Mary and Peace Before Us
Music Ministry Musings from Mary #2
A blessed Easter to all of you! While it was disorienting not to be worshiping with you at 2216 Pot Spring Rd this past week, I hope that you found ways to engage with our worshiping community in the many offerings from St. Thomas-Epiphany. I look forward so much to seeing and hearing you lift your voices in prayer and song.
This week’s musical offering is Peace before us, #791 in Wonder, Love and Praise. This hymn is based upon the following common form of a Navajo prayer ending:
With beauty before me,
With beauty behind me,
With beauty above me,
With beauty below me,
With beauty all around me,
I will walk in long life,
I will walk according to beauty.
It is completed in beauty,
It is completed in beauty,
It is completed in beauty,
It is completed in beauty.
There is a great similarity to Celtic prayer here, which embraces the idea of God’s presence surrounding us in nature. Notice the similarity in style with ‘The Three’ from Carmina Gadelica, a three-volume collection of prayers and hymns from the Gaelic-speaking region of Scotland collected by Alexander Carmichael between 1860-1909.
The Three Who are over me,
The Three Who are below me,
The Three Who are above me here,
The Three Who are above me yonder;
The Three Who are in the earth,
The Three Who are in the air,
The Three Who are in the heaven,
The Three Who are in the great pouring sea.
We also see this same Celtic spirituality in the hymn, I bind unto myself today (St. Patrick’s Breastplate), #370 in the Hymnal 1982. In verse 4 and 6, for example:
I bind unto myself today the virtues of the starlit heaven
The glorious sun’s life-giving ray,
The whiteness of the moon at even,
The flashing of the lightning free,
The whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks,
The stable earth, the deep salt sea,
Around the old eternal rocks.
Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
We can further see this Celtic connection in Canticle 1, A Song of Creation, found in the Prayer Book on p. 47 and in the Hymnal 1982 in Hymn #428, O all ye works of God, whose text moves through Invocation, the Cosmic Order, the Earth and all its Creatures to the People of God.
Bill and I were very fortunate to receive sponsorship to spend a week on the Island of Iona, Scotland in the summer of 2014, where we were able to worship daily with the Iona Community, an ecumenical community committed to peace and social justice through prayer and worship. Many believe Iona to be the birthplace of Celtic Christianity. St. Columba, an Irish abbot, arrived there around 563 AD and founded an Abbey, which became a thriving center for worship, learning, and the arts, and from whence Christianity spread throughout Scotland and the North of England. Bill and I were moved by the experience we had there, not only in worship, but in the natural beauty of this remote small island in the Inner Hebrides, where on every side we lived with the earth, the sea, the rocks, and the ethereal Northern light. I highly recommend a pilgrimage there!
Circling back to our hymn today, Peace before us, please enjoy listening to our tenor section leader, Darrius Pugh, singing it for us in the attached link. He left out the Alleluia verse, as we were originally going to send this out during Lent. Here is the text:
Peace before us,
Peace behind us,
Peace under our feet.
Peace within us,
Peace over us,
Let all around us be peace.
Vs. 2: Love before us…
Vs. 3: Light before us…
Vs. 4: Christ before us…
Vs. 6: Alleluia…
I hope you will sing along with him, and consider making this a daily personal prayer/hymn. I hope when we all return to worshiping together that perhaps we can sing this during the Peace! In the meantime, may peace be with us all.
