Tower and Temple Turn to Dust
When I’m walking, I like to have something in my mind, something that’s there for me to attend to consciously and unconsciously. When you walk, your mind goes from practical things like how to navigate things on the path to bigger things; the back-and-forth is helpful. This is one of the values of having a few memorized prayers—they are right there, available anytime. (And you don’t need to plug up your ears to think of them!) Preparing to walk the Camino a few years ago, I started memorizing two of the canticles from Morning Prayer. One of them starts, “Blessed art thou, O Lord God of our fathers, * praised and exalted above all for ever.” It’s a great sentence to say anytime. I wrote out these canticles and carried these on a small card in my pocket, so that when my recall got stuck, I could pull it out. Eventually, of course, I lost the card (but still remember most of those two canticles).
More recently, I’ve seen value in memorizing hymns. These are more complex than prayers or canticles, especially if they have several stanzas. Thus memorizing takes more focus and more time. I’ve been working on a couple of hymns for the past year. (You could probably learn them faster than I, but hey, you are younger than I am!)
One of them is the glorious “All My Hope on God Is Founded.” This was the favorite hymn of my first rector, and as a consequence we sang it frequently. It has a big, vigorous tune named Michael, and it didn’t hurt that the same was my rector’s name.
It is the second stanza that came into my mind, about a year ago, when I learned sad news about a once-great church institution. The hymn line that came to mind is the subject line of this blog: “Tower and temple turn to dust.” “Tower” stands for our proud human achievements and “temple” for our religious monuments. None of these will last.
The whole stanza in its original language runs as follows:
Pride of man and earthly glory,
Sword and crown betray his trust:
What with care and toil he buildeth,
Tower and temple, fall to dust.
But God’s power, hour by hour,
Is my temple and my tower.
One notices a shift from “his” in the second line, which refers to “man” in the first and means all (fallen, prideful) human beings, to “my” in the last line, repeated twice. The fourth line has the “tower and temple” that human pride has built for earthly glory. These things “betray” the trust that humanity puts in them, no matter the “care and toil” that goes into their building. So the first four lines all together are quite dismal, sober: in time, everything is going to decay and be lost. This applies to buildings, even churches; it applies to “sword and crown,” our political achievements, our military strength, perhaps even our national identity: all will pass away. What then? Should we do nothing?
No. There is a distinction between “his” of line 2 and “my” of line 6. Even when all else passes away, there stands “my temple and my tower.” The singer, the poet, is making a profession of faith. The singer knows a power that persists, “hour by hour,” and continues unfailingly to support the singer every hour. What is that power? It is God’s power, which is to say, it is God. What does that power give to the singer? “My temple and my tower.”
It is a powerful ending: powerful poetically, powerful musically, but of greatest importance, powerful spiritually. Whatever happens in this world, the believer can nonetheless say: “God’s power, hour by hour, is my temple and my tower.”
—
You can find this hymn in various places online—and of course in hymnals. If you don’t know the tune Michael here is one source (with lyrics for four of the stanzas): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AL9g6GbWYo
Happy memorizing!
—
Out & About. I’m recommending to everyone within earshot as a book to read this summer: Nicolas Diat, A Time to Die: Monks on the Threshold of Eternal Life. Diat is a Catholic journalist who, not many years ago, visited several monasteries in France with the question of how monks die. The monasteries differed, but all of them showed something of what holy dying might be. I hope you read it—and if you do, you’re welcome to the first Good Books & Good Talk seminar this fall in Dallas on Sunday, September 14, which, appropriately enough, is the feast of the Holy Cross.