Hymn Book

The hymn book had a blue-patterned cover and was called Celebration Hymnal. The hymns sung were always the same ones. We all knew more or less where to turn. We'd also sing the same hymns at school. 

"Sing Hosanna, to the King of Kings" "Spirit of God". I'd glance at adjacent hymns in the book, and wonder about them. There were some that were never sung, or ever mentioned. There were negro spirituals, an odd assortment, they seemed almost comical next to the Victorian hymns. The odd juxtaposition. 

On the other page from some hymn we sung a lot was a Caribbean hymn which began: "God looked down from his window in the sky, he said "I created man, but I can't remember why". I always looked at it, read it over, wondered about it. I pictured it literally: A cartoon God with a window set in a bank of clouds, peering through it. 

"Spirit of God" was a hymn written by nuns, or perhaps just by one nun. For some unaccountable reason it frightened me. For some reason the final verse of it was never sung. I imagined that that final verse had a curse upon it, and I dwelt upon this idea and it began to obsess me. I thought that that verse was evil somehow, and that was why it could never be sung. I imagined the stern, penitent nuns who had written it, immeasurably old, in their grey habits. The hymn seemed to me to be written in stone, with the chill of death upon it, and to be redolent of something medieval, something ancient. There was one line of the unsung verse which really worried me:

"I saw the scar of a year that lay dying,

Heard the lament of a lone whip-poorwhill".

The imagery. It frightened me. I imagined it as something inexplicably ancient, something from Roman times, something from the dawn of Christianity. That line, in the forbidden last verse, which was never sung, as well as its authorship by nuns, led me to suppose that the hymn had uncanny powers. I had an especially strong dislike of it, and yet it impressed me as wonderfully significant, even as wildly beautiful, above all as an expression of something fundamentally true:

"Blow, blow, blow till I be

But breath of the spirit moving in me". 

Even the melody seemed profound, expression of an ancient and austere Christianity, profoundly serious and spiritually clear, like the leaden skies, the wind-strewn heath, the cold waters.