Hymn of the Day: “The Play of the Godhead” ACS 946
Text: Mary Louise Bringle (1953)
Tune: PERICHORESIS William P. Rowan (1951)
Mary Louise Bringle, professor of philosophy and religious studies at Brevard College (North Carolina), was inspired to compose hymn texts after attending the Hymn Writer’s Workshop in Boston sponsored by The Hymn Society in the United States and Canada in 2000. She left the workshop with composer William Rowan’s words of encouragement and a collection of his compositions — eighteen “hymns without words”. That year, she penned “The Play of the Godhead,” a Trinitarian hymn that she originally paired with Rowan’s PERICHORESIS, a tune having the same name as the theological concept that inspired Bringle’s text.
The mystery of the Trinity—God, Three in One—is a concept that may need to be danced rather than explained. It’s a three-person dance—or maybe four, if we are included. The text uses images of mist, flowing water, crystals of ice, nourishing taproot, growing shoot, and ripe fruit, natural analogies for the Trinity that have historically been found wanting. Mary Louise Bringle says that the three repeating phrases of music in the middle of the song made her first think of the dance of the Trinity.
Offertory Anthem: “When Silence Filled the Formless Night,” Richard Shephard (1949-2021)
Richard Shephard was a British composer, educator, and Director of Development and Chamberlain of York Minster. He was acclaimed as one of the most significant composers of church music of his time. Today’s anthem is based on his original hymn tune (Huttons Ambo) with a text by Mary Holtby.
When silence filled the formless night
And worlds unmade in darkness waited,
God spoke the word and gave us light,
And loved what he created.
Beyond the ancient writer's art
The word affirms our primal story:
How love illuminates the heart
As heav'n declares his glory.
His voice still speaks through clouded years,
Past prisons of our own devising,
And still to shadowed lives appears
The brightness of his rising.
He comes in Pentecostal flame,
In tongues unloosed, in bondage broken;
to all united by his name
The word of life is spoken.
Let there be light and hearts be stirred
to know in Christ their sun ascending;
In our beginning is the word,
and in the word our ending.
Opening Voluntary: “Nicea” Robert Buckley Farlee (1950)
The tune NICAEA is named after the Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325) at which church leaders began to formulate the doctrine of the Trinity to oppose the heresies of Arius. NICAEA is one of the finest tunes composed by John B. Dykes and the only one of his many tunes that resembles the style of the Lutheran chorale – its similarity to WACHET AUF is noted by various scholars. Dykes wrote NICAEA as a setting for Reginald Heber’s text, and ever since their first publication together in Hymns Ancient and Modern (1861), the text and tune have been virtually inseparable.
Robert Buckley Farlee is Associate Pastor and Director of Music at Christ Lutheran Church in Minneapolis.
Closing Voluntary: Prelude in G Major, BWV 541, J. S. Bach (1685-1750)
One of the most sparkling organ works by Johann Sebastian Bach, the Prelude and Fugue in G major, BWV 541, was probably originally written around the middle of Bach's formative period in Weimar, 1708-1717, but revised in Leipzig sometime after 1740. The Prelude is an ebullient affair, a joyful stream of 16th-notes punctuated by repeated chords.