“Come Quickly, Lord”

By Timothy Dudley-Smith

Psalm 141:1

I call upon you, O Lord; come quickly to me; Give ear to my voice when I call to you. Let my prayer be counted as incense before you, and the lifting up of my hands as an evening sacrifice. (NRSV)

Come Quickly, Lord

Come quickly, Lord, and hear the cries my heart and hands uplifted raise;
And let my prayer as incense rise, an evening sacrifice of praise.
Guard now the lips that speak your name, lest they and I be put to shame.

And if my steps should go astray and from the path of truth I move,
Restore me to your narrow way, and in your mercy, Lord, reprove:
From love of self my soul defend, and wound me as a faithful friend.

We fix our eyes upon you, Lord, and tune our ears to hear your voice;
Our hearts by faith receive your Word and in your promises rejoice.
Till morning breaks and night is gone, in God we trust and journey on.

— Timothy Dudley-Smith

Meter: 8.8.8.8.8.8.

Source: A House of Praise (Hope Publishing Co., 2003)

Heartfelt and biblical are two words that come to mind in describing this song by Timothy Dudley-Smith, Anglican priest and Fellow of the Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Both of these adjectives were used by TDS himself in his latest book, A Functional Art: Reflections of a Hymn Writer, to describe what constitutes a good hymn: “Together with ‘heartfelt,’” he states, “my word of choice would be ‘biblical.’”[1] He expounds on the word “heartfelt” as including “not only sincerity but spiritual reality or genuineness.”[2] The emotion must be felt and the spiritual transformation must be real. The opening line of this psalm certainly conveys a real sense of urgency by the psalmist that Dudley-Smith has skillfully retained: “Come quickly, Lord, and hear the cries. . . .”

As the text is based on a psalm, it is also “biblical.” As Dudley-Smith states, “Psalms, in contrast to hymns and songs, lies in their being . . . ‘holy Scripture.’”[3] TDS also interprets “biblical” to mean “evangelical,” as in, “good news,” or “the Gospel.”[4] We see this in the concluding stanza with the words, “Our hearts by faith receive your Word.” These last lines seem to be a corporate confession after reflecting on the personal prayer as outlined by the psalmist. For example, note the move from the personal pronoun “I” in the first three stanzas to “We” in the last. In this sense, the last stanza concludes or complements the original psalm by including an evangelical message. This approach is similar to that of the one known as the “Father of English Hymnody,” Isaac Watts, who endeavored to “Christianize” the psalms. He desired to “teach” the psalmist “to speak like a Christian” and spoke of how hymnody could “complete” the psalms.[5] In addition, just as Watts “imitated” the psalms, rather than trying to translate them, Dudley-Smith elects to do the same by giving us his own new rendering of an ancient text. “I prefer to follow Isaac Watts,” he states, “who in his 1719 version of The Psalms of David claimed only to imitate rather than translate.[6]

“Come Quickly, Lord” is also an example of the use of intimacy and majesty. Dudley-Smith explains that “hymns find their place within public worship, often liturgical worship, where our address to God is most natural when it has in mind the two extremes of intimacy and majesty, as in the prayer that Jesus taught us, where we begin with ‘Father’ but move to Kingdom, Power, and eternal Glory.”[7] While this psalm addresses the “Lord,” it also refers to the intimate relationship of “a faithful friend,” a concept borrowed elsewhere from Scripture (Prov. 27:6).

The psalms are rich with metaphor and this one is no exception. While Dudley-Smith highlights the metaphoric language used by the psalmist, such as “prayers as incense rise,” he also includes some of his own, for example, the “cries” that heart and hands raise, as well as hearts that “receive.” Skillfully done, metaphor can be “so regular a part of our hymnody” that it often “passes unnoticed, as indeed it should.”[8] Inversion is another aspect of poetry that becomes almost expected. For example, “and from the path of truth I move” rather than “and I move from the path of truth. The warmth of the imagery combines with the freshness of the revised text to produce a poetic perspective that is both ancient and modern at the same time.

The fine form of this text demonstrates how the psalms can still be used today. “Yet how many churches,” Dudley-Smith questions, “have lost the psalms” from corporate worship? “This is, to my mind,” he concludes, “a great loss.”[9] He points to the value of the psalms in both private devotion and corporate praise:

The Book of Psalms is one of the church’s treasures, a marvelous resource for our private prayers, rooted as it is in the unchanging reality of the human condition, the human soul; but equally for public worship, which it has enriched and sustained since long before the Christian era.

However, even if the psalms are no longer sung, he points out that they can be spoken: “Let the people sit comfortably and prayerfully and say the psalms.”[10] (emphasis original) Certainly, the corporate reading of psalms as Scripture validates their use in worship, but it also binds the congregation in shared spiritual experiences: “It unites us with those who sang this song before us, and contributes its own small offering to those as yet unborn.” [11] Besides the psalms, Dudley-Smith reports that he continues “to base new hymns on specific books or passages of the Bible.”[12] A Door for the Word contains new hymns written between 2002 and 2005 and A Mirror to the Soul is a collection of 30 contemporary hymns based on the psalms.

SATB, arr. David W. Music

[1] Timothy Dudley-Smith, A Functional Art: Reflections of a Hymn Writer (Oxford University Press, 2017), 73.

[2] Ibid, 71.

[3] Ibid, 26.

[4] Ibid, 75.

[5] Isaac Watts, “Psalms of David Imitated” in The Works of the Rev. Isaac Watts D.D. in Nine Volumes (1813), preface.

[6] Dudley-Smith, A Functional Art, 29.

[7] Ibid, 91.

[8] Ibid, 98.

[9] Ibid, 26.

[10] Ibid, 27.

[11] Ibid, 144.

[12] Timothy Dudley Smith, A Door for the Word (Oxford University Press, 2006), x.

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