the hour of trial, now.

The hymn calls us on to action, to fight. But to fight what? In the first instance, to fight timidity itself, self-satisfaction, lassitude. If God does not bring the church’s bud “to glorious flower,” then that is a judgment upon us, not a mercy. What else to fight? Evil — and here the hymn suggests that the evil is not only personal. There are “hosts of evil” around us; and that should be no surprise. Milton’s dreadful judgment on the fractious human race comes to mind: “As if (which might induce us to accord) / Man had hellish foes enough besides / That day and night for his destruction wait.” But the fighting is also internal. We are prone to “warring madness,” to pride, to greed, to be “rich in things and poor in soul.” So we call upon God to cure us, to bend us to his will, to shame us into giving up our desire to hoard up those riches that rust will wear away and moths consume.

(Welsh miners singing the melody Cwm Rhondda, in How Green Was My Valley)

The melody I prefer for this hymn is the Welsh march Cwm Rhondda (“Rhondda Valley”), which we’ve featured here already for the Welsh hymn Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah (in Welsh, Arglwydd, arwain trwy’r anialwch, meaning “Lord, guide [me] through the desert”). I like it, because it gives free play to the final two verses of each stanza, repeating the final line, and also, in the second last line, building the melody up, with rising half-notes on the key verb “grant”). The stanzas themselves are artfully done. They are bound together by the penultimate line, “Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,” so that each final line, rhyming on lines two and four, strikes us as perfectly complete but also as a surprise, because in each case we are held in suspense, not knowing yet what we are asking wisdom and courage for. The final line of the final stanza cannot be superseded. Ultimately, we say that we serve God because we adore: and thus is action fulfilled in contemplation.

Sung by the Melbourne Welsh Male Choir.

God himself is with us; let us all adore him,
     And with awe appear before him.
God is here within us; soul, in silence fear him,
     Humbly, fervently draw near him.
                       Now his own
                   Who have known
God in worship lowly, yield their spirits wholly.

Thou pervadest all things; let thy radiant beauty
     Light mine eyes to see my duty.
As the tender flowers eagerly unfold them,
     To the sunlight calmly fold them,
                        So let me
                         Quietly
In thy rays imbue me; let thy light shine through me.

Come, abide within me; let my soul, like Mary,
     Be thine earthly sanctuary.
Come, indwelling Spirit, with transfigured splendor;
     Love and honor will I render.
                       Where I go
                       Here below
Let me bow before thee, know thee and adore thee.

Gladly we surrender earth's deceitful treasures,
     Pride of life, and sinful pleasures.
Gladly, Lord, we offer thine to be forever,
     Soul and life and each endeavor.
                       Thou alone
                      Shalt be known
Lord of all our being, life's true way decreeing.