Into a world of dark

Authors:
Themes:
Scriptures:
  • Genesis 1:1-10
  • Jeremiah 4:23
  • Zechariah 4:6
  • Matthew 28:17
  • John 20:10-20
  • John 20:26
  • John 20:30-31
  • John 3:5-8
  • Acts 2:1-4
  • Romans 8:2
  • Romans 8:6
  • 2 Corinthians 4:6
  • 2 Corinthians 5:17
Book Number:
  • 521

Into a world of dark,
waste and disordered space,
he came, a wind that moved
across the waters’ face.

2. The Spirit in the wild
breathed, and a world began.
From shapelessness came form,
from nothingness, a plan.

3. Light in the darkness grew;
land in the water stood;
and space and time became
a beauty that was good.

4. Into a world of doubt,
through doors we closed, he came,
the breath of God in power
like wind and roaring flame.

5. From empty wastes of death,
on love’s disordered grief,
light in the darkness blazed
and kindled new belief.

6. Still, with creative power,
God’s Spirit comes to give
a pattern of new life;
our worlds begin to live.

© United Reformed Church
Ann Phillips and compilers of Rejoice and Sing

The Holy Spirit - His Person and Power

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Tune

  • Beweley
    Beweley
    Metre:
    • 66 66
    Composer:
    • Taylor, Cyril Vincent

The story behind the hymn

From line 1 of this hymn onwards, beginning in Genesis 1, we move firmly into a contemporary style of writing; but the Holy Spirit’s life-giving and lovepouring are timeless scriptural themes. In 1972 a group at Emmanuel Congregational Church (now URC), Cambridge, was asked to produce some new hymns for Pentecost. In its original (unpublished) form, this text by Ann Phillips was sung there on Whitsunday that year. A revised version with a changed stz 6 was published in the URC’s 1975 New Church Praise and in other books, and that stz is again slightly modified in the text here, following authorised changes in Rejoice and Sing (1991). The revisions are the reasons for the joint ascription. The RS Companion also gives the original ending, ‘… the power … to see the truth and know,/ and start our lives again’; this was in response to a personal conversation with someone whose need is reflected in the words.

On its first appearance the text was set to Leonard Blake’s ACKERGILL; RS chose Cyril Taylor’s BEWELEY, as used here and at 119B, qv. It is one of the 19 tunes of his in the 1951 BBC Hymn Book which he co-edited.

A look at the author

Phillips, Ann

b Ramsgate, Kent 1930. Clarendon House Grammar Sch for Girls, Ramsgate, and St Hilda’s Coll Oxford. She worked in publishing and became chief sub-editor for Cambridge Univ Press until her appointment as Librarian and Tutor at Newnham Coll Cambridge. She has edited school text-books on Milton, written books for children (The Multiplying Glass and The Oak King and the Ash Queen), and served as an elder of Emmanuel URC in Cambridge. She was a member of the texts (sub-) committees for the mainly Methodist book Hymns and Psalms (1983) and for the URC’s Rejoice and Sing (1991). Her best-known hymn appears in several current books including the 2005 edn of A Panorama of Christian Hymnody. No.521.