Common Ground Song 121 ‘The Peace of the Earth be with you’
Words: Christine Carson (Translated from Guatemalan) / Music arranged by John Bell © WGRG / Iona Community
YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRypaQIMuTw
Featured image: Sunset over Southmere Lake © estate of Linda Craven

This is a short and simple chant in four-part harmony, of the sort to be repeated several times. The direction on tempo is ‘unhurried’. Because it is a song of calming. ‘Peace’ is attributed here to the earth, the heavens (sky), rivers and oceans. Ther ‘deep peace’ is ‘falling over you, growing in you’.

At one level, this is an oversimplification. All these elements can be far from peaceful. As we have seen recently, the earth slides and rivers flood. Oceans can be tempestuous, and the heavens can bring devastating winds, rain and snow. Yet when weather is calm and temperatures moderate, we can indeed find peace and calm in meditating on the beauty of these scenes of nature.

Linda loved to walk in the countryside, but we spent all our marriage in London and then Leeds, and she often found beauty even in the city. Parks and riverbanks, gardens and roadside verges attracted her eye and camera. The featured photo is of a small lake in Thamesmead, a deprived community in south London. Only twenty acres in area, used during the day as a watersports venue, but in the gloom of a December afternoon she found beauty in the sunset. A calming and peaceful moment in a busy city. May this peace be with all who read this.