Hymn of the Day: "For the fruit of all creation" (ELW 679)
Text: Fred Pratt Green, 1903-2000
Tune: AR HYD Y NOS, Welsh traditional; arr. Ralph Vaughan Williams, 1872-1958
Originally called “Harvest Hymn,” this text is much more comprehensive than that title implies. It also deals with stewardship, thanksgiving, and God’s endless gifts that continue to astound us. It is set to a familiar Welsh tune whose name means “throughout the night.”
In England in the middle of the twentieth century, "God, who made the earth and heaven" was associated with the tune AR HYD Y NOS. In 1957 Francis Jackson wrote another tune for it, called EAST ACKLAM. Jackson's tune never caught on. John Wilson, a particularly able hymnologist who saw this lonely tune as a good one, suggested to Fred Pratt Green that he should write a text for it, "preferably on a harvest theme where new hymns were badly needed?" Green did as requested, and the hymn appeared in the Methodist Recorder in August 1970 as "HARVEST HYMN." Not surprisingly, since this is such an able text—about harvest, stewardship, thanksgiving, and the wonders of God that astound and confound us—it has since been included in many hymnals and sung widely. Ironically, however, it has been used more often with AR HYD Y NOS than with EAST ACKLAM. Lutheran Book of Worship (1978, #563) daringly joined it to SANTA BARBARA. Evangelical Lutheran Worship retains the same slightly modified text (Green's text originally began, “For the fruits of his creation) but joins it to this congregational tune in a very happy marriage.
Fred Pratt Green is perhaps best described as the twentieth-century hymn-writing version of Charles Wesley. He was born in a suburb of Liverpool, where his father ran a leather manufacturing business and was a Wesleyan Methodist and local preacher. His mother was an Anglican. As a child he worshiped in an Anglican Church. He wanted to become an architect but worked in his father's leather business for four years, developed an interest in writing, married Marjorie Dowsett, and became a Methodist minister and superintendent.
When he retired in 1969, he planned to spend his time doing pastels. That plan never materialized. He accepted an invitation to serve on the Working Party of the Methodist Conference in Great Britain to prepare a supplement to the Methodist Hymn-Book (which was published as Hymns and Songs). The committee asked him to write hymns for topics that seemed to be lacking, and hymn writing replaced water colors for most of the rest of his life. John Wilson and Erik Routley encouraged him.
Fred Pratt Green's poetic interests and abilities did not suddenly appear out of nowhere. When he came to the Finsbury Park Circuit in 1944, he made a pastoral call to Fallon Webb, the father of one of his Sunday school children. Webb, in spite of his arthritis, had an intense interest in poetry. When he discovered that Green had written some poems, he suggested that they each write a poem and criticize the other's work at their next encounter. They continued the practice weekly for the next twenty years, until Webb's death. Green was well prepared for hymn writing.
He produced a large number of hymns, many of which are included in denominational hymnals. He received an honorary doctorate from Emory University, served as vice president of the Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland, and was made a fellow of the Hymn Society of the United States and Canada. In addition to being a faithful pastor and remarkable hymn writer, he was an unusually humble man with a twinkle in his eye and a song in his heart.