Common Ground Song 145 ‘When our confidence is shaken’
Words: Fred Pratt Green © Stainer & Bell Ltd / Music: John Bell & Graham Maule © WGRG / Iona Community
Featured image: ‘Church girl’, copyright holder unknown

First, a note on the words and music. I found no static web page including the lyrics that was not behind a paywall, but I have quoted a good proportion of them scattered within this post. The performances of this hymn that I found online were set to a variety of melodies, the most common being one called ‘New Malden’. That one was unfamiliar to me, as is the one in Common Ground called ‘Full Circle’ (presumably written for this text, as the phrase appears in it). But the C.G. editors do suggest it can be sung to ‘Picardy’, the tune for the Advent hymn ‘Let all mortal flesh keep silence’, and the minor key of ‘Picardy’ seems to suit the essence of this hymn, which acknowledges our doubts and the difficulties of living the Christian life.

Like the hymn in my last post (Heaven shall not wait), it is third-person writing, consisting of a series of statements, that can be read as prose, or maybe poetry. In fact, the whole piece is more like one of the more honest psalms, the ones written in David’s despair or fear. Like most of Fred Pratt Green’s work, it comes out of the 1970s when Christians were struggling to reconcile a new world of scientific advance and post-modern morality with the traditions received from earlier generations of believers. The opening lines (When our confidence is shaken in beliefs we thought secure’) make that clear.

The starting point for such struggles is to acknowledge that ‘certainty’ gets us nowhere. Anyone, even a bishop, who tells you for certain what God is like, or what heaven will be like, or what is the exclusively ‘Christian’ course of action in a particularly tricky situation, is misleading you. No-one can be that certain. But then, neither can scientists be 100% confident that the latest theory about the way the universe works will prove to be absolutely true.

Thus, the hymn offers us cameos of post-modern angst: ‘solar systems, void of meaning’; ‘the spirit, in its sickness, seeks but cannot find a cure’; ‘our researches lead us to the ultimate unknown’. Even when the words turn to religious practice, we find the same problems: ‘in the discipline of praying, when it’s hardest to believe’; God redeems us in the Christ we crucify’.  It’s enough to make anyone reach for the whisky bottle, and give up on God.

But of course the author has not given up on God. He has, rather, realised that being a Christian is more about engaging in our own struggle with meaning, with God as the one who discloses ultimate meaning: ‘Faith must die, or come full circle to its source in God alone’. We are reminded also that it is a lifelong journey, and our Creator knows that: ‘God is active in the tensions of a faith not yet mature’. And even though we will never find the ‘answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything’ (spoiler alert: it is not 42), we can at least try to work towards it: ‘faith, maturing, learns acceptance of the insights we receive’.

The final verse is more positive, and focuses on God’s love, the love that ‘redeems us in the Christ we crucify’. That is whey we can be confident that God will not punish an honest seeker for ‘getting it wrong’. The cross is ‘God’s eternal answer to the world’s eternal “why?”’. Therefore, in the final line, ‘May we in this faith maturing be content to live and die’.

This is, then, a psalm for our times, and like any psalm, you may choose to speak it, sing it to whatever tune you find helpful, or indeed just pray it silently. Perhaps those opening words of Picardy’s original lyrics can be the last word in the face of the uncertainties of existence: ‘Let all mortal flesh keep silence’.

For another commentary on this hymn, see  https://www.umcdiscipleship.org/resources/history-of-hymns-when-our-confidence-is-shaken