Today’s hymn was written by Rev. George Matheson of Glasgow, Scotland (1842-1906). He published several works of prose and poetry while serving as a parish minister. His most popular hymn is “O Love, That Wilt Not Let Me Go.” “Make Me a Captive, Lord” was published in 1890. The tune was written in 1862 by George William Martin of London.
“Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation. When his breath departs, he returns to the earth; on that very day his plans perish.” (Psalm 146:3–4 ESV)
1 Make me a captive, Lord, and then I shall be free; force me to render up my sword, and I shall conqueror be. I sink in life’s alarms when by myself I stand; imprison me within Your arms, and strong shall be my hand.
2 My heart is weak and poor until it master find; it has no spring of action sure — it varies with the wind. It cannot freely move, till You have forged its chain; enslave it with Your matchless love, and deathless it shall reign.
3 My power is faint and low till I have learned to serve; it lacks the needed fire to glow, it lacks the breeze to nerve; it cannot drive the world, until itself be driven; its flag can only be unfurled when You shall breathe from heaven.
4 My will is not my own until to You it’s given; it must its earthly crown resign if it would reach to heaven; it only stands unbent, amid the clashing strife, when on Your bosom it has leant, and found in You its life.
Yet another reviewless night. My reading has been sharply curtailed, and it looks to be thus for a while, due to a pile of work (some of which I’m even getting paid for. So I’ve got that going for me). Today was also my annual appointment with my thoughtful Tax Professional, always an ordeal. People as poor as I am shouldn’t have such complicated taxes (multiple tiny income streams are to blame). I’m pretty sure I’d vote for a flat tax.
So I post music again. The song above, Les Bicyclettes de Belsize, is outside my usual, Norwegian-oriented repertoire. It’s just a song I’ve loved ever since it came out, during my college days. I did not know, and have only recently learned, that it’s the theme for a short film. I watched the film on YouTube, but I’m not going to link to it here, because I suspect it’s copyrighted and will soon be pulled. Furthermore, I found it kind of disappointing. It’s a short musical with but one memorable song.
I must have been misled by my own mood when I first heard the song; I always assumed the film would be bittersweet. It’s not. It’s dumb and cheerful, a rather banal story about young people dressed in what we used to call “mod” clothes. Boy falls in love with girl. Boy and girl are separated. Boy and girl find each other again. That’s about it.
In spite of the French title, it’s an English movie and an English song. If you’d like to hear the English-language version, Engelbert Humperdinck had a pretty big hit with it. It’s easily located.
The singer here is Mireille Mathieu, a French artist I’m amazed I never heard of. Incredible voice. According to Wikipedia, she’s a devout Roman Catholic and stands fully 5 feet tall.
Today’s hymn is another from the great Isaac Watts. “Stand Up, My Soul; Shake Off Your Fears” was written in 1707 and paired in some hymnals with the traditional German tune “Mendon.”
“For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” (Gal 5:1 ESV)
1 Stand up, my soul; shake off your fears, and gird the gospel armor on; march to the gates of endless joy, where your great Captain Savior’s gone.
2 Hell and your sins resist your course; but hell and sin are vanquished foes: your Jesus nailed them to the cross, and sang the triumph when he rose.
3 Then let my soul march boldly on, press forward to the heav’nly gate; there peace and joy eternal reign, and glitt’ring robes for conqu’rors wait.
4 There shall I wear a starry crown, and triumph in almighty grace; while all the armies of the skies join in my glorious Leader’s praise.
I’m fairly sure I’m losing my mind. You read about it often in artists’ biographies – at the end of their lives they descend into some kind of mania, growing obsessed with astrology or spiritualism or organic food or bitcoin or something. “He was always a little oversensitive, a little unstable,” friends will report. “But at the end he seemed to lose all touch with reality.”
Of course, in the cases of many of those artists, that fatal condition had something to do with syphilis or alcoholism or drugs. And last time I checked, I don’t have a problem with any of those. No, my descent into unreason can only be blamed on my home-grown neuroses and manifold phobias.
All the verbiage above constitutes my quaint method of introducing an idea I’ve conceived, one that’s just silly enough to embarrass me. But that doesn’t make it wrong.
What if the Kingdom of God is a musical comedy?
You may recall my recent theological speculations. In one line of thinking, I posited the theory that the created universe is a Story.
In another, I suggested the universe is Music.
And I asked myself, “Is there any way to fuse those two ideas into a single, Grand Unified Theory?
And then it hit me. What if the universe is a Musical Comedy? That would be perfect! (The argument works for ballet and opera too, I suppose, but I’m a little lowbrow for those metaphors.)
I’m not a major fan of the musical stage – though I once played Mordred in an amateur production of Camelot, and was, it goes without saying, brilliant. But I’ve seen a fair number of the older, classic productions – The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, etc. They can be pretty enjoyable.
But one thing that always troubled me was the moment – so common in musicals – when people are conversing in a normal way, and then somebody suddenly bursts into song, and a few moments later the whole crowd is singing and dancing in intricate choreography. (I embedded a clip of that sort above, a scene from the Marx Brothers’ film, “A Night at the Opera,” featuring Allan Jones with Harpo and Chico.)
I always had trouble with that moment. There are points – occasionally – in real life when people do burst spontaneously into song. Back when I was in a musical group, my friends and I sometimes even did it in harmony. But nobody ever started a chorus line.
But what if the problem isn’t with the musicals, but with the fallen world?
How often have you experienced a sublime moment in life, when your feelings surpassed mere words? When only song and dance would really have been sufficient to adequately celebrate what was going on?
Maybe that was what the world was meant to be like. Maybe Adam and Eve were doing taps and high kicks in the Garden of Eden (perhaps with animals backing them up, as in an old Disney film). Maybe that’s one of the things we lost at the Fall, and we enjoy musicals now because we’re longing for our unfallen state?
It’s just a theory, of course. But let me add this kicker, which I consider weighty indeed –
The American musical comedy was invented, in part, by P. G. Wodehouse. That would make Wodehouse a kind of prophet.
Am I a Soldier of the Cross performed by Apryl Dawn
Today’s hymn is an old favorite. The great Isaac Watts (1674-1748) wrote this meditation on the Christian life in the modern world. The tune above is not one from your hymnal. It’s an excellent pairing with a traditional Irish tune, which I think of as “The Foggy Dew” but is used in many songs. Do you sing this song at your church?
“Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus” (2 Tim 2:3 ESV).
1 Am I a soldier of the cross, A follower of the Lamb? And shall I fear to own His cause, Or blush to speak His name?
2 Must I be carried to the skies On flowery beds of ease, While others fought to win the prize, And sailed through bloody seas?
3 Are there no foes for me to face? Must I not stem the flood? Is this vile world a friend to grace, To help me on to God?
4 Sure I must fight if I would reign; Increase my courage, Lord; I’ll bear the toil, endure the pain, Supported by Thy word.
5 Thy saints, in all this glorious war, Shall conquer, though they die; They view the triumph from afar, And seize it with their eye.
6 When that illustrious day shall rise, And all thine armies shine In robes of victory through the skies, The glory shall be Thine.
Nothing to review tonight. I’ve had the misfortune to start reading two books in a row that I had to give up on due to lousy writing. Too painful to finish, even for the base pleasure of shredding them in reviews. And a third, which I just started, is looking a little dubious… (Fortunately, I got these books free or at very low cost through online deals, so my cost was minimal.)
I had a topic all teed up for blogging about, though. Entirely trivial and haphazard. And then I watched the video above, and it sparked some actual thoughts.
I do love Once Upon a Time in the West (except for the massacre at the beginning). It’s a case study in what you can achieve through blending visuals with music. The movie has been called operatic, and its effect has been lodged under my skin ever since I saw it in a theater back in 1969, when it was new. It’s even affected my novel writing – I try to mix poetry in with my big dramatic scenes, striving for the same kind of sublimity.
But it occurred to me to wonder about Charles Bronson’s character, known only as “Harmonica.” In the scene you see above, Jill (Claudia Cardinale) makes it about as obvious as she can (I think even I would have picked up on the hints) that she wants him to stay with her. But no, he’s gotta be on his way. Gotta ride off into the sunset, in the tradition of the Western hero (I think it has something to do with Manifest Destiny). Sergio Leone was explicitly doing homage to Western movie traditions here, and riding off alone, like Shane, is definitely part of that tradition.
But – in terms of this story – why? Why is Harmonica leaving? Up to now, his whole life has been devoted to a single goal – getting his revenge on the evil Frank (Henry Fonda). Now he’s finished that job. He’s got the whole rest of his life before him. Here’s an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of building a railroad town. Not a bad job. Not to mention THE MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRL IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE throwing herself at him. Why not stick around a day or two, just to see if it could work out?
I suppose Cheyenne (Jason Robards) explains it, when he tells Jill that men like Harmonica have got something inside them – “something about death.” Maybe Harmonica has killed too much. Maybe he’s got PTSD, and has lost his sense of belonging anywhere.
Then I pondered epics in general. In epic terms, I think we could say Harmonica is already dead. It’s the epic hero’s job to die at the end, like Beowulf. Like Hector. The very concept of the epic involves a battle with death – a battle no man can win. Epics teach us how to die.
And that’s a mythopoeic thing. The epic hero, in a dim and reflected way, foreshadows the great Hero of the Gospel. The epic hero may have no virtues at all except for courage – like Harmonica and Siegfried the Dragon Slayer – but his iron refusal to let Death break his spirit anticipates Christ passing through Death and finishing the job at which all the others have failed – killing the Great Enemy.
“Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending” performed by The Cambridge Singers
Today’s hymn comes from the great Charles Wesley (1707–1788) and is a reworking of an earlier hymn by John Cennick (1718–1755). Wesley gave it the title “Thy Kingdom Come.” It is considered one of the great Anglican hymns of all time. The text copied here is from the Trinity Hymnal and has a few more words than the recording above.
“Tell us, when will these things be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” (Matt. 24:3)
1 Lo! he comes, with clouds descending, once for favored sinners slain; thousand thousand saints attending swell the triumph of his train. Alleluia! Alleluia! God appears on earth to reign.
2 Ev’ry eye shall now behold him, robed in dreadful majesty; those who set at naught and sold him, pierced, and nailed him to the tree, deeply wailing, deeply wailing, shall the true Messiah see.
3 Ev’ry island, sea, and mountain, heav’n and earth, shall flee away; all who hate him must, confounded, hear the trump proclaim the day: Come to judgment! Come to judgment! Come to judgment, come away!
4 Now Redemption, long expected, see in solemn pomp appear! All his saints, by man rejected, now shall meet him in the air. Alleluia! Alleluia! See the day of God appear!
5 Yea, amen! let all adore thee, high on thine eternal throne; Savior, take the pow’r and glory, claim the kingdom for thine own: O come quickly, O come quickly; alleluia! come, Lord, come.
In meetings at Kensington Cross For lingo I searched at a loss. One word—marinara Was all I could bear, uh, For the spots on my shirt were all sauce.
No shirts were stained in the composition of that limerick. Now, on to the links.
Memoir: Rob Henderson has a memoir releasing next month called, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. J.D Vance praised it for a “gripping” message. Others called it “extraordinary.” But major city bookstores don’t want to schedule tour events for him, even though he had tens of thousands of social media followers (over 137k on Twitter).
The rejections scarred Arthur and made him slightly ashamed of his character, because he wanted to be a high brow writer. Nevertheless, he persevered because he was short of money, and he had a family to support, and he was also very, very hardworking, and energetic.
After Sherlock’s first two outings, both of which were lacklustre in terms of readership, his literary agent suggested a new magazine called The Strand, which was a mid-market magazine aimed at commuters, who were hustling and making a life for themselves in the busy throbbing urban world of London, in the 1890s, that Arthur struck gold.
Self-Awareness: We seem to be overly aware of ourselves, don’t we? But we aren’t yet schizophrenic. “The cult of the ironic, distanced observer, aware of his own awareness, unable to break out of his solipsistic construction of himself and his world, has displaced what is now seen to be the naive, immediate relationship with reality as it is felt. This point of view has developed its own orthodoxy, even if most of us go about our lives as though we were actually involved with things, events and people not entirely of our making.” (via Rob Henderson)
Dante’s Inferno: “Somewhere in Ukraine right now, my friend who publishes books orders printers in the bombed out city of Kharkiv to produce thousands of copies of Inferno. The trucks deliver weapons into Kharkiv. And, going back, empty, they decide to pick up thousands of copies of Dante’s Inferno.
“This is an image of war that happens as I write it: cars are bringing weapons into the besieged city that’s bombed daily, and they leave full of books.” (via The Book Haven)
“At the Name of Jesus” sung by the congregation of First Plymouth Church in Lincoln, Nebraska
Today’s hymn a regal song of praise that ends with the promise of his soon return. “At the Name of Jesus” was written by English writer Caroline Marie Noel (1817-1877). She spend many years in sickness and took up writing devotional poetry for herself and other invalids she could send them to. This song was one of those published in 1861 in a book called, The Name of Jesus and Other Verses for the Sick and Lonely. The majestic tune was written for these verses by the great Ralph Vaughan Williams.
“. . . at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil 2:10-11 ESV).
1 At the name of Jesus ev’ry knee shall bow, ev’ry tongue confess him King of Glory now. ‘Tis the Father’s pleasure we should call him Lord, who from the beginning was the mighty Word.
2 At his voice creation sprang at once to sight, all the angel faces, all the hosts of light, thrones and dominations, stars upon their way, all the heav’nly orders in their great array.
3 Humbled for a season to receive a name from the lips of sinners unto whom he came, faithfully he bore it spotless to the last, brought it back victorious, when from death he passed.
4 In your hearts enthrone him; there let him subdue all that is not holy, all that is not true: crown him as your Captain in temptation’s hour: let his will enfold you in its light and pow’r.
5 Brothers, this Lord Jesus shall return again, with his Father’s glory, with his angel train; for all wreaths of empire meet upon his brow, and our hearts confess him King of glory now.
This is my favorite arrangement of John Newton’s “Amazing Grace.” The singer, of course, is Sissel. There are several videos of her doing this hymn on YouTube, but none of them have exactly this arrangement (Andrae Crouch wrote it, I believe), and not exactly in this quality.
