Like the murmur of the dove's song

Why did the Holy Spirit come ‘in a bodily shape like a dove’ upon Jesus (Luke 3:22)? The symbol has been taken to denote peace, calm, sacrifice (Luke 2:24) or other motifs with more or less biblical warrant. Carl P Daw Jnr quotes a 1968 book by Louis Evely which said that the dove was chosen ‘because of its moan. It is because the Holy Spirit moans all the time … it is a verbal and not a plastic [or visual?] image.’ The author of this hymn adds that he ‘goes on to quote Romans 8:26 and could have given further evidence by referring to Isaiah 38:14 or 59:11, which use the image of the moaning dove as metaphors for praying in distress’. He adopts this picture as the opening for his text written expressly for Peter Cutts’ tune, at the request of the Text Committee for The Hymnal 1982 of the N American Episcopal Church. It featured in that book, and in Carl Daw’s A Year of Grace (1990), from which these quotations are taken (p84). The notes there also explain that ‘the content of the refrain became obvious first’; and that stz 1 portrays how the Spirit comes, 2 where or to whom, using Pauline, Johannine and Lucan imagery, and 3 why—‘for reconciliation, prayer, divine power (Acts 1:8) and quiet confidence’. Worship Songs Ancient and Modern (1992) is the first British book to include the hymn; others have now begun to follow.

Peter Cutts’ tune BRIDEGROOM was composed at Erik Routley’s manse in Newcastle in 1968 for Emma F Bevan’s paraphrase As the bridegroom to his chosen. ‘Routley’s grand piano wrote it’, says the composer, since his host would not let him get up from the piano until it was finished. Cyril Taylor (who calls it ‘an altogether spontaneous tune’) suggested the final shape of the last phrase, and it was published in 100 Hymns for Today (1969) and many books since then. Subsequently it has been set to Timothy Dudley-Smith’s Not for tongues of heaven’s angels as well as for the Bevan text, sometimes for both in the same N American hymnals. But the Companion to The Worshiping Church (1993, p120) seems to have a confused account at this point. Hymns for the People (1993) provides a 4-bar musical introduction which may also be used between the stzs.

b Louisville, Kentucky 1944. Rice Univ, Univ of Virginia, Univ of the South. From a Baptist background, he became an Anglican and was ordained to ministry with the Episcopal Ch of the USA, serving churches in Virginia and Connecticut and the Community of Celebration, Aliquippa, Penns, also teaching English. He began hymnwriting in 1980 while consultant for The Hymnal 1982. His collected texts are found in A Year of Grace (1990), To Sing God’s Praise (metrical canticles, 1992) and New Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1996). Has written widely on hymnody, and shared work on A Hymntune Psalter (1998–9) From 1996 to 2009 he was Executive Director of the Hymn Society in the U.S. and Canada—a job entailing much administration, editing the periodical leaflet The Stanza, and teaching the hymnology course at the Boston Univ Sch of Theology. As writers, he and Thos Troeger (qv) are ‘the two most widely published hymnists from the United States’—Paul A Richardson, who includes 9 of his texts and a paraphrase in the 2005 edn of A Panorama of Christian Hymnody. He notes Daw’s ‘ability to perceive deeper meaning in biblical stories, more or less familiar’, adding that ‘both [authors] have written with the intent to make the church’s song more biblical’ and that Daw ‘is particularly effective when contemplating the God beyond human conception.’ CPD has conducted many hymn festivals and similar events in N America; he has 6 texts in Evangelical Lutheran Worship (2006), 7 in The Book of Praise (Presbyterian Church of Canada, 1997), 16 in Worship and Rejoice (2001), 21 in the United Church of Canada’s Common Praise (1998), 3 in the UK book of the same title (2000), and 22 in the new edn of the Anglo-Chinese Hymns of Universal Praise (2006). Nos.19B, 530.