This photograph was a happy accident. At least, I didn't expect or intend to suffuse the path and steps with light. It was the garden path and the kaleidoscope of sunlit green that attracted my attention. But once taken, and I had a chance to look at it I realised it was one of those flukes when direct sunlight hits the lens and suffuses the image with bright rays.
But now that it's there, I found it deeply suggestive of several things. But without thinking much about it, the words of a seldom sung hymn helped me interpret those beams of light, in a garden.The poet William Cowper wrote several of the finest hymns in the English hymn canon. He also wrote some that were unsingable then and are now consigned to old hymn books of several generations ago.
The last time it was in a mainstream British denominational book, to my knowledge, is the 1962 Baptist Hymn Book. It is included in the section titled "Trust in God" The first two lines are "Sometimes a light surprises / the Christian while he sings." The two words that are important in this hymn, and they are clues also to the spirituality and fragile mental health of the poet who wrote them, are the words "sometimes" and "surprise".
All his life Cowper suffered from severe and recurring episodes of melancholia; today we would probably be describing chronic tendency to clinical depression. He could plummet to near suicidal despair, utter desolation and self-rejection. His illness at times attached to the stern Calvist theology to which he doggedly held, at times believing he was not of the elect and was predestined to be lost. His great friend and support was John Newton of Amazing Grace fame. If Cowper tended to self-despair, Newton by contrast was boisterous and confident in the mercy of God and the sufficiency of Christ's grace, that brought him safe thus far and that would lead him home. The friendship of these two Calvinist Christian friends is one of the models of pastoral care and patient compassion.
At times Cowper comforted himself by writing his poetry, and hymns. But he knew the darkness would return; hence that poignant qualifying word sometimes. Not always, not predictably, not even reliably, but "Sometimes a light surprises the Christian while he sings". Cowper knew there were times when he could sing himself out of depression. But not always. Hence only sometimes does a light surprise. Cowper was one of those Christians who learned to live with painful ambiguity, without constant assurance of salvation, and with a deep anxiety which added layers of darkness to a spirit already benighted.
And yet. The thing is, like that photograph, he sometimes discovered the warmth and radiance of a presence that brought him healing, albeit temporary. I love Cowper the poet, Cowper the depressed Christian, Cowper who like so many who struggle with mental illness, showed amazing courage to keep going when he had little sense of the amazing grace that saved a wretch like him. Cowper is the patron saint of the depressed, and his hymn slowly gathers confidence and trust until we expect it to end in peace – and then the ambiguity returns. Read the hymn now, as the testimony of someone acquainted with the night, and who hangs on in there because "sometimes a light surprises the Christian…."
That fourth verse is a milestone in evangelical spirituality. After all this singing about healing, comfort, cheer, set free, and verse 3 with its echoes of the Sermon on the Mount and the loving provision of the Father; after all this surprising light, the poet is drawn to Habakkuk's darker vision of the wilderness in which vine and fig will not bear fruit, there will be no sheep, no olive trees nor fields producing fruit, and once again you sense disaster. Except for one word, the first word of verse 4 lifted exactly from the King James Version. Though. Though now our world is as bleak and barren as it gets, and all the obvious human resources have failed. Though it looks hopeless – yet God. Read it for yourself – the testimony of someone singing himself back to faith and to health. And no it didn't always work. But Cowper understood the dynamics of music therapy
1 Sometimes a light surprises
the Christian while he sings;
it is the Lord who rises
with healing in His wings;
when comforts are declining,
He grants the soul again
a season of clear shining,
to cheer it after rain.
2 In holy contemplation,
we sweetly then pursue
the theme of God’s salvation,
and find it ever new.
Set free from present sorrow,
we cheerfully can say,
“E'en let the unknown morrow
bring with it what it may.”
3 "It can bring with it nothing,
but He will bear us through;
who gives the lilies clothing
will clothe His people, too;
beneath the spreading heavens
no creature but is fed;
and He who feeds the ravens
will give His children bread."
4 Though vine nor fig tree neither
their wonted fruit should bear,
though all the field should wither,
nor flocks nor herds be there,
yet God the same abiding,
His praise shall tune my voice;
for while in Him confiding,
I cannot but rejoice.
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