Recently we sang this line at Communion:
Love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be
Samuel Crossman's hymn, one of the first written in the English language, is full of poignant phrases of which this is perhaps the most profound. A threefold use of love which in summary describes the operation of the love of God on lost humanity.
Love is used in many ways in the lives of people and via the media, but never is it so wisely located as it is here.
On St Patrick's Day it seems only right to have a one liner from a hymn written in Ireland.
This line summarises something which passes a great many people by - including almost the entire UK education system.
He only could unlock the gate of heaven and let us in
From the children's hymn, There is a green hill far away this line expounds so many things in so few words. You can't just choose to go to heaven (and nor could your dead relatives). There is a way of getting to heaven - there is only one way though. The Way is a person, one person. There was no other good enough.
Cecil Frances Alexander, wife of the sometime Archbishop of Ireland (earlier Bishop of Londonderry), may have been writing catechetical hymns for children, but she also gave us all something important to remember as we approach Easter.
(for more in this series click on the hymnline tag below)
Thomas Binney goes against the grain of the first three in this series (tag hymnline below) in that he wrote very few hymns, though he was a prolific writer. None he wrote are really sung much any more either, but one that should be - perhaps the only one - is Eternal Light.
The whole hymn is amazing poetry, but Binney excels himself and perhaps nearly all other hymnwriters when he describes the answer to the question of how (sinful) human beings can hope to reach, or even live, in God's eternal light . . .
An offering and a sacrifice, a Holy Spirit's energies, an Advocate with God.
Rarely has anyone captured so succinctly so many of the riches of the Gospel, for which we truly owe God our song.
It's St. David's Day - the national day of Wales - so it only seems right to have a hymn line from William Williams, the most famed welsh hymnwriter. In this verse he is describing the peace of God:
O! anchwiliadwy fôr, Sy’n cynnwys ynddo’i hun Ryw annherfynol stôr;
The hymn is set in the context of battle but describes the Gospel as the banner that assures peace. And in this line, O well of peace . . .
O deepest ocean, containing within it, unending stores.
As we have already seen in these blogs, the sea and the sky supply hymnwriters with the poetry of divine greatness - and in a troubled world, how wonderful to reflect that this metaphor of endlessness is also applicable to God's peace in which we rest day by day.
