Common Ground Song 60 ‘I waited patiently’
Words: John Bell © WGRG / Iona Community; Music: Alex Muir © Bandleader Publications
Featured image: Hannah praying in the Temple. From tbquk.org, copyright unknown.

This song by John Bell is a setting of Psalm 40. It is one of the most loved of all the psalms, for it speaks of God hearing and answering prayer.  There are 17 verses to the psalm, but the text of this song only covers four of them: the four verses of the song correspond to verses 1, 2, 3 and 5 of the psalm respectively.  These four verses still make a consistent story: the psalmist waits for God to hear their prayer, God listens, raises them from the (literal or metaphorical) pit into which they have fallen, set them in a firm place so that in return they can sing God’s praise, so that other people will in turn trust in God. It finishes with thanking God for all his goodness. This is the essence of our relationship with God: whenever we are in any king of trouble or distress, we can ask him to help and he will help, in some way, but expects us to thank him, and tell other people of what he has done. This is what we call ‘witness’, the theme for the next few weeks in our parish church’s teaching programme.

Let’s go back to the first line, though (the first half of Psalm 40:1). Most translations of the psalm, and most hymn or song settings, render it as ‘I waited patiently for the Lord, he listened to me and heard my cry’,(or very similar) following the Authorised Version. But it is worth looking at alternatives. The Jerusalem Bible, always worth turning to for the more poetic parts of Scripture, renders it as ‘I waited and waited for Yahweh, now at last he has stooped to me and heard my cry for help’. This carries a stronger sense of persistence in prayer, and of God actively moving in our direction in response. The Latin (Vulgate) title for the psalm, still found in some English translations and choral settings, is ‘Expectans expectavi Dominum’. I like that. ‘Expectantly, I expected the Lord’. I am not just praying in a vague hope that he might, eventually, hear me. No, I am expecting that he will hear me, and that creates in me a sense of anticipation. Prayer, or sung worship, should start with that attitude: I expect a response.

There are many settings of this, and other Psalms, with recordings to be found online, but I could not find a recording of this one. The editors note that the tune ‘Bays of Harris’ was written specifically for these words by Alex Muir, in a traditional Scottish ‘lilting’ folk style. It is therefore easy to pick up, and easy on the ear. It is very similar to the tune for ‘Put peace into each other’s hands’, but the second and fourth lines of the two songs are not quite the same length, so that tune cannot easily be substituted.