Of all the gods, Death only craves not gifts: Nor sacrifice, nor yet drink-offering poured Avails; no altars hath he, nor is soothed By hymns of praise. From him alone of all The powers of heaven Persuasion holds aloof.

All our life is like a day of celebration for us; we are convinced, in fact, that God is always everywhere. We work while singing, we sail while reciting hymns, we accomplish all other occupations of life while praying.

At four lines, with the quatrain, we reach the basic stanza form familiar from a whole range of English poetic practice. This is the length of the ballad stanza, the verse of a hymn, and innumerable other kinds of verse.

Ayn Rand called her novella Anthem a "hymn to man's ego." My approach to Anthem the play was to provide the story a further dimension through music and sound. The work is now larger than a hymn. It's really "spoken opera."

There are two thing you need for a jolly good hymn.The first is a set of words that expresses the mood or sentiment of the worshipper.The second-and perhaps even more important- is a good tune..with a simple popular melody.

The MTC is known for singing music by great master composers, hymns, American music, Broadway numbers, popular songs, and inspirational music. If the audience doesn't like one genre, they need only wait for the next number.

Probably about 10 years ago or so I told my grandmother that I always wanted to make a record of hymns if I could ever make a career of all of this. She kind of held me to it. She passed away in 1999. I just never forgot it.

Storytelling has driven faith and religious practice, keeping them alive for millennia. Just as every hymn, icon, and stained-glass window in a church links to a story, brands have the potential to build holistic identities.

Paul commands the Church to let the word of Christ dwell in us richly when we meet together, singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. It seems clear here that style is not the important issue as much as the depth of content.

In the immense cathedral which is the universe of God, each person, whether scholar or manual laborer, is called to act as the priest of his whole life--to take all that is human, and to turn it into an offering and a hymn of glory.

Do not fancy, as too many do, that thou canst praise God by singing hymns to Him in church once a week, and disobeying Him all the week long. He asks of thee works as well as words; and more, he asks of thee works first and words after.

In their plush melodies and plummy platitudes, many Rodgers-and-Hammerstein songs were secular hymns, which so insinuated themselves into the ear of the Eisenhower-era listener that they became the liturgical music for the American mid-century.

Let us say with one voice, the words of James Cleveland's great freedom hymn: "I don't feel no ways tired. I come too far from where I started from. Nobody told me that the road would be easy. I don't believe he brought me this far to leave me."

To honor with hymns and panegyrics those who are still alive is not safe; a man should run his course and make a fair ending, and then we will praise him; and let praise be given equally to women as well as men who have been distinguished in virtue.

My mum was raised Jewish, my dad is very scientifically minded, and my school was vaguely Christian. We sang hymns in school. I liked the hymns bit, but apart from that, I can take it or leave it. So I had lots of different influences when I was younger.

And before my Soul took me to task I was hard of hearing; I heard only tumult and uproar. But now I am all ears listening to the silence and its choirs singing the hymns of time, intoning the praises of the firmament, revealing the secrets of the invisible.

Like civil-rights protesters who sang rousing hymns as they were carried off to jail, Twitterers are bearing witness to what's happening around them, and calling out into the darkness of cyberspace for confirmation. I'm here. You're here, too. We are present.

Far or forgot to me is near; Shadow and sunlight are the same; The vanished gods to me appear; And one to me are shame and fame.They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt, And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

If any spiritualistic medium can do stunts, there is no more need for special conditions than there is for a chemist to turn down lights, start operations with a hymn, and ask whether there's any chemical present that has affinity with something named Hydrogen.

Easy, simple and great laws, which await nothing but a sign from the lawgiver to spread prosperity and vigour throughout the nation, laws which would earn him immortal hymns of gratitude down the generations, are those which are least considered or least wanted.

It is not enough to say prayers: we must become, be prayer, prayer incarnate. All of life, each act, each act, every gesture, even the smile of the human face, must become a hymn of adoration, an offering, a prayer. One should offer not what one has but what one is.

I wanted to have more songs with religious backgrounds. The Christmas record has strong, traditional hymns, but it also has a song called 'Christmas in Heaven' about missing someone that you love that's passed on, and wondering what's going on up there on Christmas.

I am atheist in a very religious mould. I'm always asking myself the big questions. Where did we come from? Is there a meaning to all of this? I read the King James Bible, as all English writers should. And when I find myself in church, I edit the hymns as I sing them.

I sing the hymn of the conquered, who fell in the Battle of Life,-The hymn of the wounded, the beaten, who died overwhelmed in the strife....The hymn of the low and the humble, the weary, the broken in heart,Who strove and who failed, acting bravely a silent and desperate part.

What a way to learn great theology! That's what comes to mind whenever I sing one of those old hymns. "And Can It Be" is like putting the doctrine of salvation to music. "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" is a melodic lesson in grace. No wonder good hymns make for strong faith!

I listen to hundreds of those hymns sung repeatedly over the years of my life. And I know that they probably influenced a rhyme scheme maybe to certain extent. They influenced the pentameter of placement of words, etc. And it's not something that's a conscious thing that occurred.

I think the hymns give us a glimpse of the generations before us, and what was important to them at the time. Even though they are usually singing similiar messages that are in today's music, it is good to be reminded that the message of Christ is just as much relevant today as it was then.

It's more in retrospect as I've thought about it over the years and look back at what I wrote, how I wrote things - like there's a song that Ralph Stanley later recorded with me that he had guested on my record what was called "Travelers Lantern" that I wrote as basically, you know, a hymn.

We can set our deeds to the music of a grateful heart, and seek to round our lives into a hymn — the melody of which will be recognized by all who come in contact with us, and the power of which shall not be evanescent, like the voice of the singer, but perennial, like the music of the spheres.

