Hymns of Comfort
Orson Scott Card
One of the purposes of our hymns
is to comfort those who are caught up in grief or suffering.
When we gather together for a funeral
or memorial service, we need hymns to sing that will comfort those
who feel the grief of death most poignantly.
Eliza R. Snow’s “O My Father” long
ago became a funeral hymn, primarily because of the final stanza:
“When I leave this frail existence, / When I lay this mortal by,
/ Father, Mother, may I meet you In your royal courts on high?”
Another hymn that is often used at
funerals is “Each Life That Touches Ours For Good,” by Karen Lynn
Davidson. Mostly it is a hymn celebrating good people who have
served as God’s instruments in blessing our lives — this alone
would make it a favorite hymn.
But the third stanza speaks of death
quite clearly: “When such a friend from us departs, / We hold
forever in our hearts / A sweet and hallowed memory.” At funerals
it allows all who attend to sing to the family about how much
their lost loved one meant to everyone.
There is comfort in such sharing
of grief, and Davidson achieved something sweet and fine with
this masterful hymn.
In a way, though, it’s a shame that
two such important hymns have become so associated with funerals
that not only do we sing them more rarely in normal congregational
settings, but also we sing them at such a slow, dirgelike tempo
that some of the joy inherent in them is lost.
Funerals are not the only occasions
that cry out for comfort, however. When we gather to take the
sacrament, we never know who among us might be coming before the
Lord to beg forgiveness for sin and relief for the suffering of
guilt.
There is no life untouched by grief
or loss of one kind or another. And the gospel offers comfort
for all.
So it is no surprise that the hymnbook
contains hymns like “Be Still My Soul” and “Though Deepening Trials.”
The latter hymn is another by Eliza R. Snow, and who could know
more about the many ways the Saints could suffer than one who
had lost her first husband to an assassin’s bullet, who bore no
children despite her longing, and who witnessed and took part
in the suffering, grief and loss of the generation of Saints who
were driven out and forced to seek refuge again and again?
Yet there is surely room for more.
Words and music that touch one heart might not reach another;
and when we have only a few hymns that carry such themes, perhaps,
to avoid repeating them too much, we don’t sing hymns of comfort
often enough.
“Father, in My Sorrow”
By Orson Scott Card
Father, in my sorrow
I have felt thy hand
Lift me up to stand
Ready for tomorrow.
Father, in the evening
Thou hast brought me light;
Promised in the night,
Dawn will end my grieving.
Flood with living water
Deserts of despair;
Bread enough to share
Give me through the winter.
All thy goodness shows me
Suffering is brief.
Quickly comes relief,
For my Father knows me.
This hymn is a first-person prayer,
spoken by one who grieves. It follows the vagueness rule well
enough that it could be sung at a funeral, but also could be sung
in an ordinary sacrament meeting.
My hope is that even people who are
not at the moment feeling grief will remember such feelings in
the past; and those whose grief comes from their souls being harrowed
up by memory of their own sins will sing this and feel affirmed
in the desire to repent and accept the comfort of the Father.
Metrically, the hymn is a bit unusual
in its short, three-foot lines, rhymed ABBA, with the A rhyme
being a trochee (ending on an unstressed syllable) and the B rhyme
an iamb (ending on a stressed syllable).
It’s a deliberate choice to have
each stanza end with the softening effect of a trochee. Musically,
it demands a soothing melodic line, a gentle touch. You can’t
easily bring off a bold or heroic ending on an unstressed syllable;
instead the stanzas beg for a melody that fades away.
Asking Why
One of the responses we can feel
during a time of trial is to ask the question, Why would this
happen?
“Be Still My Soul,” by Jane Borthwick
in English (translated from Katrina von Schlegel’s German original),
recognizes the question and insists on stillness and patience.
I thought there was room for a hymn
that did not immediately silence the question, but rather gave
it its full expression, while still answering with, I hope, some
comfort.
“O Child of God”
By Orson Scott Card
O child of God, you wonder why
You came to earth to live, to die;
Remember you are not alone,
And when the seed of love has grown,
One day, with joy, you're going home.
O child of God, you wonder why
Things break, and Father does not mend,
And even those you love must die.
Why can't we see beyond the bend
What road will take us home?
O child of light, you wonder why
In darkness every day you stride
And many who would lead you lie
And true directions are denied.
Keep on, you're heading home.
O child of peace, you wonder why
Such hatred tears the world apart
As parents grieve and orphans cry
And trust is lost in every heart
And hope can find no home.
Be comforted, O child of woe:
Your Father knows your pain and fear.
There is no place that you can go
Where God is not already there.
Reach out, and you are home.
My thought in writing this was that
by ending each stanza with a reference to going home, the hymn
would evoke the feeling of comfort we get from the thought of
returning to a familiar place where we are surrounded by those
who love us most.
