Music Notes from Denise, November 9, 2025

This Sunday we will celebrate the feast day of our church’s patron saint, St. Martin of Tours. There are many stories about St. Martin that revolve around the idea of Servitude. The music for this Sunday reflects and honors the Trinity: our experience of the Spirit, our knowledge of Christ, and our service to others in the world with God’s support.

Our Processional hymn will be Gracious Spirit, give your servants, written by Carl P. Daw, Jr. This beautiful hymn to the Holy Trinity was written for the Consecration of the Rt. Rev. Andrew D. Smith, Bishop Suffragan of the Diocese of Connecticut in 1996.

Our Sequence hymn will be Lord, make us servants of your peace. The text has been attributed to St. Francis of Assisi and his famous prayer, but it can’t be traced back further than 1912, when it was found in Paris in a small spiritual magazine called La Clochette. The hymn text was written by Father James Quinn SJ (1919-2010), a Scottish priest who saw his hymn writing as an extension of his commitment to his Jesuit order. It reflects the ways that we can help to bring about the Kingdom of God. (music.churchofscotland.org.uk)

For the Offertory, St Martin’s Choir will sing a new arrangement of the familiar spiritual Kum Ba Yah by Kyle Pederson called Come By Here. About this arrangement, Kyle writes: “I grew up singing Kumbaya around the fire at every church camp and retreat—the ubiquity and simplicity of this tune perhaps numbing me to its extraordinary power…What a powerful plea—all the more impactful and heartbreaking as it was first voiced by those forced into bondage and held in slavery their entire lives. In my own arrangement, I want to honor those original voices, which continue to speak to us in our own circumstances and allow us to give voice to our own heartbreak and yearning for God’s spirit to come near…I also believe that God’s spirit is already with us in all of our circumstances. In our joy, grief, rising, falling, living, and dying, God is there with us, working toward wholeness and healing. So the lyric morphs into a more declamatory statement of “you are here” as the piece reaches its climax. And those words are the final words the listener hears as well:

       Come by hear, my Lord, come by here. O Lord, come by here.

       Someone’s praying’, Lord, come by here. O Lord, come by here.

       Someone’s cryin’, Lord, come by here. O Lord, come by here.

       In the morning, Lord, In my pleading, in my longing, in my healing, in my seeking, dying, Lord 

       In the evening, Lord, waiting, caring, Lord, blessing, falling, aching, finding, Lord

       In my waking, Lord, In my loving, in my hoping, hiding, laughing, breathing, Lord

       In my sleeping, Lord, Grieving, Rising, praising, Lord, dying, Lord, You are here.

       Come by here, my Lord, come by here. O Lord, you are here.

  (Come By Here by Kyle Pederson Copyright 2020 Birnamwood Publications, MorningStarMusic.com)

Our closing hymn is one found in Selah Publishing’s new hymnal supplement for Episcopal churches, Take Up the Song. Sung to the Melita tune associated with the Navy hymn, the new text written by the Reverend Canon Herbert O’Driscoll (1928-2024) is O God, beyond all face and form. O’Driscoll was born in Ireland and served as an Anglican priest in Canada. He was remembered as a great storyteller and a prolific hymn writer. (thehighway.anglicannews.ca) David P. Schaap, the editor of Take Up the Song, writes concerning this supplement: “These hymns remind us that Christian hymnody didn’t end in the 1980s—it continues to flourish. When we sing new hymns alongside historic ones, we join our voices with both the communion of saints and the living church of today, participating in something greater than ourselves.” (Take Up the Song copyright 2025 Selah Publishing Co. All rights reserved)