Churches Weekly Newsletter - No.146, 5 February 2023
During last Sunday’s exceptional Church in the Pub at The Lake House - my, how we sang! - one hymn particularly stood out for me. It was requested by John Casson, fondly remembered from his schooldays. Its words are all the more powerful for their strangeness to our ears; for this is a rare hymn of Christ the Worker - full of the eschatological hope that when Christ returns he will come alongside the factory workers, the labourers, the miners, ‘God in a workman’s jacket as before’.
The hymn [1] is the creation of Geoffrey Anketel Studdert Kennedy, born in 1883, the seventh of nine children born to Jeanette Anketell and William Studdert Kennedy, vicar of St Mary's, Quarry Hill, a deprived Leeds parish. Following his father’s vocation, Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy became known for his chaplaincy to soldiers in the trenches during WW1 where his generous distribution of cigarettes earned him the nickname ‘Woodbine Willie’, and where his reflections on the intense suffering of all around led him to develop his idea of God as being the ‘comrade’ of those who struggle, as in this poem:
The hymn is the creation of Geoffrey Anketel Studdert Kennedy, born in 1883, the seventh of nine children born to Jeanette Anketell and William Studdert Kennedy, vicar of St Mary's, Quarry Hill, a deprived Leeds parish. Following his father’s vocation, Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy became known for his chaplaincy to soldiers in the trenches during WW1 where his generous distribution of cigarettes earned him the nickname ‘Woodbine Willie’, and where his reflections on the intense suffering of all around led him to develop his idea of God as being the ‘comrade’ of those who struggle, as in this poem: ‘Only with Him, my Comrade God, beside me, Can I go forth to war with sin and pain.’ [2]
In poor parishes and industrial chaplaincy Studdert Kennedy dedicated the rest of his life’s work ‘with affection and respect’ to ‘the working men of Britain: they were soldiers once’. [3]
Studdert Kennedy’s notion of God as being alongside the ordinary person going about their everyday tasks brings to mind the poet-priest D. Gwenallt Jones whose poem Dewi Sant (1951) envisions Saint David as one who ‘went down to the bottom of the pit with the miners And threw the light of his wise lamp on the coal-face’, and who later, ‘brought the Church to our homes, Put the Holy Vessels on the kitchen table, And got bread from the pantry and bad wine from the cellar, And stood behind the table like a tramp Lest he should hide the wonder of the Sacrifice from us.’ [4]
And lastly, I find echoes of this in one of the great moments of twentieth-century British liturgy, a traditional form revived by Revd George MacLeod as a daily prayer of the Iona Community: ‘O Christ, the Master Carpenter, who at the last, through wood and nails, purchased our whole salvation; wield well your tools in the workshop of your world, so that we who come rough-hewn to your work bench may here be fashioned to a truer beauty by your hand.’ [5]
In his writings and speeches Studdert Kennedy often lamented the gulf between the Church and working people, and he devoted himself to bridging the gulf between the organised Church and organised labour, whilst his poetry and song lead us into the heart of a God who is immanent in a world of working people’s struggles. What other holy songs might we sing into those struggles today?
Notes
[1] Click here to listen to a recording of When through the whirl of wheels and engines humming by Van Wagner. Entry for the hymn in hymnary.org.
[2] Wikipedia: Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy; Richard and Sylvia Rice-Oxley, Woodbine Willie – musical reflections: The Comrade God.
[3] G. A. Studdert Kennedy, Democracy and the Dog-Collar, front matter.
[4] D. Gwenallt Jones, Dewi Sant.
[5] The Morning Service of the Iona Community from the Iona Abbey Worship Book [PDF].
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