Those songs [from church], I think, shaped to some degree how I would evolve as a writer, pentameter of songs, the melodies of those kind of hillbilly hymns - I used to refer to them - because they were not Southern gospel as much as they were passed down from Scottish Welsh Protestant hymnals.

The faith in which I was brought up assured me that I was better than other people; I was saved, they were damned.... Our hymns were loaded with arrogance - self-congratulation on how cozy we were with the Almighty and what a high opinion he had of us, what hell everybody else would catch come Judgment Day.

When I did the Abyssinian mass, I went through the whole history of the church music and the gospel music, even with the Anglo American hymns, the Afro American hymns, the spirituals and how it developed, up to Thomas Dorsey and the Dixie Hummingbirds, going through the history of the music, jazz musicians.

I grew up in the church, with traditional hymns, but at the same time I was beginning to listen to pop music, the mid-60s, The Beatles, which had just as much influence on me as those hymns did. Then the hippy stuff like Pink Floyd started to raise questions about how I lived my life and the world in which I lived.

Sometimes I, as a public official, turn to Scripture or hymns - especially hymns, because sometimes we Catholics don't have the Scriptures memorized like we should - to help me explain a public policy position or an idea or to be able to articulate it better when you're talking about justice or mercy or compassion.

My grandfather once ventured upon publishing a volume of hymns. I never heard anyone speak in their favour or argue that they ought to have been sung in the congregation. In that volume, he promised a second if the first should prove acceptable. We forgive him the first collection because he did not inflict another.

When temptation comes, you can invent a delete key in your mind- perhaps the words from a favorite hymn. Your mind is in charge; your body is the instrument of your mind. When some unworthy thought pushes into your mind, replace it with your delete key. Worthy music is powerful and can help you control your thoughts.

An organist who has the sensitivity to quietly play prelude music from the hymnbook tempers our feelings and causes us to go over in our minds the lyrics which teach the peaceable things of the kingdom. If we will listen, they are teaching the gospel, for the hymns of the Restoration are, in fact, a course in doctrine!

Kitsch is the daily art of our time, as the vase or the hymn was for earlier generations. For the sensibility it has that arbitrariness and importance which works take on when they are no longer noticeable elements of the environment. In America kitsch is Nature. The Rocky Mountains have resembled fake art for a century.

It seemed intended by the blessed providence of God that I should be blind all my life, and I thank him for the dispensation. If perfect earthly sight were offered me tomorrow I would not accept it. I might not have sung hymns to the praise of God if I had been distracted by the beautiful and interesting things about me.

Hymns have always sounded like sung spells to me. I never felt included in the magic of the God songs I heard growing up - I knew I was going to hell before anyone ever told me that I was. People found comfort in this all-knowing source, but I felt frightened and found out. I developed some weird and very dramatic complexes.

...we must all offer up a hymn of praise to the God... who is 'Lord of lords' (Deut. 10:17, Ps. 136:1, I Tim. 6:15, Rev. 17:14, 19:16)... Lordship is not simply a matter of being superior with respect to inferiors but a complete possession of all that is beautiful and good, and is furthermore a true and unshakable stability.

I'm fortunate in that I've grown up in a worshipping tradition which is quite rich musically (and music is very important to me) and has a wonderful resource of hymns from all sorts of different parts of the Church... and to go to church and be able to sing that stuff and listen to a Bach motet or indeed some charismatic choruses.

One of the things my mom used to do - I don't know why she chose me, but she chose me out of her six children to take to the African-American church that was in the town that we lived in Springfield, Missouri. And we would go to the church, and we would sit in the back row, and we would listen to all of the spirituals in the hymns.

Music is sound, vibrations, whereas paintings are vibrations of whatever you pick up. It's not actually an energy vibration you get from a groovy painting, but music and sound seem to travel along vibrations, you know the whole thing with mantras is to repeat and repeat those sounds... it's vibrations in everything like prayers and hymns.

TEDIUM, n. Ennui, the state or condition of one that is bored. Many fanciful derivations of the word have been affirmed, but so high an authority as Father Jape says that it comes from a very obvious source --the first words of the ancient Latin hymn _Te Deum Laudamus_. In this apparently natural derivation there is something that saddens.

The nation, like the church, has its visible symbols and insignia, its parchments engrossed with the revealed word, its dogmas, hymns, liturgy, holy day celebrations, its early Fathers, prophets and martyrs, its priesthood and its lay sodality, its myths of sacred genesis and apocalyptic crises, its world-saving mission and its missionaries.

Mounting toward the upland again, I pause reverently, as the hush and stillness of twilight come upon the woods. It is the sweetest, ripest hour of the day. And as the hermit's evening hymn goes up from the deep solitude below me, I experience that serene exaltation of sentiment of which music, literature, and religion are but the faint types and symbols.

One of the things that is wonderful about hymns is that they are a sort of universally shared poetry, at least among certain populations. There isn't much of that anymore either. There are very few poems people can recite, but there are quite a few hymns that, if you hum a few bars, people can at least come up with two verses. Many of the older hymns are very beautiful.

A few doors away was the Baptist Church, and as I walked towards it I began to think that people didn't want me to share their church. As I walked through the Baptist door I was tense, waiting for that tap on the shoulder…but instead I was given a hymn book and welcomed into the church. I sat through the service…This up and down treatment wasn't doing my nerves much good.

He who was Shri Rama, whose stream of love flowed with resistless might even to the Chandala (the outcaste); Oh, who ever was engaged in doing good to the world though superhuman by nature, whose renown there is none to equal in the three worlds, Sita's beloved, whose body of Knowledge Supreme was covered by devotion sweet in the form of Sita. (part of A Hymn To Shri Ramakrishna)

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