Hymn of the Week: January 31, 2022

Hymn of the Week:  He Comes to Us as One Unknown

Text: Timothy Dudley Smith b. 1926
Music: Sir Hubert Parry 1848-1918
REPTON (Dear Lord, and Father of Mankind)

Today’s hymn, although mostly sung in the Episcopal church and not in our hymnal, is still one of my all-time favorite tunes. I love how the melody meanders up and down a very limited range of notes yet captures the meditative quality of the text written in the 1960s.

He Comes to Us as One Unknown

He comes to us as one unknown,
A breath unseen, unheard;
As though within a heart of stone,
Or shriveled seed in darkness sown,
A pulse of being stirred,
A pulse of being stirred.

He comes when souls in silence lie
And thoughts of day depart;
Half seen upon the inward eye,
A falling star across the sky
Of night within the heart,
Of night within the heart.

He comes to us in sound of seas,
The ocean's fume and foam;
Yet small and still upon the breeze,
A wind that stirs the tops of trees,
A voice to call us home,
A voice to call us home.

He comes in love as once he came
By flesh and blood and birth;
To bear within our mortal frame
A life, a death, a saving Name,
For ev'ry child of earth,
For ev'ry child of earth.

He comes in truth when faith is grown;
Believed, obeyed, adored:
The Christ in all the scriptures shown,
As yet unseen, but not unknown,
Our Savior and our Lord,
Our Savior and our Lord.

Timothy Dudley-Smith (b. 1926) Educated at Pembroke College and Ridley Hall, Cambridge, Dudley-Smith has served the Church of England since his ordination in 1950. He has occupied a number of church positions, including parish priest in the diocese of Southwark (1953-1962), archdeacon of

Norwich (1973-1981), and bishop of Thetford, Norfolk, from 1981 until his retirement in 1992. He also edited a Christian magazine, Crusade, which was founded after Billy Graham's 1955 London crusade. Dudley-Smith began writing comic verse while a student at Cambridge; he did not begin to write hymns until the 1960s. Many of his several hundred hymn texts have been collected in Lift Every Heart: Collected Hymns 1961-1983 (1984), Songs of Deliverance: Thirty-six New Hymns (1988), and A Voice of Singing (1993). The writer of Christian Literature and the Church (1963), Someone Who Beckons (1978), and Praying with the English Hymn Writers (1989), Dudley-Smith has also served on various editorial committees, including the committee that published Psalm Praise (1973).
Bert Polman

This arrangement comes from one of my favorite piano hymn tune arrangers: Thomas Keesecker.

Philip