Last Sunday, at the small parish in the mountain village where I was on vacation, they sang – remarkably – all nine stanzas of Isaac Watts’s famous hymn, “O God Our Help in Ages Past.” It was sung as the closing hymn, putting to the test those parishioners most stalwart about not leaving for their cars until the singing is over.
You remember the bit about “time like an ever-rolling stream.” But I wager you have never sung these lyrics:
The busy tribes of flesh and blood,
With all their lives and cares,
Are carried downwards by the flood,
And lost in foll’wing years.
Lugubrious? Yes, and yet also true. Most of us are forgotten soon after we die, certainly so in our work. If we are fortunate, children and grandchildren will remember us in their prayers. But even the most pious among us do not pray for our great-great-grandparents.
That hymn is beloved because it invites us to look at our material strivings from God’s point of view. We see that everything like that, which we take to be important now, will be reduced to nothingness. This should free us from care – “is not life more than food and clothing” –
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