Barefoot in the Dust: A Hymn-Poet’s Memoir

By Brian Wren and Richard Leach

In this memoir, internationally acclaimed hymn-poet Brian Wren outlines his life story, describes his writing process, and explores the relationship between words and music. Although (because) Christian hymns are typically sung by untrained voices, they exemplify the abiding and universal appeal of human voices joining together in song. This book will be useful and interdenominationally appealing to students and teachers of church music, theological students, pastors, choir members, and worshipers who care about the words they sing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Oct 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781498234955

Brian Wren

Brian Wren is Professor Emeritus of Worship at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. He is a well-known hymn writer and the author of Praying Twice: The Music and Words of Congregation Song,published by WJK.

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Barefoot in the Dust

A Hymn-Poet’s Memoir

Brian Wren

foreword by Richard Leach

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Barefoot In The Dust

A Hymn-Poet’s Memoir

Copyright © 2017 Brian Wren. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-4982-3494-8

hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-3496-2

ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-3495-5

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Wren, Brian. | foreword by Leach, Richard.

Title: Barefoot in the dust : a hymn-poet’s memoir / Brian Wren.

Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017 | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: isbn 978-1-4982-3494-8 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-4982-3496-2 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-4982-3495-5 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: 1. Hymns, English. | 2. Memoir. | I. Title.

Classification: bx8337 w68 2017 (print) | bx8337 w68 (ebook)

Manufactured in the U.S.A. 10/20/17

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1: My Life In Outline

Chapter 2: Poet, or Hymn-Poet?

Chapter 3: Nudged, Annoyed, Inspired, and Still Traveling

Chapter 4: The Creative Spiral—Writing a Hymn Poem

Chapter 5: Sources of Inspiration

Chapter 6: Words Seeking Music

Chapter 7: Looking Ahead

Chapter 8: Compilation with Tunes

Chapter 9: Hymns Cited and Other Information

Epilogue: Barefoot at the Gate

Appendix 1: Barefoot

Appendix 2: Correspondence with Erik Routley

Appendix 3: Meeting the Awesome She

Appendix 4: Samples of non-hymnic poetry

Foreword

In the 1980s I was a United Church of Christ pastor in Connecticut, selecting hymns each week from The Pilgrim Hymnal published in 1958. It was a fine hymnal with many hymns that still deserve to be sung now. But it left much to be desired. The hymns were overworn from repetition, the singing was in a rut.

In 1987 I audited a course on worship at Yale Divinity School. Jeffrey Rowthorn was the teacher, and he introduced us to the work of contemporary hymn-poets. Brian Wren was one, and I picked up his first collection, Faith Looking Forward, in the school bookstore. What an astonishing difference from The Pilgrim Hymnal! Such vivid and direct language. An emotional range that could include raw grief. A topical range that could look at Christian missionary work through clear lenses rather than rose-tinted ones. A solid Trinitarian theology that could sing Dear Sister God. And Woman in the Night, a celebration of women in the Gospels. Through it all, a kind of confrontation with both the world and the church and with their settled ways that needed unsettling by the gospel. The settled hymnody I knew needed unsettling, and these poems did it. What’s more, they did it with precise language, with careful meter and rhyme. The liberation of ideas was matched with polished craft, not looseness or close-enough-ness, making it all the more compelling.

That is my personal take on something that was well known by many at the time, and by many more now, that Brian is an essential poet of a twentieth-century renewal of English-language hymnody. The gifts and challenges of that renewal have gone around the globe and continue to be received and felt.

I started writing hymns myself in 1987. Brian’s work inspired me then and always since, and I cherish the friendship we came to have once we met. Besides inspiration, he gave me life-changing good advice when he told me to take part in the annual conferences of the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada.

It is an honor to invite readers into this book. I do it with respect, great gratitude and love.

Richard Leach

Stamford, Connecticut June

28

,

2016

Introduction

On a sandy beach in summer, when younger, I went barefoot. Elsewhere I wore shoes. When I think about hymn writing, I picture myself in the middle of a singing congregation. But I imagine the singers standing not in church but in the open air, barefoot in the dust.

