In Wesley's Footsteps: My heart it doth dance at the sound of His name!

Hymn CD's can either inspire or depress, draw or shove me towards worship or kill devotional intent stone dead, shake up my tired ideas or bore me with cliches, and therefore be a means of grace or a source of annoyance. But now and again we come across a sound and expression of faith that touches most of the positive chords in our particular and personal spirituality - such as it is, and such as I am, at the moment, this music resonates with the deep places of the soul.

Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band have been my equivalent of a devotional companion for years. Their album, Sing Lustily and with Good Courage, was so played, scratched and enjoyed I've bought it again. The combination of Maddy Prior's clear and liquid voice, the authentic 18th Century instruments, and the repristination of hymns by Watts, Wesley, Montgomery and others, have made this for me a regularly taken spiritual tonic. And their much more recent album, Paradise Found, commemorating the tercentenary of the birth of Charles Wesley has for me the same tonic quality. The tunes for some of the better known Wesley masterpieces are different, and if at times I was disappointed and at least uncertain, several listenings have persuaded me that there's more than one way to sing a hymn, even the same hymn!

We listened to Paradise Found driving to Gwennap, with ruined tin mine workings around us, rolling Cornwall countryside, nearly every village with a Methodist meeting place (some of them now converted (ironic word) into lovely houses, or business premises). Take for example, Come O Thou Traveller Unknown, the beautifully spiritualised story of Jacob wrestling, which Wesley transformed into a hymn about the longing soul refusing to let the unknown Saviour go until he tells his name:

....

Wrestling I will not let thee go

Till I Thy name, Thy nature know!

 

Tis Love!, 'tis Love! Thou diedst for me,

I hear Thy whisper in my heart,

The morning breaks, the shadows flee,

Pure Universal Love Thou art!

And the utterly hilarious (I use the word in its true meaning of joyful laughter as the inner dance of the spirit) My God I am Thine. Listening to this as we travelled from Trewint Cottage where Wesley was given hospitality on his first pioneering preaching visits to Cornwall, then down to Truro, was like a step back in time. The sun was shining, the trees were early autumn colours, and the lightness of the music, the sheer exuberance of unembarrassed joy, and the combination of music, colour and historical significance of place, was one of those epiphany episodes you don't plan, and you can only enjoy.

I really would love to hear a modern praise band, bass guitar, drums, some brass, woodwind and strings, and as many other guitars as you like, romping through the theological and spiritual merriment of this hymn:

My God, I am Thine, what a comfort divine,
What a blessing to know that my Jesus is mine!
In the heavenly Lamb thrice happy I am,
And my heart it doth dance at the sound of His Name.

True pleasures abound in the rapturous sound;
And whoever hath found it hath paradise found:
My Jesus to know, and feel His blood flow,
’Tis life everlasting, ’tis Heaven below.

Yet onward I haste to the heavenly feast:
That, that is the fulness; but this is the taste!
And this I shall prove, till with joy I remove
To the heaven of heavens in Jesus’s love.

And so on. I'm well aware of the difficulty post-modern pilgrims like us have with such explicit spiritual experience, distilled into biblical metaphors, and imbibed in a state of uncrtical devotional intoxication, innocent of any hermeneutic of suspicion, and founded as the whole thing is in the biblical metanarrative of redemption, itself cause for much post-modern trembling. But by jings, you just need to have stood in Gwennap Pit, used your imagination, remembered what it is to pray, and then listened to the lilting music of authentic 18th Century instruments accompanying Maddy Prior as as she sings of the 'heaven of heavens in Jesus's love' - there's something about song linked to the deep encounters of the soul, that touches those even deeper realities, and transforms the way we see the world, ourselves and each other - and brings us within reach of the Mystery that is redeeming love.

Or as Charles describes it:

Thy love I soon expect to find

In all its depth and height:

To comprehend the Eternal Mind

And grasp the Infinite.