Christians, lift up your hearts

John Edward Bowers (1923-2019), the author of this hymn, was educated at Dulwich College and King’s College, London;  he was ordained to the priesthood in 1952 and shortly became Priest Vicar and Sacrist of Southwark Cathedral.  Later, he served for twenty-five years as Vicar of Ashby-de-la-Zouch (1963-1988).  He concurrently served as a military chaplain (1955-1978).  In 1978 he was made an honorary Canon of Leicester Cathedral.   Bowers wrote a number of hymns, though most are not so well known as this one.  The hymn we sing is part of a longer work entitled “The House of God,” written in 1980. Bowers’ stanzas were first published in Hymns Ancient and Modern New Standard (1983) as three separate hymns, all set to the tune “Salve, festa dies,” and all of which have the same four-line refrain.  

  

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) wrote the tune “Salve, festa dies” for the first edition of The English Hymnal (1906), of which he was musical editor.  The tune was a setting for the English translation by Maurice Bell of the resurrection poem Salve, festa dies, toto venerabilis aevo (Hail festive, ever venerable day”) by Venantius Fortunatus (c. 530-609).  

 

Vaughan Williams had not yet written any of the major orchestral works for which he was later famous when he was approached in 1904 by Percy Dearmer about becoming musical editor of the proposed English Hymnal.  Having studied with Parry and later with Stanford at the RCM, and with Charles Wood at Cambridge, he had composed the song “Linden Lea” and the cycle of “Songs of Travel”  based on poems by R.L. Stevenson.  He was at work on the choral setting of Walt Whitman poems, “Toward the Unknown Region.”  He had composed a few chamber works, and he had been much involved in collecting English folk tunes.  It surprised Vaughan Williams to be asked to work on a hymn book.  “I protested that I knew very little about hymns.” he later wrote, “but . . . the final clench was given when I understood that if I did not do the job it would be offered to a well-known Church musician with whose musical ideas I was much out of sympathy.”  It was while working on the hymnal that he discovered the theme by Thomas Tallis which he turned into his Fantasia.