The dust in my metaphor is the dust of human experience: dirty, uncomfortable, and earthbound. It is the dust of our mortality, the dust to which we return. It is the dust of our sin and failure. It is the dust of earth, through which we feel, on unprotected feet, the joy and pain of being human. Barefoot in the dust, we cannot pose or pretend. Our prayers become more honest, our thanksgiving more genuine, and our praise more heartfelt.

I have been writing hymn poems for much of my lifetime, and have often spoken in lectures and workshops about what makes me a hymn-poet, and the process of hymn writing. This is the first time I have written about such matters for publication. Though I use the word hymn, and think mostly of the particular type of song it represents, most of my comments apply to of any kind of song lyric intended for a worshiping congregation.

Though most of this book is new, some parts are adapted from previous writing, in particular from my book, Praying Twice: The Music and Words of Congregational Song. Chapter 7 is based on an article in the Bulletin of the Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Chapter 8 is developed from a presentation to the Hymnal 21 Conference of the United Church of Christ in Japan, at the Shibuya Church, Tokyo, on January 27th, 1998.

Many of my hymns referenced herein appear in Chapter 8.

My hymn poems to 1996 are collected in Piece Together Praise—A Theological Journey: Poems and Collected Hymns Thematically Arranged. Later collections are Visions and Revisions (1997), Christ Our Hope (2004) Love’s Open Door (2009), In God Rejoice (2012) and Onward !2016.

Many people have contributed to this book through questions and insights in workshops and teaching. My partner in marriage, Susan Heafield, has been my companion throughout and is the first person to whom I show a new hymn for comment and critique. My good friend, hymn-poet Richard Leach, whose grasp of grammar and syntax is as precise as his hymns are imaginative, read the entire draft and made many helpful observations.

This book is intended for anyone who worships the one God known to Jew, Christian, and Muslim, and for people who love to sing in worship and who care about the words we sing. I hope it will be enjoyable and useful.

chapter 1

My Life In Outline

Almost daily, we tell stories about ourselves. We describe a holiday journey, the achievements of children, a workplace grievance, or the illness of parents. For thirty seconds or thirty minutes we talk to someone else about what we did, who we spoke to, what they said, and what happened to us. We do this partly to communicate with others, but mainly to establish our identity. Our stories say who we are, and our stories are who we are.

In our stories, we give different information for different purposes. Our medical history at a doctor’s office differs from the work history we show to a prospective employer. Our work history needs to be accurate (unless we want to risk being found out and discredited), but we tell it so as to present ourselves favorably.

By contrast, if we are wise, our medical history will be accurate even if unfavorable. Because we need an accurate diagnosis and well-founded advice, we set aside our embarrassment at having to admit—for example—that we smoke, drink too much alcohol, work too hard, or don’t do enough physical exercise (for the record, I have never smoked, drink wine in moderation, and exercise three times a week).

Some of our stories are private, known only to trusted relatives and friends. Medical and work histories are less private, but usually known to a limited number of people. When any of our stories are shared more publicly, they become biography.

Like private information, biographical information serves different purposes. If I want to establish my credentials to an audience, my biographical information might say something like this:

Brian Wren is Emeritus Professor of Worship, Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia, USA and a retired Minister of the United Reformed Church (Great Britain). His hymn-poems are published internationally in hymnals of all Christian traditions. He is partner inmarriage to Rev. Susan Heafield (pronounced Hayfield), a United Methodist pastor and composer."

When I write a book or journal article, I may also say that I am a white, middle-class, heterosexual male, born and raised in England, and a member of the generation that reached adulthood in the 1950s. This information tells the reader something about my likely perspective on things, so that (to use a popular idiom) the reader knows where I am coming from, and can allow for my limitations—or even be surprised by my insights.

In this book, my story means my story as a writer of hymn lyrics. It will be less than a biography, but enough to show who I am, and what may have shaped me as a writer of hymns. I shall tell my story in outline, then revisit the parts most relevant to my journey as a hymn writer. In the next chapter I shall say more precisely what I mean by the word hymn.

