I often post old hymns here, especially on Fridays. But I’ve never posted one this old — it’s “O Gladsome Light” (Phos Hylarion) a hymn still used in Orthodox churches, and first known from a manuscript around 300 AD. But it could be older.
I should mention that others promote a hymn called the Oxyrhynchus Hymn. You can decide for yourself.
Have a good weekend.
I found this video on YouTube. It seems to me both wonderful and troubling.
First of all, Jack Lewis is using “my” microphone. It’s a Blue Yeti, and I have one exactly like it, even unto the color. (Or “colour,” as he would have spelled it.)
Secondly, it’s pretty well done, except for a couple glitches. The voice appears to be cloned from Lewis’ well-known The Four Loves recordings. (On the downside, I’ve read a statement from one of Lewis’s friends, who says that that was not his normal speaking style.)
The troubling aspect is – of course – just that this is A.I. I’m almost obligated to hate A.I., which took a much-needed job away from me.
The very idea of resurrecting actual humans through A.I. is just disturbing to many of us, whether it’s affected our bottom lines or not. It seems creepy, like necromancy. However, I’m not sure that creepy feeling is to be trusted. When radio was a new technology, there was a fair number of sincere Christians who denounced it as demonic – voices coming through the air; that has to come from the domain of the Prince of the Powers of the Air! (For our young readers, that’s a biblical reference to the devil (Ephesians 2:2 in the King James Version).
But the bottom line, for me, is that I found it kind of fun.
I’d like to see more of this sort of stuff, and no doubt I will. Maybe somebody can recreate Moody preaching, or Jonathan Edwards declaiming “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (contemporaries reported that he read it from a manuscript, in a very rote voice).
The best thing about A.I. might be that it could kill Hollywood. We can bring back the great actors of the past and cast them in new movies, bypassing Wokeness. I’d love to see a young Clint Eastwood playing Travis McGee, for instance. Authors could have total control of film adaptations. Who wants to do an A.I. production of The Year of the Warrior for 50 bucks? I might be able to spring for half of that.
Someone on Basefook brought this project to my attention. The idea is to locate the lost bones of St. Olaf (best remembered as a character in my Erling novels) for scientific and cultural purposes.
For a saint as problematic as he was in life, St. Olaf swung disproportionate weight in the religious life of the European Middle Ages. His shrine in Nidaros Cathedral was a rich and elaborate one, making the city of Trondheim a very popular pilgrimage destination (perhaps people calculated that the hard trip over Norwegian terrain would earn them extra penance points). Pilgrims streamed in from all over Europe, lifting up prayers, looking for miracles, and spending money. Sigrid Undset describes such pilgrimages in several of her novels.
During the Reformation, Olaf’s shrine was demolished and broken up, the proceeds going to the king. Yet it seems that the bones themselves were not destroyed. Instead, they seem to have been re-buried covertly. Anyone who knew the secret of their location did not pass it on. But now there’s this project to rediscover them using modern scientific techniques.
My Basefook friends have expressed mixed views on the project. Many of them are – reasonably – concerned that if the bones are recovered, they will once again become the object of pilgrimages and devotion. We Protestants don’t hold with that stuff, and I agree.
Yet, all things considered, I’m for it. I believe in freedom of religion, so let the Roman Catholics do what they like. If it serves as a counterweight to the advance of Islam in Europe, it’s the lesser of two evils, it seems to me. What I’d like is for Lutheran Norway to be preserved, but I’ll take a Catholic Norway over a Muslim one.
Also, I’ll be interested in what analysis of the bones will reveal.
I signed the petition. I’ll be watching the project’s progress with interest.
An extract from The Chronicles of the Last Days:
After the second Great War had been won, the victorious Americans went home to an undamaged country. They proceeded to build the freest and most prosperous society the world had ever seen. Vowing that their children would never suffer as they had, they lavished on them high-quality education, material comfort, and indulgent freedom.
