Thomas Moore and me (ii)

[I can't help thinking you might enjoy scrolling down to the bottom and starting the YouTube video, then letting it play as you read.]

Don't call 911, but the truth is I am quite regularly visited by lyrics from long ago, snippets of hymns from my the ancient past, not because I've requested them to play. They just suddenly are there, for no apparent reason, Disney-like childhood memories ("'Give,' said the Little Stream," "The Ninety and Nine," "Sing, Hosannah!"), a whole gaggle of of Let Youth Praise Him numbers most any Christian school kid of my vintage remembers. Without notice, they visit.

The man who pastored our church years ago required his catechumens to recite psalms, not KJV, but what was then the standard repertoire from the purple Psalter. That those old standard psalm settings might rise from my mind's miasma makes sense; they took some work to get put there: "To the Hills, I Lift Mine Eyes" (Psalm 121) is a great example. It came to me on a tour bus, out of nowhere, after an hour or so of being surrounded by the gorgeous shoulders of the Missouri River. An hour later, we were all singing it.

Two days ago, it was "Come, Ye Disconsolate." 

I'll let that soak in for a moment. 

When I stepped out of the car after buying a dandelion-puller (mine broke on the first stab of the new season), a pair of weed shears, and some wicked liquid stuff to take care of the crab grass, I'd shut the car door behind me, and when I did the music started playing, my spotty memory filling in words, as if I were reading the score from an open hymnal on someone's grandma's old pump organ.

Come, ye disconsolate, where’er ye languish;
Come to the mercy seat, fervently kneel.
Here bring your wounded hearts; here tell your anguish.
Earth has no sorrow that heav’n cannot heal.

It's not a psalm--I looked it up. If you follow this blog, you might have guessed. It's a hymn, one of very few, that originated from the pen of the Irish poet beloved for reminding the Irish of their Irishness. Thomas Moore did a ton of writing, but didn't do scads of hymns, wasn't really the type--no William Cowper he. And me?--I don't have a dime's worth of Irish blood. 

But I wasn't thinking about origins. What struck me immediately was the word "disconsolate." Honestly, I don't think I'd ever used that word except in the old hymn. "Oh, Henry there?--he's just plain disconsolate." Nope. Didn't happen. 

And although I've got some scars from depression, I've never suffered the really dark blues as so many others have; still, I was struck--I still wasn't out of the garage--by how cognate disconsolate is to despair. I opened the door to the house and couldn't help think how perfectly apropos that old hymn would be for those terrorized by the dark: "disconsolate," "languish," "wounded hearts," "anguish." I'd never really thought about those words, never realized how Moore's verse lends itself to suffering in darkness. I learned that hymn long before I came anywhere near to understanding it.

But where?--why did I know those words and that music, "by heart," as they say. It's not a Let Youth Praise Him top ten. No kids would have stuck his hand up in class and 'Oh, ohed" to pick "Come, Ye Disconsolate." There's nothing kiddish about it.

Did I learn it in church? Doesn't seem like something that regularly made the hymn board. It's likely in the purple Psalter because it is in the gray one. What I know is it's likely I hadn't sung "Come, Ye Disconsolate" for decades. But, poof!--out of nowhere, this obscure hymn dream-like, sweeps into my consciousness as I walk into the house. Like being visited by a ghost, I think--although I've never been so blessed.

We've been reading Frederick Buechner's Beyond Words lately, and the night before we'd read a single sentence on "Despair": "Despair," Buechner says, "has been called the unforgivable sin--not presumably because God refuses to forgive it, but because it despairs of the possibility of being forgiven." 

I was thinking about dandelions and crab grass, not Frederick Buechner; but I had, just the night before. Maybe the mind is its own Bingo bin. It rolls ideas and images around and around, then throws out a number, willy-nilly, as if suggesting that what it silently broadcasts be the meditation of the hour.

This morning's thanks is for whoever did it and why. I just want to say that I'm open for more strange visits from Thomas Moores or Fanny Crosbys for that matter, as long as the musical line plays as beautifully as this gracious old, mega-comforting setting: