'Common Ground' Song 91 ‘Now go in Peace’
Words: Revd Michael Mair
Tune : Caribbean traditional
YouTube recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6UXP_z28j0
Featured image: the Holy Spirit window in St Peter’s Basilica, Rome (photo anonymous)

This song was new to me, and very different from anything I usually sing. The words, by a Scottish minister, read as a gentle Celtic blessing (‘Holy Spirit encircle you’ is typical of this genre). The opening (‘Now go in peace, now go in love’) sounds as if it is intended as an end-of-day blessing for a peaceful night. But the tune is a rousing, fast and syncopated Caribbean melody ‘picked up from a multi-cultural neighbourhood in Coventry’. The recording linked above (by a church choir in Pennsylvania) is several people singing it as a canon or round. It would actually work better as a start-of-day song for a group to sing to each other, blessing each other’s work for God in the day ahead. This one could grow on me!