This postwar generation was known as the Baby Boom. These “Boomers,” as they came to be called, took advantage of their opportunities, enjoying their freedom to the utmost, giving no thought to future generations – indeed, they made it a point to have few if any children of their own.
Yet this was not enough for them. They desired even more freedom. They identified Christian Puritanism as the one thing that was keeping them from total self-indulgence. “Let us destroy Christian Puritanism,” they said, “that there may be no limit to our license.” And so they did. Their contemporaries in Europe did the same. Together they plumbed the depths of depravity, squandered their nations’ wealth, and left the whole mess to the progressively smaller generations that followed them.
And when the Boomers finally aged and weakened, and realized that they must soon relinquish power and die, they said, “It is not right that the world should go on without us to enjoy it. Let us destroy the world – or let us at least destroy our civilization.”
And so they turned their civilization over to Islam, so that all liberty would be erased.
And this is why the name of Boomer remains a hissing and a byword among all the peoples of the earth, even unto this day.
Tonight, as is so often my lazy wont, I share with you a Norwegian hymn, performed here by a volunteer pietist men’s choir. But this hymn is different, in a highly insignificant way.
The hymn is called “Den Himmelske Lovsang,” which translates, “The Heavenly Song of Praise.” (“Lovsang” does not mean “love song,” however much you might want it to. “Lov” is Norwegian for “praise.”)
I can’t find an English translation, and that’s kind of the point of this post. The gist of the lyrics is that it’s all about the joy of Heaven, embodied in music. The idea that all nature and the heavenly host are having a wonderful time singing God’s praise, and that through Christ we can hope to join in the fun ourselves someday.
Once a month I get together with a small clutch of old men, most of whom are retired pastors from my church body. At the last meeting, one of them mentioned this hymn, commenting that it’s the most popular hymn among the Lutherans of Madagascar.
(The reason for this goes back to the 19th Century, when international mission organizers “assigned” part of the Madagascar mission field to the Norwegians. These missionaries came not only from Norway, but from the Norwegian-American immigrant church.)
In our gathering, we noted that the hymn has never caught on in the US. Nobody was sure why. I thought it might be because no one had ever done a satisfactory English translation.
You can guess what came next. I decided to give it a go myself.
I’m not working at it full-time; I’ve got several other projects demanding my attention. But I’ve been noodling with it in odd moments, and I’m generally pleased with my progress.
Translating verse is a particular challenge. The only way I can figure out to do it is to first study the text closely, trying to figure out what the poet is attempting to convey, and how. Then I proceed to do my own original poem on the same theme, in the same meter, touching base with the original text whenever I can.
I have no idea where it’s all going.
Anyway, do you think this hymn would be interesting to American Christians?
Tonight, for no particular reason, Stuart Hamblen’s “This Ole House.” Probably his biggest hit.
This clip comes from the long-running Country & Western comedy show, “Hee-Haw.” I think I actually saw this episode, which surprises me a little, because I wasn’t a regular viewer. I was too snobbish about “hillbilly” music.
As I recall, Hamblen introduced this performance by recounting how he’d come to write it. He was on a hunting trip with a friend in the mountains when they found an abandoned hunting lodge with a man’s body in it (dead, apparently, by natural causes). As they rode back down the mountain, he meditated on mortality and composed the lyrics.
“I hated, Rosemary Clooney’s performance,” he said (as I remember it), “because she speeded it up to a sort of a schottische rhythm. Then it sold a hundred-thousand copies… and I came to love Rosey’s version.”
I was reminded of this song tonight by association. My dad, when he was milking cows out in the barn, used to sing the first couple lines of another of Hamblen’s songs: “I Won’t Go Huntin’ With You, Jake (But I’ll Go Chasin’ Women).” This was a big hit of Hamblen’s before he was born again.
