Abide with Me

It is said to have been Alfred North Whitehead’s favorite hymn (which, given his heterodox theology, might not be much of a commendation). Whitehead was interested in the old philosophical problem of change and continuity: How can things have identity across time while they are changing? It’s a great question—are you really the same person as the 10-year-old child you used to be? Whitehead’s instinct, perhaps, was that the answer to that old question lay somehow in the hands of God; one could say we have our identity over time only when God abides with us.

We are indeed stuck in fragmented and meaningless lives if God does not abide with us.

“Abide with me” is #662 in The Hymnal 1982. The first line juxtaposes steady abidingness and the reality of change. “Abide with me; fast falls the eventide.” It’s a prayer asking God to stick with us even though (quickly!) the day comes to an end. The image, which is natural to Christian thought, is of a human life as a single day. The poet will shortly spell out that he needs God “every passing hour.” We need God because there are many kinds of change that threaten our life. The darkness deepens. Other helpers fail and comforts flee. We are helpless, but God is precisely the “help of the helpless.”

All that from only the first stanza. The second introduces temptation, indeed, the tempter himself. Only God’s grace “can foil the tempter’s power.” Only God can be our guide through all these changes in life. Only God can be our “stay,” the still point, our secure hold while everything changes. We need God not only in trouble but also when things seem calm. We need God to abide “through” good things and bad: “Through cloud and sunshine, Lord, abide with me.”

The third stanza expresses the confidence that comes when God is with us. Fear of the foe is gone; our “ills” have no heaviness, our tears no bitterness. Then St. Paul is quoted: “Where is death’s sting? where, grave, thy victory?” This, from 1 Corinthians 15, reveals that our concern from the beginning has been death—and that death is a vanquished enemy. “I triumph still,” the poet says, “if thou abide with me.”    

What is triumph at death? It is the passage from death to life. How does it happen? In the final stanza the poet asks God to keep the cross in front of his eyes as they close, that the last thing he sees in life be the sign of Jesus’ death as his promise of resurrection. After death comes sunshine: “heaven’s morning breaks”! And what, pray tell, is that morning except Easter morning! So the whole prayer can be wrapped up as a request for God to “abide with me” in life, in death, always.

The author was a clergyman who, despite fragile health, was known for cheerfulness. He preached his last sermon against his family’s urging that he stay in bed; he was known to say “better to wear out than to rust out.” Henry Francis Lyte, 1793–1847: he wrote the hymn and it was first sung at his funeral, though not to the perfect tune that we know, “Eventide,” which William Henry Monk wrote 14 years later.

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A few years ago, as part of my campaign for memorizing prayers, I wrote about “Lord Jesus, stay with us, for evening is at hand and the day is past. . . .” That prayer, like “Abide with me,” is based on the story in Luke 24 of the two disciples inviting Jesus to turn in to their home. “Abide with me” is a fitting pair to that collect, and I am going to try to memorize it for the Camino. I invite you to join me in the memorization. (If you don’t know the tune, there are many performances on YouTube; one could do worse than start with the choir of King’s College in Cambridge.)

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Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;

the darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide:

when other helpers fail and comforts flee,

help of the helpless, O abide with me.

I need thy presence every passing hour;

what but thy grace can foil the tempter’s power?

Who, like thyself, my guide and stay can be?

Though cloud and sunshine, Lord, abide with me.

I fear no foe, with thee at hand to bless;

ills have no weight, and tears no bitterness.

Where is death’s sting? where, grave, thy victory?

I triumph still, if thou abide with me.

Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes;

shine through the gloom, and point me to the skies;

heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee;

in life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.

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Out & About. This Sunday, March 22, I will be preaching at the 9:30am Eucharist at St. John’s Church in Corsicana, Texas. Then on Wednesday, March 25, I am to speak at their Lenten program. My talk is titled, “Walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain: A pilgrim's reflections.” The program starts at 6pm with a light supper.

Palm Sunday, March 29, I will be preaching at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas at 9 and 11:15am.

Posted by The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin with

Pilgrim Again

   As in 2022 and 2024, so this year, God willing, I will be walking the Camino Francés across northern Spain to Santiago. My route will be basically the same as before, as will be the time of year, and I have wondered if I am getting in a rut. Would it be better to make a pilgrimage to a different destination? or at least to take a different route to Santiago?

    In the Middle Ages, there were three principal pilgrim destinations: Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago. In the year of our Lord 2026, walking to Jerusalem would present obvious difficulties. To walk to Rome, by contrast, would be quite possible: I know a peregrina who walked from Canterbury to Rome, about 1500 miles in total (she did it in three, 500-mile pieces, one piece every other year). Why not Rome?

    Or why not get to Santiago by a different camino? There are ancient paths from Seville and Lisbon, for instance; there is also the Camino Norte that runs close to the Mediterranean. Further options are to start in France, for instance at Le Puy; that camino (about 500 miles in France) is an earlier French part of the Camino Francés that I have walked.

    Nonetheless, I keep coming back to the original plan: to walk, alone, the Camino I have walked before. My decision has to do with the nature of pilgrimage. The point is not tourism. As T. S. Eliot says in his poem “Little Gidding,” about a minor pilgrimage destination in England (an old church in an out of the way place which has survived centuries and which, at one point, was the center of a family-based Christian community under Nicholas Ferrar): One does not go to such a place in order to inform curiosity or carry report back home. Instead, Eliot says, you come to such a place “to kneel Where prayer has been valid.” 

    This is the strange thing about pilgimage. You have a destination; you have a period of time cleared on your calendar; but you must let go of control of the details. People ask me how I will get to my starting place, and that’s something I’m still working out. (Things happen in the world and they affect pilgrims just like everyone else. In my case, it has to do with changes to Spain’s train service subsequent to a derailment and crash earlier this year.) Once you’re at the starting place, you entrust yourself to the Camino, to people you will meet who will offer food and shelter, to your fellow pilgrims. You can make reservations, though I prefer not to. 

    The biggest letting-go, however, is not with regard to arrangements of travel and lodging. It is letting-go of yourself into God’s hands. You start a Camino not knowing what God wants to give you. It is, precisely, a journey—not only a journey through landscapes and villages, but a journey of the soul. A few years ago I had the sense that I was accompanying Jesus through the multitude of humanity to his cross. By Camino lore, Santiago himself is a pilgrim on this route, going with us to the cathedral which, by tradition, contains the tomb that contains his mortal remains. 

    The ancient Greek Heraclitus said you can’t step into the same river twice. It’s the same Camino as before, but it is as open to possibility as ever.

    And of course, this is true for everyone reading these words. Everyone of us is on a pilgrimage here on Earth. (This is always true, but especially this is what Lent is about, and supremely the holy week.) At the center of our lives is our letting-go of ourselves and taking the hand of Jesus, to walk with him. Where will he take us? No matter where it might be in terms of geography and lodging and bodily health, it will be into his heart, into the life of God.

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    Out & About. Wednesday, March 25, at St. John’s Church in Corsicana, Texas, I am to speak at the Lenten program. My talk is titled, “Walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain: A pilgrim's reflections.” The program starts at 6pm and includes a light supper; everything is concluded by 8.

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The Rev. Canon Victor Lee Austin. Ph.D., is the Theologian-in-Residence for the diocese and is the author of several books including, "Friendship: The Heart of Being Human" and "A Post-Covid Catechesis.: 

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