Love New and Everlasting

Our hymns give us wonderful ways of thinking about God. Some of us were lucky enough to grow up singing them as part of our school’s daily act of worship. So words and tunes have lodged in our minds, and often arise in the curious ways our memories feed our everyday experience.

In our Easter season, and surrounded by spring’s glorious growth, I find myself returning to an old favourite: ‘New every morning is the love’. It was written by John Keble in the nineteenth century, so the words sound a bit old fashioned. (The final line asks for help ‘to live more nearly as we pray’ and, growing up, I often wondered what it meant to live ‘more nearly’!) But there is wisdom. ‘The trivial round, the common task’ is seen as the way to approach God, long before mindfulness entered our lives.

And the emphasis on newness touches a chord. We live in the light of the Resurrection, which for Christians changes everything. Not by offering us the shiny, attractive novelties which the marketing world adores. But by rooting us in the deep knowledge that God loves us so much he will always be finding new ways to reach us and bring us into the scope of his boundless love. Healing, kindness and generosity are his methods.

It is difficult in our everyday contexts to translate that into human action. Pressure builds up in all our organisations and change can be seen as good in itself, and sometimes for the wrong reasons. But ultimately it is only God’s love that can create and renew. Which John Keble knew well when he wrote:

‘New mercies, each returning day,                                     

hover around us while we pray;                                      

new perils past, new sins forgiv’n,                                

new thoughts of God, new hopes of heav’n’.                                 

How might this be true for each one of us today?

With thanks to all who choose, accompany and sing our hymns, both new and old, informing our worship with skill and knowledge fed by centuries of worship.