I am bubbling with opinions on public issues in my state today, so I’ve decided to express none of them. I’m painfully aware that I’m actually fairly ignorant of a lot of things that have me upset, so I’ll do you (and my soul) the courtesy of just stifling myself. For the present, anyway.
Instead, I post the old American hymn, “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind.” Oddly, most of the videos of the hymn available on YouTube use the tune “Repton,” which the English churches prefer. But I like the American tune I’ve always sung, a tune called “Rest,” by Frederick Charles Maker.
The text is a superior one because, unlike so many hymn writers, its author, John Greenleaf Whittier, was an actual poet, and a good one. He was also a Quaker. The text is in fact an excerpt from a longer work called “The Brewing of Soma,” a poem about an ancient Indian custom of brewing a drink called Soma, on which worshippers got drunk in an effort to make contact with the divine. Whittier goes on to tell the reader that we ought to seek God through higher methods – peace and patience and rest in faith.
I’m not a great admirer of Quaker theology, but they have something to tell me.
Thanks for this!
I can’t remember ever hearing about “The Brewing of Soma” – or hearing this tune, for that matter – though bits of it seem somehow familiar.
I’ve enjoyed singing it to Repton – and at some point read that that tune originated in an oratorio, “Judith” – a fascinating thought! – whereafter I have never got round to trying to listen to that, much as I have enjoyed Charpentier’s and Vivaldi’s Judith oratorios!
I see it’s on YouTube – maybe I’ll catch up at last! And I see from Wikipedia what a lot more Judith oratorios there are! (I think I must have heard the one by Mozart – written at age 15! – but do not remember it – !) I don’t suppose I’ll ever catch up with all of them. And I don’t remember ever knowing the wonderful “Spem in alium” by Thomas Tallis is a setting of part of chapter nine of Judith.
I have, however, enjoyed following up Tolkien’s playing with the adjective used to describe Judith in the Old English poem about her (among other places), after hearing a paper about it: “aelfscine” – which Albert Stanburrough Cook glosses “beautiful as an elf” and Tolkien sometimes applies to women in Middle-earth as “Elfsheen”!
I don’t know much about Quaker history – or the course(s) of Quaker theology down the centuries – but did enjoy reading The Journal of John Woolman.
Woolman was a great Christian.
In Whit Stillman’s excellent The Last Days of Disco a character mentions that hymn helped him through a bout of mental illness. There’s a scene where he sings it in Central Park, but I couldn’t find a clip of it.
I’d forgotten that. I’ve only seen TLDOD once. Need to check it again.
Dave Lull sent the following link, which didn’t post here for some reason:
See the The Last Days of Disco video here:
https://m.ok.ru/video/7393262635606
The scene starts at about 1:33:41
Meanwhile , a couple days having passed, I just read that a couple students at Notre Dame U. in South Bend, Indiana have built an “ice chapel” where Candlemas was celebrated on a “snow-fashioned […] altar” in front of it. It was named after St. Olaf (with no further elucidation in the National Catholic Register report I read) – and I realized I do not know if current Roman practice requires celebration over relics – the article mentions neither the temporary installation of an altar stone (as, famously, in Bridehead Revisited) of the use of an antimenium.
Well that’s intriguing. The Olaf dedication might be a flippant hat-tip to the Disney movie, “Frozen.”
I had never heard of the requirement for a celebration over relics. And it’s something I ought to know about.