Hymn of the Week, A Lenten Devotional: March 20, 2023
Be Thou My Vision
Glory to God: 450
Irish poem translated by Mary E. Byrne 1905
Music Irish ballad; harm, David Evans 1927
Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart;
naught be all else to me, save that thou art;
Thou my best thought, by day or by night,
waking or sleeping, thy presence my light.
Be thou my wisdom, and thou my true word;
I ever with thee and thou with me, Lord;
thou my soul’s shelter, and thou my high tower;
Raise thou me heavenward, O Power of my power.
Riches I heed not, nor vain, empty praise;
thou, mine inheritance, now and always;
Thou and thou only, first in my heart,
High King of heaven, my treasure thou art.
High King of heaven, my victory won,
may I reach heaven’s joys, O bright heaven’s Sun!
Heart of my own heart, whatever befall,
still be my vision, O Ruler of all.
Hymn Texts: A Lenten Devotional
The next several week’s devotions come to us from a book that takes us on a Lenten journey, using hymns of our faith. Each day of Lent is represented with a beloved hymn in the book. I will be sharing music and approximately 6 of the many devotionals available in the book.
The devotion has been reprinted with permission of the author, James C. Howell, from his book entitled: Unrevealed Until Its Season: a Lenten Journey with Hymns. Published by Upper Room Books 2021. The book can be found here: The Upper Room
Still Be My Vision
Hymns help us hear and see what God hears and sees. Who wrote “Be Thou My Vision” and why? Sometimes it’s attributed to St. Patrick, the courageous fifth-century missionary to the Irish. Or maybe it was the writer St. Dallan Forgaill in the sixth century. It’s been covered by lots of musicians, including Van Morrison. What thoughts have flitted through the minds and hearts of millions as they’ve sung this over the centuries?
My optometrist checks my vision and prescribes corrective lenses. He can explain why my vision is trending a certain way. Our hymn asks for a peculiar vision – that the Lord will not merely help or correct my vision but rather “Be thou my vision, O Lord.” You be my eyes.
On the road to Damascus (see Acts 9) Paul experienced a transformative vision of Jesus. After a short stint of blindness, he recovered his sight. But he never saw anything the way he had previously. “From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view” (2 Corinthians 5:16). We see ourselves, others, every situation, and all creation through the lens that is Jesus’ life, cross, and resurrection. Our bodies aren’t gangly, unwieldy things but temples of the Spirit. There is beauty in the picturesque but also in the aspects of God’s creation that nobody thinks to photograph. Hope for reconciliation shines in the ugliest conflicts. Other people are divine image bearers.
Don’t thoughts just happen? Don’t they just pop into your head? Yes, but we have choices about what to think and what not to think. Reading scripture, singing hymns, worshipping, study, and service are a years-long tutorial in what and how to think. The goal? “Thou my best thought.” Late in life, Dorothy Day told how she once started to write a memoir but discovered she had no need to do that: “I just sat there and thought of our Lord, and his visit to us all those centuries ago, and I said to myself that my great luck was to have had Him on my mind for so long in my life!”
Be Thou My Wisdom
Maybe that’s how you turn out if your constant prayer is “Be thou my wisdom.” We know smart, successful people. But who is wise? Henry David Thoreau mocked Harvard for teaching “all the branches (of knowledge), but none of the roots. Wisdom is deep underground, not just lying around on the surface. We hear thin, pithy sayings pretending to be wise: “Time is money.” “You get what you pay for.” “When the going gets tough, the tough get going. ““Life is short, play hard.” “Bloom where you’re planted.” These are too trivial to be true; they are too insubstantial. Thoreau, who went to live in the woods in pursuit of wisdom, noted how technological advances are merely “Improved means to unimproved ends.”
Wisdom thinks about the end, the purpose of life. Wisdom is serenity and patience. Wisdom must be cultivated and won over the length of life. Wisdom treasures what is old and has survived for a reason. Wisdom is born out of the cauldron of experience: hard times, grief, sacrifice. You can’t just pick up an idea and suddenly become wise, the way you crack open a fortune cookie. You live it, wait on it, test it, let it seep up from the good earth through the soles of your feet. You become one with God, who is Wisdom.
The way to wisdom is “I ever with thee and thou with me, Lord . . .with thee one.” Sam Wells suggested that the most important theological word in the Bible is with. God is with us. This is a constant theme in our best hymns. That’s what the psalmist sought after suffering much: “Nevertheless I am continually with you…There is nothing on earth that I desire other than you…For me it is good to be near God.” (Psalm 73: 23-28).
We stick close to God in prayer, immersion in scripture, holy conversation, and being with those in need. We never forget the quirkiness and scandal of divine wisdom. Paul wrote to the sophisticated, philosophically proud Corinthians that “the message about the cross is foolishness” and that God “will destroy the wisdom of the wise” (see 1 Corinthians 1:18-27). “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom” precisely because “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise” (1 Corinthians 1: 18-27). Signs that this foolish wisdom has been cultivated in us are contentment, gratitude, and forgiveness. Our values are not defined by this world: “Riches I heed not, nor man’s empty praise.” The hymn itself pulls us into the very soul of God. What joy it is to sing that God is “heart of my own heart.” The heart of my heart is the heart of God – which is the way to “reach heaven’s joys.”
Sources
Robert Coles, Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion (reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1987), 16.
Quoted in “the Harvard in Thoreau, “ Richard Higgins, The Harvard Gazette, June 29, 2017, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/06/near-the-bicentennial-of-thoreau’s-birth-a-look-at-his-harvard-years/.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Random House, 1992), 49.
Samuel Wells, A Nazareth Menifesto: Being with God (Malden MA: John Wiley and Sons, 2015), 3, 11.
Be Thou My Vision
Cathy Craig
