A hundred years ago this year in 1911, Vaughan Williams published Five Mystical Songs. They received their first performance the same year at the Three Choirs Festival in Worcester Cathedral. The Five Mystical Songs are settings of five poems by the mystical 17th century poet George Herbert. We are singing an arrangement of one of these, The Call, during the service.
That same year, 1911, also saw the founding of the English Folk Dance Society (later to become the English Folk Dance and Song Society) by Cecil Sharp.
Cecil Sharp toured the English countryside carefully noting down morris and folk dancing tunes and folk songs which were on the point of extinction. The fact that we can see morris dancing on every village green is down to Cecil Sharp. And to Vaughan Williams, who also went around collecting English folk songs, particularly here in East Anglia. As we know, Vaughan Williams’ music – pieces like The Lark Ascending and Fantasia on Greensleeves – is highly influenced by his interest in English folk music.
Across Europe, composers were taking an interest in national folk music. Composers like Bartók in Hungary, Janáÿek in Czechoslovakia, DvoĜák in Czechoslovakia and later America were all turning for inspiration to national music. And perhaps that’s not surprising. If you think of music from Beethoven to Brahms to Wagner to Schoenberg, music in the nineteenth century became more romantic, more chromatic, more complicated and perhaps more remote from the common musical language and from audiences. Looking to folk music was not looking to a simpler form of music. It would be quite wrong to say that folk music was simple because folk music is quite capable of expressing the full range of our emotions.
Turning to national folk music was a way of reconnecting with the soul of a nation, with audiences and with the common language of music.
Now it doesn’t seem to me surprising that when Vaughan Williams was looking for poems to set to music he should look to the poetry of George Herbert. His poetry, particularly in these poems, is quite uncomplicated. The Call, which we are singing during the communion, is written entirely in single syllable words Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life:
Such a Way, as gives us breath:
Such a Truth, as ends all strife:
Such a Life, as killeth death.
Every word is a single syllable word – yes, except for one word you spotted: the word ‘killeth’. It is almost as if Herbert is saying complication kills. But the poem is anything but simple:
Come my Way, my Truth, my Life:
The line reminds us of Jesus in John’s Gospel saying, ‘I am the Way, the Truth, the Life.’ But it’s more than that. What are the things we need to live life? We need that which will enable us to flourish as individuals, to be our true selves and to live life ‘our way’ or, as the song says, ‘my way’. We need to live life free from illusion and falsehood, to live in the truth. And we want to enjoy life in all its fullness. Herbert goes on to explore these in the next three lines:
Such a Way, as gives us breath:
It speaks to us of the breath of life, the breath that breathes over the face of the waters at creation, a way that breathes inspiration and life into our lives:
Such a Truth, as ends all strife:
What is truth? Not the 'I have to tell the truth Sermon Stephen Mitchell preached this sermon at St Mary's Church Dalham on Sunday 29th May 2011, Rogation Sunday.
George Herbert whatever the reception.
I’m the sort of person who tells it like it is.’ Not the ‘We have the truth and you are in the wrong.’ Truth is that which ends all strife, that brings people to a common mind:
Such a Life, as killeth death.
The life worth living, the true life, the life which enables us to flourish is the life that accepts death, that accepts the vulnerability and fragility of life.
The words are uncomplicated, the thought profound. We don’t need complicated words to speak profound truths. But more than that, there isn’t a single theological word in the whole poem. Yet it speaks to us of our faith. We don’t need theological words to talk of God and our faith. This doesn’t come as a surprise. After all Jesus taught in parables, through common everyday tales. This is encouraging and should make us suspicious of those who overjargonise our faith.
But it also comes with a rather unsettling truth.
And it’s this: If we speak of God without theological words, if we can talk of faith in common language, then the difference between belief and unbelief, between believers and unbelievers, may not be as great as we think.
Today is my birthday, my sixtieth birthday, and I was rather amused to see that the first reading was about Paul’s visit to Athens and his speech to the Athenians about The Unknown God and Epimenides’ description of the God ‘in whom we live and move and have our being’, which, happens to be the starting point of my book God in the Bath.
And it reminded me of Vaughan Williams. Ralph Vaughan Williams was the son of a clergyman, the vicar of Down Ampney (and hence the name of the tune he wrote for Come Down O Love Divine – which incidentally again has very, very few theological words). Vaughan Williams wrote a great deal of religious music, wrote and arranged many hymn tunes (all the hymns we are singing today are by him or arranged by him). He also edited one of the most influential hymnbooks in the English language, the English Hymnal. But Vaughan Williams was an agnostic. Would any of us not sing Come down O Love Divine or For All the Saints because of that?
Surely not.
True faith, true belief, true belief in God, goes beyond atheism and theism, true faith brings us together because we all ‘live and move and have our being’ in God. We all share the one life that flows through us all in our common world.
And the other surprising thing is that if common, uncomplicated language can speak of God, then there is no division between the sacred and the secular, between the sacred and profane. There are no fences (pro-fane means outside the fence) outside of which, beyond which God’s call, God’s spirit, God’s influence cannot reach.
Stephen Mitchell is the Vicar of Gazeley, together with four other parishes, and Rural Dean of Mildenhall, Suffolk. He is a former Chair of SOF Trustees.