He had a crazy American Christian story. A preacher’s kid, son of the founder of the Evangelical Methodist Church denomination in Texas, he got into music and became a popular singer and recording artist, with his own radio program. He also acted – if you watch old B westerns, you’ll often see Hamblen – not as a hero, but as the bad guy who leads the outlaws or the evil posse. He dealt with the pressures of fame by drinking, and became an alcoholic. Whenever he got arrested for brawling or public intoxication, his radio sponsors would pay his bail and get it covered up.
Then he attended a Billy Graham crusade in Los Angeles in 1949, and surrendered his life to Christ. He stopped doing beer advertisements on his radio show, and got fired for it. But by then he’d given his testimony on the air, and it boosted Billy’s public profile immensely (though Randolph Hearst’s instructions to his editors to “Puff Graham” certainly had plenty to do with it too).
He remained an outspoken Evangelical the rest of his life, composing such songs as “It Is No Secret What God Can Do” (title suggested by his friend John Wayne) and “Open Up Your Heart and Let the Sunshine In.” He also ran for office, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, on the Prohibition ticket.
The main thing I love about “This Old House” is the line, “Now it trembles in the darkness / When the lightning walks about.”
That’s genuine poetry.
I thought to myself, “Hey! I haven’t posted “Built On the Rock the Church Shall Stand” yet. That’s an important Scandinavian hymn I haven’t done here before!”
Checked our search utility. No, I posted about it – and as recently as last year.
Chalk it up to old age. Old men tell the same stories over and over, and old bloggers blog the same material under and under.
I’ll post it anyway, because I’ve got nothing else.
The lyrics were composed by Nikolai F. S. Grundtvig, the eccentric Danish clergyman who made the first translation of Beowulf into a modern language and started the Folk High School movement.
My people (the Norwegian Haugeans) did not like Grundtvig much, but we sang his hymn. This rendition is done by the Luther College Cathedral Choir, Decorah, Iowa. My people didn’t like Luther College much either, and the one year I spent studying there didn’t leave me with a lot of good memories. The arrangement is by F. Melius Christiansen, who conducted the choir of St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota – which I never attended, but still dislike on principle.
The English translation is pretty faithful, but the opening line takes an interesting tack. The original Danish says, “The church, it is an ancient house,” but goes on to say that it keeps standing anyway, upheld by God. Our English version, as you’ll notice, kicks off in a more upbeat, defiant vein.
Danes, generally speaking, don’t do audacity.
What’s on tonight? Hey, how about a pointless account of my day? What could be more fun than that?
Last night my men’s Bible study group re-convened after several weeks of preemptions. I continue to be astonished how much these meetings nourish and uplift me. I feel an actual physical easing. I’ve been a solitary for so many years, getting by without close Christian fellowship. I knew that was the wrong way to do it, but I was hemmed in by… well, fear, to be honest.
I don’t think these guys will ever realize what they’re doing for me.
This morning I drove to the gym, and while I was inside, beavering away at my Sysiphian labors, a freezing rain came down, which covered my car windows in a matrix of icy pearls and made the road treacherous going home.
I worried about driving this afternoon, as I had a doctor’s appointment. But by the time I had to pull out again, the moisture had all melted and (mostly) dried off. I was able to reassure a technician, who took samples of my blood, on that point.
(No big deal on the doctor’s appointment, by the way. I wanted him to check something out, and he ordered tests, but didn’t seem greatly concerned. This stuff is just S.O.P. when you achieve venerability.)
Right now I’m re-reading two different books I read as a teenager, both of which deal with medieval Glastonbury. Because I’m writing a book about King Haakon the Good, and he grew up in England, and there’s good reason to think he might have spent time at that ancient site of monasticism and pilgrimage.
The first book is The Hidden Treasure of Glaston, by Eleanore M. Jewett. This is a book aimed at teenagers, and I remember that it surprised me when I read it (as a teenager), since I had known nothing about Glastonbury or the grave of King Arthur up to then. So far, I think it stands up pretty well. Entirely credulous about the legends, but well done withal. I’ll review it when I finish it.
