A Hymn that Touches Me Deeply

I try not to be negative, and I’ve worked to shake my old habit of singling out the fine people at the Oregon Catholic Press for relentless flogging.

But, still, sometimes you just have to say it. If these people are going to put out hymnals, fine. I think we should be singing propers, but I guess OCP disagrees.

But is there really any excuse for not including “Wake, Awake for Night Is Flying” from Advent selections? It strikes me as an egregious oversight.

Thanks to OCP’s dominance in the Catholic world, I’ve gone probably 15 years without singing it. This comes to an end this Sunday. We are printing the words in the program and just forging ahead. It is a rare time when we do a hymn other than the recessional but that’s the way it’s going to be.

If you do not know it (perish the thought), here is one version with slightly different words (we are singing from Hymnal 1940).

Here is the astonishing thing that Bach did to this: