Music and lyrics – August 7, 2024

Today’s Readings: AM Psalm 119:97-120; PM Psalm 81, 82; Judges 7:19-8:12; Acts 3:12-26; John 1:29-42

Over the last couple of years, I have been ambling through J. R. R. Tolkein’s, The Lord of the Rings. I carry the tome with me when travelling. Savoring this book, I read a page here and there…and sometimes I go on a bit of a tear and get a chapter or two behind me. It is a journey, for sure. I appreciate the poetry and songs that are interspersed as the bold adventurers traverse many a land. I revisit the lyrical portions for content, and I marvel that Tolkein created both story and poetry, weaving them together with careful detail. He plays with language as cultures clash in a time of great change. Tolkein’s gift of creativity and imagination presents a multi-textured narrative that is outside of time. I am a big fan.

Today in the life of the Episcopal church, two obscure names - John Mason Neale and Catherine Winkworth - are commemorated for this day in A Great Cloud of Witnesses and Lesser Feasts & Fasts 2022, works that pull the names of recent and long-ago people whose lives shaped aspects of Christian faith, life, and prayer. Neale (1818-1866) translated ancient liturgies of the early Eastern church and wrote reflections on the Psalms. He is most known in the Episcopal church for the hymns he translated from Latin and Greek – like “All glory, laud and honor” and “Come, ye faithful, raise the strain”, among many others. He brought ancient hymns into an accessible space for those speaking English.

Catherine Winkworth (1827-1878) translated German hymns from the 16th to 18th centuries for use in English-language worship. She published a collection of translations in the mid-1850s called Lyra Germanica, that was reprinted 23 times. Her works introduced into the hymnody of our tradition that remain today include “Comfort, comfort ye my people”, “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty”, and “Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates”.

John Mason Neale and Catherine Winkworth may not be familiar to you, however, they are reminders to me that poets, translators, and those who craft language offer to us gifts that linger for generations. They open doors to pray the prayers of those who lived long ago, yet their yearnings, questions, and struggles align closely with the stirrings of our own hearts.

Faithfully,

Katherine+