The other book is Avalon, by Anya Seton, which I’ll also review. I read this as a Reader’s Digest Condensed Book (remember those?) back when it was new. It was quite a thrill for me, back in 1965 or 66, to discover any novel involving Vikings. I’m enjoying this book too, though I detect some historical errors. It’s set slightly before my Erling books.
What do I envy most in other historical writers’ works? The ability to describe geography, plants, and wildlife. I struggle with that stuff. “What kind of flowers would be blooming in an English marsh in Somerset in April, 980 AD, and how would they smell?” Would it be the same varieties they have now? How much have things changed in a thousand years? How much guessing do the authors do? Sigrid Undset was great at that stuff, but she was an amateur expert in botany.
What comforts me most? Finding mistakes. If successful novelists can screw up on details, maybe I can get away with a few howlers too. Because I know they’re there, like Communists under the beds (who were also actually there, as it happened).
I recall sitting in my office one day (I think it was a Saturday; I had to work Saturdays at the time) back when I lived in Florida, listening to the local Christian station on my radio. Suddenly I heard the strains of “Behold a Host, Arrayed in White,” (an English translation is at this link) and was astonished. This is not a hymn much known outside Scandinavian Lutheran circles, and down among the gators a lot of people had no idea what a Lutheran was, let alone a Scandinavian Lutheran.
The reason the radio station had that song, I later learned, was that they leased music from the University of Northwestern (St. Paul) radio network’s licensing library, and Scandinavian Lutheranism is pretty well known up in these parts.
In my mind, at least, “Behold a Host” is the preeminent Scandinavian choral hymn. My dad and my grandparents loved it. This recording has the Norwegian lyrics, whose first lines actually go “This great, white host we see, like a thousand mountains full of snow, before the Throne – who are they?”
It’s a reference to Revelation 7:13-17:
13Then one of the elders answered, saying to me, “These who are clothed in the white robes, who are they, and where have they come from?” 14I said to him, “My lord, you know.” And he said to me, “These are the ones who come out of the great tribulation, and they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. 15“For this reason, they are before the throne of God; and they serve Him day and night in His temple; and He who sits on the throne will spread His tabernacle over them. 16“They will hunger no longer, nor thirst anymore; nor will the sun beat down on them, nor any heat; 17for the Lamb in the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and will guide them to springs of the water of life; and God will wipe every tear from their eyes.”
The text was written by Hans Adolph Brorson, a much-loved Danish pastor and hymn writer. The tune is, I believe, traditional, but this arrangement is by none other than Edvard Grieg.
This particular recording is of the choir of Augsburg College, Minneapolis, which happens to be my alma mater, though this performance was around 1945, somewhat before my time.
A hymn tonight, as is so often my lazy default on Fridays. I’ve posted a different version of the one before, but it never gets old. I can’t find a composition or publication date for “O Love That Will Not Let Me Go, ” but Wikipedia reports that its author, Rev. George Matheson, wrote it on the evening of his sister’s wedding. It must have been a poignant moment for him, as he’d gone blind as a young man, and his sister had been his caretaker since then.
He wrote, “I am quite sure that the whole work was completed in five minutes, and equally sure that it never received at my hands any retouching or correction. I have no natural gift of rhythm. All the other verses I have ever written are manufactured articles; this came like a dayspring from on high.”
He himself had been engaged to be married once, but his fiancée broke it off when she learned he was losing his sight. In spite of his handicap, he became a very successful minister in the Scottish Presbyterian Church and a respected scholar, publishing several books and earning an LL.D. degree.
Matheson is also the author of my favorite hymn, “Make Me a Captive, Lord,” which I hardly ever sing anymore, because my church doesn’t seem to know about it, and everybody but me sings it wrong anyway.
Have a blessed weekend.