Ephesians 5.15-20, John 6.51-58
The Twelfth Sunday of Trinity, 18 August 2024, Austwick, Clapham, Eldroth
Be filled with the Spirit, as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts.
Today we give thanks for the gift of song: and for those who compose the songs we sing, and in particular for the life of the celebrated hymn-writer The Rt Revd Timothy Dudley-Smith, who died in the early hours of Monday morning in Cambridge, aged 97.
Bishop Dudley-Smith wrote the lyrics of well over 400 hymns, among the most familiar of which are “Lord, for the years” (written in 1967) and “Tell out, my soul” (in 1962), which John Betjeman described as “one of the few modern hymns that will truly last”.
Timothy Dudley-Smith was born in Manchester on Boxing Day, 1926. He attended Tonbridge School, from where he went to study at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He trained for ordination at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, (which was where I also trained for the ministry, some fifty years later. I stand on the shoulders of giants).
Ordained deacon in 1950 and priest in 1951, Dudley-Smith went on to serve as Archdeacon of Norwich, and then as Bishop of Thetford from 1981 until his retirement in 1991.
Timothy Dudley-Smith’s hymns were compiled into what became a three part collection called A House of Praise, published in 2001, 2013 and 2018. Many were published in hymnals throughout the English-speaking world and in translation. He was an honorary vice-president of the Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland, a Fellow of the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada, and a Fellow of the Royal School of Church Music. In 2003 he was awarded an OBE 'for services to hymnody', and in 2009 an honorary Doctor of Divinity from the University of Durham.
Now, Dudley-Smith’s total of 400-plus hymns is impressive, and whilst it does not come close to Charles Wesley’s 6,500, it is approaching Isaac Watts’ total of 600. Canon David Winter described him as “one of the outstanding hymn-writers of our generation.”
He didn’t write music, instead many of his hymns were set to well-known tunes, and for the others he collaborated with musician friends and colleagues: for instance Lord, for the years, was set to music by Michael Baughen, who became the Bishop of Chester.
Timothy Dudley-Smith described hymn writing as “A Functional Art”: he made that the title of a book on the subject which he published in 2017. [2]
The book tells us that he wrote more than half his texts before breakfast during his summer holidays in a cottage overlooking the beach near The Lizard in Cornwall, while others of his songs were begun or completed at home, on trains or elsewhere.
He was a literary man: profoundly impacted by his schoolmaster father’s reading poems to him from an early age, his favourite poets were the late Victorian trinity of Tennyson, Housman, and Walter de la Mare; and aside from Charles Wesley, his favourite hymn-writers are largely also drawn from the Victorian age, notably John Ellerton, who composed “The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended”.
Timothy Dudley-Smith proposed that the marks of a good hymn are that it be heartfelt, biblical, simple, deep, and uncontroversial. This places him in a very orthodox Anglican tradition of hymn-writing, although in his case an unashamedly Evangelical one as well; but a distinctive kind of Anglican Evangelicalism — as the writer Ian Bradley put it, “somehow very English, cultured, eirenic, and gentle.” [3]
In the preface to his hymn collection Timothy Dudley-Smith quoted Tennyson saying that ‘A good hymn is the most difficult thing in the world to write. In a good hymn you have to be commonplace and poetical.’ [4]
‘Commonplace’ words help the people to form our praises and find our voice; the poetry is in the way these words combine together to uplift us.
If hymn writing is, as Timothy Dudley-Smith described it, “A Functional Art”, then its function is to help the people shape the phrases which express what we feel, and see, and know, of God in our lives.
The word ‘functional’ suggests something utilitarian, unembellished, workaday. Which may seem an odd way to describe songs which help us lift our hearts to God. But, as Timothy Dudley-Smith clearly grasped, and as St Paul clearly taught, we are each called to the simple everyday work of praising God in all things.
Notes
[1] Sources for biographical details: Timothy Dudley-Smith, hymn-writer and bishop, has died. Church Times, 12 August 2024; Ruth Peacock, Hymn writer Timothy Dudley-Smith dies aged 97. Religion News, 13 August 2024; timothydudley-smith.com.
[2] Timothy Dudley-Smith, A Functional Art: Reflections of a Hymn Writer.
[3] Ian Bradley, A Functional Art by Timothy Dudley-Smith. Church Times, 21 July 2017.
[4] Timothy Dudley-Smith, Foreword to A House of Praise: Collected Hymns 1961-2001.
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