My Spirit Longs for Thee
(Fingal)
Often the most powerful words are the simplest. “Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy burdened, and I will give you rest,” says Jesus, and Saint Augustine, with those simple words ringing in his ears, and thinking also of the many years he spent far from God, astray in a land of want and disappointment, says to God, “You have made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless, till they rest in thee.”
Man longs for what soars far beyond him, and that may explain all of our fantasies about outer space and alien planets, and yet when the makers of such shows take us to those places they imagine, it is as if we had not moved one inch from our pride right here on earth, our lust, our wrath, our spiritual sluggishness, and it is all disappointing in the end, rather gray and grim for all its technological flash. Then we might listen instead to the words of this hymn, which a doctor named John Byrom wrote some time in the 1700’s; he wrote poems for his pleasure, and they were published only after he had died.
It’s a simple poem, this – hauntingly simple. The poet’s heart longs for rest, but where can rest be found? He does not trouble to name the specific places where it is not. We can do so ourselves. Rest, in ambition? Rest, in the pursuit of pleasure? Rest, in political action? Rest, in the sweat and toil of labor, with your hands and your shoulders and your back? Where can you find rest – not sluggishness and despair, but true repose and peace, the peace that passes understanding? “No rest is to be found,” we sing to God, “but in thy blessed love.”
Most of the melodies to which our hymn is set divide the poem into four verses, according to the four stanzas. But that’s not really how the poem works. You see that the second stanza plays upon the first, echoing it, and moving in reverse, and the fourth stanza does much the same with the third. So then, to my ear the minor-key Irish melody called FINGAL is the best for this poem – dividing it into two verses, not four, but musically, the second half of each verse echoes the first, and brings it on to its resolution. It is utterly beautiful.