I tried to strengthen this by making
the person spoken to a “child” in the first line of each stanza.
By implication, then, this hymn is spoken, not by mortals to God,
but by a loving Father to his children. (Literally, this is not
necessarily so — the singer refers to the Father in the third
person; the singer is, thus, a surrogate for the Father.)
The weakness is the plainness of
speech. In the second stanza, there is no euphemism for death
in “Even those you love must die.” Yet the point of the hymn
is to name our griefs.
A greater problem in the second stanza
is “Things break.” This is not the kind of thing one normally
sings about in a hymn. I meant it to evoke the experience of
children, but also intended that it be taken metaphorically as
a reference to adult things that break — like marriages, hearts,
covenants, friendships, and expectations.
The third verse is just as plainspoken,
referring to those who, offering to lead us, “lie” and deny us
the true directions that we need. This is a common source of
much grief for Latter-day Saints, as we are led astray by false
teachers. It is unusually specific for a hymn, and this is the
stanza that I would remove in order to make this fit the four-stanza
norm.
My hope is that despite the problems,
the hymn might, with the right musical setting, express enough
of the feelings of the Saints that it will be a welcome part of
our meetings from time to time. The word “die” might make the
song unbearable at funerals ... but then, I once wrote a whole
novel about facing the truth about life and death at funerals.
As If We Were Already Comforted
Sometimes a hymn can give comfort
by speaking as if we were already comforted.
“The Light of the Lord”
by Orson Scott Card
The light of the Lord
Does not despair
Does not depart.
How bright is the word
Of love and care
Within our heart.
In
darkening days
Of plague and war
Of famine’s blight
Bright charity says
What life is for,
What path is right.
The whisper of love
Can lift us up
So we can see
The sacrifice of
The bitter cup
That set us free.
We dwelt in the dust
Where blind men grope
And long for sight.
Now, true to his trust,
We rise in hope
And live in light.
This hymn is meant to be specific
to the troubled times of latter days, so I don’t think the references
to “plague and war” and “famine’s blight” are out of place. Note
that the answer to these woes is “bright charity,” suggesting
that we have a responsibility to help alleviate those problems,
not merely expecting the Lord to ease them.
Musically, this is a complicated
hymn. With an ABCABC rhyme scheme in a stanza of six short two-stress
lines, let us just say that it won’t fit any of the existing hymn
tunes in the hymnal — especially because the A-rhyme lines end
with a three-syllable anapest, and all the others with an iamb.
The short lines could easily be combined
into standard four-stress lines — but there’d be only three of
them per stanza, which is musically uncomfortable.
The solution, musically, is to repeat
two lines in each stanza. I didn’t plan it this way, but after
the hymn was complete I realized that the first and last lines
of each stanza are repeatable.
If one set of voices sang the first
line, and another group immediately repeated it, and did likewise
with the last line, we’d have a much more satisfying four-line,
four-beat stanza:
The light of the Lord (the light
of the Lord)
Does not despair, does not depart.
How bright is the word of love and care
Within our heart (within our heart).
Notice that now the A and B rhymes
are hidden inside the lines. We still feel and respond to them,
but they function more subtly.
The drawback is that congregations
find it complicated to divide; and I resent it, just a little
bit, when there’s a line of a hymn that only the women get to
sing, so that the men sing an incomplete hymn. In this case,
however, everybody would sing all the words, just not all at the
same time.
(For those who are troubled by the
grammar of saying “our heart” instead of “our hearts,” this is
a situation in which either choice would be correct. In the average
congregation, there are indeed exactly as many hearts as there
are members; but then, each person has but one heart; so either
choice is grammatical. And the singular rhymes with “depart,”
so I used it.)
Comforting
the Sinner
One of the greatest functions of
the gospel and the Church is to provide a proper setting for confession
of sin as part of the process of repentance and receiving the
blessing of Christ’s atonement.
But confession of sin is generally
a private matter. Gone are the days when testimony meetings were
punctuated with specific confessions and pleas for forgiveness.
Our sense of decorum now demands that such things be taken care
of between sinner and sinned-against, or between sinner and bishop.
Yet which of us does not take the
sacrament with a keen awareness of how we fall short of the Savior’s
plea that we be perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect?
Charles Gabriel’s “I Stand All Amazed”
is the most powerful statement of our sinfulness before the Lord.
Another hymn of his that is not in our hymnal is even more
specific:
“My Evening Prayer”
By Charles H. Gabriel (1856-1932)
If I have wounded any soul today,
If I have caused one foot to go astray,
If I have walked in my own wilful way —
Good Lord, forgive!
If I have uttered idle words or vain,
If I have turned aside from want or pain,
Lest I myself should suffer through the strain —
Good Lord, forgive!
If I have craved for joys that are
not mine,
If I have let my wayward heart repine,
Dwelling on things of earth, not things divine —
Good Lord, forgive!
