What Did He Do?
My wife was recently trying to select hymns for my son to play on Trinity Sunday in the small church where we attend Mass in the summer, in Cape Breton. The Canadian Book of Worship III is not very obliging. Most of the songs are contemporary trash. Most of the remainder are unsuitable for Christian consumption, their texts having been rendered heretical or imbecile. The emphasis in general is on our feelings, not on the mighty deeds of God. So she pretty much gave up on it. The Trinity may be the central mystery of the Christian faith, but you wouldn't know it from that dreadful hymnal.
The mighty deeds of God, the mystery of the Godhead, the unfathomable sacrifice of Christ—I found them well-celebrated in a small, old hymnal my wife gave me as a present the next day: Favorite Welsh and English Hymns and Melodies, published for Welshmen living in the United States and Canada, and for the Gymanfa Ganu, the Festival for Sacred Song. The editor's account of how the festival came about confirms our intuition that people are only really united from above, by common worship. The festival
is expressive of the soul of the Cymry, or Welsh, since it gives an outlet for their deep and fervent religious feeling through the medium they love best, the music of human voices blended in harmony. It is, as it must be to be Welsh, a democratic institution, for persons in all positions in life take part in it. It is devoted to four-part singing of hymns and anthems, and has given the congregational singing of the Welsh people concededly first place among the nations.
A Musical Chain of Glory
There's a splendid hymn in the book that shows just how we can make manifest the unity of young and old, men and women, in adoration of the One who alone can save us. The melody is called Deemster, and it has this fine feature, a form of which is common among rousing Baptist revival songs: in the refrain, which dominates the hymn, male and female voices divide and reunite. The women and treble boys sing an eight-beat question, then the men sing an eight-beat answer to the same melody in the bass; then the women follow with a four-beat question, the men with a four-beat answer; then another question, another answer; and then an amplified answer in seven beats, sung by all the voices together.
What's really sweet, and theologically suggestive, is that the questions and answers are not wholly separate. The women sing the last syllable of their question exactly when the men are singing the first syllable of their answer, and when the men sing the last syllable of their answer, the women are singing the first syllable of the next question. So question and answer and question and answer are bound in a living chain or crown of glory.
Let me give the refrain in Welsh, first with a literal translation, then with the loose English rendering in the hymnal:
Pwy gadwodd holl dylwythau'r llawr?
(Who saved all who were laden down?)
Pwy ond yr Archoffeiriad mawr;
(Who but the great High Priest;)
Beth wnaeth Efe?
(What did he do?)
Aeth yn ein lle;
(He went in our place;)
B'le mae Efe?
(Where is he?)
Mae yn y Ne,
(He is in heaven,)
Mae yn o'n eiriol drosom.
(He is there interceding for us.)
Here are the English verses for the choir:
Who saved us from eternal loss?
Who but God upon the cross?
What did he do?
He died for you!
Where is he now?
Believe it thou
In heaven interceding.
I like the musical arrangement all the more because it reflects the central wonder of the poem. That is that God has exchanged places with us, and still does. What else does it mean for Christ to intercede with the Father on our behalf, if not that he puts himself in the place of sinners, so that he can put sinners in his place before the Father? That wonder of love is well-expressed by the second stanza of the English adaptation:
No angel could our place have taken,
Highest of the high though he,
The loved one on the cross forsaken
Was one of the Godhead Three.
In that final line, the English paraphraser has touched upon the majesty and mystery of the being of God. It's the only line in which he does so. Oddly enough, that particular line is not in the Welsh, but the original otherwise fairly runneth over with joyful contemplation not only of What God Did but Who He Is.
The Story Ever New
The poet, William Owen, begins by declaring that the blood that runs from the Cross abides from age to age in remembrance, for it would need more than the "seas of eternity"—remarkable phrase—to speak of it in full. But the Cross is no more a mere memorial than God is a mere dweller in time. So in the second stanza Owen turns to heaven and the sons of morning. I'll translate in a meter that will fit the melody, as best I can:
Prime text of all the hymns of heaven
Was "He Himself," and rightly so;
And angels swept their gleaming harps
To sing that best, most glorious song.
My English cannot well express the weight of glory that we apprehend not just within each stanza, but between them and beyond them. To talk about the sacrifice of Christ is to talk about the being of God, though the poet does not pause to tell us why. To talk about Calvary is to talk about when God made the heavens and the earth, and the sons of morning sang for joy. To talk about that first creation is to talk about the new creation, the New Jerusalem:
Mysterious, wondrous is the blood
The Lamb sheds to defend our souls;
Resounding higher than the notes
Of seraphim who sing for joy.
For the old, old story is the story ever new, ever fresh:
When ages numerous as the sands
Began, the song had just begun;
Now the new wonder of Christ's death
Will shine while endless ages run.
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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