When Morning Gilds the Skies

Translated from the German by Robert Bridges (1899)

Our Word of the Week, birthday, has me thinking about childhood again, and all the more since a lot of old birthday pictures have been showing up on our screen. There’s one of old friends of ours, from almost thirty years ago, when Davey was invited to a party for a little boy who was his age, in a family where there were eight kids at the time, four boys and four girls — I think the ninth child, a boy, broke the tie! They were about the most joyful family we ever hung around, fellow homeschoolers, too, and I’d like to think that they sang our Hymn of the Week in their church, as we sang it in ours. It’s a youthful and exuberant song, full of energy, well to be sung by children and by their parents and grandparents, a song of dawn no matter what time of the day it is.

Now, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen the sun rise. We’ve become night owls at our house. But I have memories of the early morning — waiting for the high school bus at 7:15 AM, in the winter, before the sun was up, and seeing Venus in the eastern sky, against that deep beautiful blue that has no name. I guess the school bus wasn’t so fit for singing, but it does make me wonder what it’s like to be up before the sun, with your fellows, singing and praying. What would you sing about at that time? The fundamental thing: that God is God. Praise is the thing — pure praise — to cry out, “How excellent it is that you exist!” And then if you move from that to how God’s love has been made most gloriously manifest in the world and in your life, you will cry out the refrain of our hymn today, “May Jesus Christ be praised!”

Praise is the most gracious response to grace: you are given a free gift, even the unsurpassable gifts of life and redemption, and you respond with a free gift of your own, the gift of praise. There’s no petition, no focus on yourself or your needs or your feelings, nothing but the simple and wholehearted gift. And that, as it seemed to the anonymous German poet who gave us this hymn back in 1828, is just as it ought to be. He wrote fourteen stanzas of six lines each, with the third and sixth lines of each stanza the same refrain, “Gelobt sei Jesu Christus!” I’ve found the book on line. It’s in an old German hymnal like many I’ve seen, in German and English: you get the words but not the music. That’s because people learned the melodies by heart, from singing so many songs all the time. Just get them started, Mr. Organist, and they’ll be fine!

The poet says, in one stanza after another, that Jesus Christ ought to be praised, no matter what time of day it is, how old you are, whether you’re poor or rich, when you think about your blessings or you feel the weight of your sins; and all the nations of the world ought to do so too, joining the heavens and all their hosts of angels. There’s something attractively brave about that. “All is grace,” said Therese of Lisieux, her last words, words of love. You may have the hymn as translated by the great Edward Caswall; ours today is by Robert Bridges, the good friend of one of our favorite poets at Word and Song, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and a poet to reckon with in his own right. And I haven’t seen any English hymnal with all fourteen stanzas, so if there are differences from one version to another, it may just be that the editors chose certain stanzas rather than others. The version below is a translation of stanzas 1, 9, 12, 13, and 14. Better than read it — sing it!

When morning gilds he skies,
My heart, awaking, cries,
May Jesus Christ be praised!
When evening shadows fall,
This rings my curfew call,
May Jesus Christ be praised!

When mirth for music longs,
This is my song of songs:
May Jesus Christ be praised!
God's holy house of prayer
Hath none that can compare
With: Jesus Christ be praised!

No lovelier antiphon
In all high heaven is known
Than, Jesus Christ be praised!
There to the eternal Word
The eternal psalm is heard:
May Jesus Christ be praised!

Ye nations of mankind,
In this your concord find:
May Jesus Christ be praised!
Let all the earth around
Ring joyous with the sound:
May Jesus Christ be praised!

Sing, suns and stars of space,
Sing, ye that see his face,
Sing, Jesus Christ be praised!
God's whole creation o'er,
For aye and evermore
Shall Jesus Christ be praised!