If I have been perverse, or hard,
or cold,
If I have longed for shelter in Thy fold,
When Thou hast given me some part to hold —
Good Lord, forgive.
Forgive the sins I have confessed
to Thee,
Forgive the secret sins I do not see,
That which I know not, Father, teach Thou me —
Help me to live.
See? I’m not the only one who writes
five stanzas when nobody wants to sing more than four. (Note
that the removable stanza in this hymn is the fourth one, partly
because the word “perverse” is out of general use in the sense
he means, but mostly because it’s very hard to parse what in the
world he’s talking about with “When thou has given me some part
to hold.”)
The weakness of this hymn, compared
to Gabriel’s “I Stand All Amazed,” is that in being so specific
about the sins being repented of, he includes only the sins of
those who haven’t committed any major ones. Someone repenting
of a grave sin would find no comfort in this hymn, since
it’s designed to be sung by people keenly aware of not having
any really serious sins.
In writing the following hymn, I
tried to leave room for all sins, both great and small.
“He Sees”
By Orson Scott Card
He sees into my soul,
The scarlet of my sin:
His grace will make me whole.
The doors of life he opens wide.
Eternal joy is found inside.
He says to me, "Come in."
He sees into my heart.
He knows my deep desire.
He teaches me the art
Of comforting the ones who mourn,
Preparing them to be reborn
Ablaze with holy fire.
Oh, Sister, join with me.
Rise up, dear Brother, rise!
Let Zion come to be.
Where Jesus dwells there is no wall.
His gift to one is shared with all:
The love that never dies.
Now will he set us free,
Now will he make us wise,
For he will let us see
All things that will be, were, and are.
The tender child, the farthest star
We'll view through Jesus' eyes.
The comfort here comes not only from
the atonement, but from taking part in Jesus’ great work, as the
Saints invite each other to join in sharing the Savior’s gift
with others, “Preparing them to be reborn / Ablaze with holy fire.”
I would like to think that others
would feel, as I did in writing it, that we are not alone in repenting
of our sins; and that by candidly confessing “the scarlet of my
sin,” each of us can become participants with the work of bringing
to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.
But “He Sees” speaks from the heart
of the sinner already determined to repent. This next one is
an attempt at a hymn that tracks the whole process of repentance,
beginning with the hopelessness of those who have become keenly
aware of the gravity of their sins:
“The Way”
By Orson Scott Card
Where is the hope for those like me
Who waver and who stray,
For those who search but cannot see,
For we have lost the way?
The Savior in Gethsemane
Knelt all alone to pray:
Thy will, O Father: let it be,
If there's no other way.
To justice, with its stern decree,
The Savior now can say:
I paid for all their sins; now free
The ones who seek my way.
In darkest night, now suddenly
His coming brings the day.
We hear his voice: Come unto me,
My friends. I am the way.
Using only two rhymes in the entire
hymn may feel oppressive; I suppose the test is, if you noticed
it, then it was probably excessive; if not, then it worked fine.
Rhythmically, this hymn fits the
melody of “There Is a Green Hill Far Away,” though you’ll immediately
recognize that it is all wrong for that reflective tune.
This is mainly because the tune to
“Green Hill” fades toward the end, instead of building to a strong
closure. Another reason is that this hymn cries out for the strong
initial accent to be, not on the first stressed syllable (“Where
IS the hope for those like me”) but rather on the second:
“Where is the HOPE for those like me.”
Thus the first three syllables are
all pickup notes. This works on lines three and four, as well,
though line two needs to have only a single pickup note. The
pattern, then, would be:
Where is the HOPE for those
like me
Who WAver and who stray,
For those who SEARCH but cannot
see,
For we have LOST the way?
This works for me, at least, even
in the second stanza, where we would end up emphasizing the word
“in” in the first line, and the third stanza, where the first
line would be emphasized on “with.” But composers will doubtless
have their own preferences.
Celebration
Not every reference to the atonement
and resurrection has to be in the context of either grief or taking
the sacrament. Yet I can imagine the following hymn being sung
at a funeral.
“He Woke, and All These Children
Will Awake”
By Orson Scott Card
He woke,
And all these children will awake,
And rise
To take up flesh and bone again.
He spoke,
And made his foolish children wise.
His pain
Was holy, suffered for their sake.
Hosanna! for the Son
of God alive.
Hosanna! God is love.
He went
To prison to redeem the dead.
He did
What sacrifice alone could do.
Repent —
Rejoice in doing as he bid.
Be true
And follow Jesus where he led.
Hosanna! for the Son of God
alive.
Hosanna! God is love.
His word
Will lead us on the path of right,
To save
Our souls by grace we cannot earn.
O Lord
Who rose and raises from the grave
Return
And fill our lives with love and light.
Hosanna! for the Son of God alive.
Hosanna! God is love.
