Issue 4: “Songs for the People”
"Poetry is a nightingale that sits in the darkness and sings"
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
Our mission at the Matthew 25 Initiative is to equip and sustain Anglicans serving alongside the vulnerable. The work of justice and mercy is often difficult work. Holding beauty and naming pain and hope is what M25i does well. Walter Brueggeman writes, "A poem utters the unutterable and thinks the unthinkable." Join us in this new series, "For the Soul." Out of suffering often, comes the most powerful worship. In places of brokenness, we encounter Jesus.
Frances Harper's poem speaks to the power of words, music, and beauty to remind the vulnerable and wounded of shalom. Her own singing rises from hardship, suffering, and contending. Shalom is the Jesus way, and blanketing beauty over each other can heal. But coming near, alongside, incarnationally . . . that's what allows the song to be heard.
Be filled with the Spirit speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord.
Ephesians 5:19
Songs for the People
by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
Let me make the songs for the people,
Songs for the old and young;
Songs to stir like a battle-cry
Wherever they are sung.
Not for the clashing of sabres,
For carnage nor for strife;
But songs to thrill the hearts of men
With more abundant life.
Let me make the songs for the weary,
Amid life's fever and fret,
Till hearts shall relax their tension,
And careworn brows forget.
Let me sing for little children,
Before their footsteps stray,
Sweet anthems of love and duty,
To float o'er life's highway.
I would sing for the poor and aged,
When shadows dim their sight;
Of the bright and restful mansions,
Where there shall be no night.
Our world, so worn and weary,
Needs music, pure and strong,
To hush the jangle and discords
Of sorrow, pain, and wrong.
Music to soothe all its sorrow,
Till war and crime shall cease;
And the hearts of men grown tender
Girdle the world with peace.
