"Give Thanks for Life"

This week our church sang a very moving hymn for All Saints Day that seemed equally appropriate for either the Thanksgiving or Easter seasons, as well:

Give thanks for life, the measure of our days;
mortal, we pass through beauty that decays, 
yet sing to God our hope, our love, our praise:
Hallelujah, hallelujah!

Give thanks for those who made their life a light
caught from the Christ-flame, bursting through the night,
who touched the truth, who burned for what is right:
Hallelujah, hallelujah!

And for our own, our living and our dead,
thanks for the love by which our life is fed,
a love not changed by time or death or dread:
Hallelujah, hallelujah!

Give thanks for hope, that like the wheat, the grain
lying in the darkness does its life retain
in resurrection to grow green again:
Hallelujah, hallelujah!

(© 2005 Hope Publishing
Text: Shirley Erena Murray 
Music: Ralph Vaughan Williams)

Unfortunately, I've been unable to find a decent recording of the hymn that really shows how beautiful it is, but you can listen to a midi file of it on the Hymnary website here.

The Oldest Known Christian Hymn?

Thanks to James McGrath for posting on the oldest known Christian hymn with musical notation. 

According to the Ancient Peoples blog, the hymn, discovered on a papyri fragment in a garbage dump near Oxyrynchus, Egypt, reads:

...Let it be silent 

Let the Luminous stars not shine, 

Let the winds (?) and all the noisy rivers die down; 

And as we hymn the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, 

Let all the powers add "Amen, Amen." 

Empire, praise always, and glory to God, 

The sole giver of good things, Amen, Amen.

There is something bizarre and mystical about the piece. Music has a unique way of connecting us to the past in ways that other media—even the written word!—cannot. To listen to this hymn is to hear what the ancients heard, and to somehow witness a transcendence of time and culture in the worship of God.