The Hour of Banquet and of Song
The tune was commissioned by the 1940 Hymnal to go with these words, though they, the words by Horatius Bonar, had been in many preceding hymnals with a different tune. I remember first singing it a half-century ago out of that hymnal. “This is the hour of banquet and of song; / this is the heavenly table spread for me; / here let me feast, and feasting still prolong / the BRIEF, BRIGHT HOUR of fellowship with thee.”
The opening stanza sets forth the Eucharist as a banquet with singing; it is “the heavenly table” and it is personal to the singer: all this that God has done is “for me.” It is an hour of fellowship with God, a “brief, bright hour,” with the final words “with thee” putting God in rhyming parallel with the singer, “for me.” George Herbert (and of course many other poets) have described God’s work as a feast done for each of us personally. The power of this is emphasized by the tune, Canticum refectionis (dumb-literal translation, “song of the refectory”), whose last line has a special feature: two extended half-notes followed by a downbeat that give stretched-out emphasis to the words “brief, bright hour” (which I put in ALL CAPS above).
Then follows the middle stanza on the transience of the Eucharist. “Too soon we rise; we go our several ways; / the feast, though not the love, is past and gone, / the bread and wine consumed; yet all our days / thou STILL ART HERE with us—our shield and sun.” The hour of the church service ends; we leave and go on our various “ways.” The candles are put out; the silver is cleaned and stored away; the doors are locked. But this is not the whole truth of the Eucharist: “thou still art here with us.” God is with us throughout our lives. He protects us and he gives us the light to see, and he is always doing this. The three words emphasized by the tune this time are “still art here”: God remains here, regardless.
In the middle of their time with Jesus, some disciples were on the top of a mountain and they saw him glowing with the light of God, a light no longer hidden within his flesh. But the hour passed, the light faded, and they went down the mountain and continued on to Jerusalem where, perhaps only months later, on the night before the cross, they had the Last Supper.
Our life is always one of occasional visions, moments of transcendence, the experience of “fellowship with thee,” experiences where we know God’s creative and redemptive love for us. These occasional visions are sacramentalized in the Eucharist. But then life goes on, must go on, rightly goes on in ordinary “ways.”
The final stanza takes us to the end. “Feast after feast thus comes and passes by, / yet, passing, points to the glad feast above, / giving us foretaste of the festal joy, the LAMB’S GREAT MARriage feast of bliss and love.” The last line here, which I have quoted from the Hymnal 1982, was different in 1940: “the Lord’s eternal feast” it said. (Bonar’s words were yet different still.) It is good, I think, to picture the heavenly feast as a marriage; it comes, as the end of Revelation depicts, as a marriage of heaven and earth, and it is hosted by Jesus who, as Augustine said, married divinity and humanity in his Incarnation. There might be a better word than the (alas overworked) “great” but the point remains sound: the Eucharist is our foretaste of “the Lamb’s great marriage feast.”
Let’s pull together the three syllables the tune emphasizes in the last line of each stanza: “brief, bright hour” — “still art here” — “Lamb’s great mar[riage feast].” They emphasize our present enjoyment, God’s persistent presence, and the promised postmortem reality of heavenly “bliss and love.”
It’s #316 in the Hymnal 1982 (#206 in the 1940 Hymnal). May I commend it to your memorization?
—
Out & About: Sunday, September 14, the Good Books & Good Talk seminar will discuss Nicolas Diat’s A Time to Die. We meet from 5 to 6:30 p.m. at St. Matthew’s Cathedral. Everyone is welcome to attend; if you read the book, you are also welcome to talk! Directions: Park in the reserved cathedral section of the apartment building. When you walk out of the garage, Garrett Hall will be ahead of you on the right of the green. (The cathedral will be to your left.) We meet in Garrett Hall on the 2nd floor. There will be someone at the door to let you in starting about 4:45.
The subsequent fall seminars will be Oct. 19 on Dr. Wortle’s School by Anthony Trollope, and Nov. 9 on Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot.
Ethics class: I will be teaching the Christian Ethics course at the Stanton Institute; five Saturday classes from January to May 2026. You can register now. Details: https://edod.org/our-diocese/stanton-institute-for-theology-and-practice/