Common Ground Song 47 ‘Hear me, dear Lord’
Words: © Colin Ferguson / Music: traditional, arr. John Bell © WGRG / Iona Community
Facebook video: https://www.facebook.com/share/v/19P3WpsWuT/
Featured image: Mourning angel sculpture in the Wilson Mausoleum in the churchyard of All Saints, Crofton (West Yorks.) © Stephen Craven
Like many of the hymns in the book, I had allocated this one to a random date. It was not until I looked at it that I realised it was very relevant to the present season, since it is a hymn of lament to be sung in a time of grieving. The tune is familiar (Londonderry Air / Danny Boy) but the words are new. I could not find a performance on YouTube, but there is one on Facebook (without the words on screen).
As is often said, everyone’s experience of grieving is unique to them. Some of the sentiments here I can empathise with: ‘Hear me, dear Lord, in this my time of sorrow’, and the first half of the second verse, about holding in faith the belief that Jesus is risen from the dead. That faith has indeed comforted me much, knowing that Linda lives on in whatever God’s eternity may be.
Other sentiments are not what I have been feeling, though no doubt some people will experience these. ‘The anger that makes me take your name in vain’, or ‘Life seems for a while to have no gladness’. Fortunately, and I am sure due in no small part to the number of people who have been praying for me, I have not experienced anger or depression, at least in these first two months. Maybe as the death and funeral slip into the past, I may find myself encountering those stumbling blocks.
The psalm set for Compline today was Ps.143, which includes these lines (verse 3-6):
For the enemy has pursued me, crushing my life to the ground,
making me sit in darkness like those long dead.
My spirit faints within me;
my heart within me is desolate.
I remember the time past; I muse upon all your deeds;
I consider the works of your hands.
I stretch out my hands to you;
my soul gasps for you like a thirsty land.
‘The enemy’ here might be understood not as a human foe, but as the power of death, which has since the dawn of time opposed God’s will for his creatures to have eternal life. ‘The works of your hands’, by contrast, are God’s actions in redeeming us from death, supremely in the Resurrection of Jesus.
God knows my struggle and that of others. He knows when our spirit faints, and when we feel we are ‘gasping’ for him. The last lines of the hymn help us to accept this and walk with God into the future: ‘From grief and pain create in me anew a faith that finds in you a way of living, a love that offers all it has to you’. Perhaps those final words are the key. The love that I had for my wife now yearns for someone else to love. While there is no person yet to fill that hole, I must remember that Jesus is always with me to offer his love, and receive mine.