My Life in Outline

I was born on June 3, 1936, at Oldchurch Hospital, Romford, in the county of Essex, England. My only sibling, my brother Keith, was born seven years later. My parents Mabel Wren, née Blann (1910-2001) and Arthur Wren (1909-1998), described themselves, throughout their lives, as working class, meaning that they belonged to the stratum of society that does not own capital or live from the profits of other people’s labor. They sought to improve their own lives through education, and their society through trade union organization and peaceful, democratic political action. Their youth and young adulthood were shaped by the economic depression of the 1920s and 1930s, during which they knew great hardship, and then by the rise of Nazism in Germany and the Second World War. After the war, they saw some of their hopes realized in the election and programs of a Labor Party Government (1945-1952).

By the time I was born, my parents had struggled to save enough money to put down a deposit on a bungalow (a small, one-story house) in Cranham, Essex. Cranham was then a rural village becoming urbanized. It is on the outskirts of Upminster, a medium-size suburb to the northeast of London. Every weekday my dad took the bus to Upminster station. From there he traveled to the city of London, where he had low status, low paid work—the only work available—as a messenger in the Alliance Assurance Company. Financial ledgers were then written by hand, and nearby communication was by letter, sent by hand. Besides carrying such messages, he worked in the mail room.

Though my parents were equal partners in their political work, they otherwise followed traditional roles. My mother stayed at home, managed the household, and looked after first me, then my brother. Later, she worked outside the home as a welfare assistant in a primary school. She once told me that when she and Arthur first bought the house, and calculated their weekly budget, they had barely enough for mortgage payments, basic food, essential clothing, and one visit to the cinema.

The Second World War¹ began when I was three years old. By the time I was four, my father began to be away from home for long periods, first because his employers moved out of London to southern suburbs unlikely to be bombed, then when he was called up for military service.

In the army, he served in the Royal Corps of Signals as a signalman (i.e., private soldier), the lowest rank. His job was to maintain radio and telephone communications. He refused promotion more than once because he did not believe in hierarchies so did not want to give orders to others. Finally, he saw the opportunity of improving his post-war prospects by transferring to the Education Corps, where he was promoted to sergeant. After the war, he enrolled in a government-funded program and trained as a teacher, having found his vocation. He taught science, then general subjects, and reached the post of deputy head of a junior school.

My mother, left alone in wartime with one son, then two, moved to Eltham, in southeast London—in the path of aerial bombardment but near her parents and able to benefit from their proximity. My childhood memories include love and warmth with my maternal grandmother, huddling in an air raid shelter, the sound of air raid sirens, the wail of falling bombs, the crump of their explosions, picking up shrapnel in the street, and the sight of bombed-out houses on my way to school.

When war ended, and my father was demobilized, the family returned to our home in Cranham. At the age of ten I had passed a selective exam and gained a scholarship to a grammar school. From there I gained entrance to Oxford University. I went to Oxford in October 1957, aged twenty-one, having completed two years compulsory service in the British Army. At Oxford I took Honors degrees in Modern Languages (French), then Theology, and finally a doctorate in Theology (Old Testament)—all funded by government scholarships. I (and my parents) could not have afforded it otherwise.

In 1962 I married my first spouse, Brenda, whom I had met and fallen in love with during my first two weeks at Oxford, where she had come to study law. Our daughter Hilary and son Nicholas were born in 1966 and 1968, and continue to be a source of joy and delight.

In 1965 I was ordained as a minister in the Congregational Union of England and Wales. In 1972, this grouping of Congregationalist Churches united with Presbyterians and Disciples of Christ to become the United Reformed Church, of which I am a minister (now retired). I served for five years as minister of a Congregational Church in Hockley, southeast Essex, not far from my childhood home.

For thirteen years after that, my calling was to educate and campaign on the problems of world poverty, first within the British churches, then with an organization (Third World First²), working with students in British colleges and universities. During that time I led adult education events, prepared educational materials (including study packs and simulation games), served as board member then chair of a British aid charity, War on Want, and did almost every kind of writing (from job descriptions to articles and advertisements) and prepared grant applications.

By 1983, I knew that the time had come to leave Third World First. Enquiries about other salaried jobs proved unsuccessful. My first hymn collection had just been published in the United States, and during a six-week visit sponsored by Hope Publishing Company I received two invitations to return for short-term teaching. I decided to take the risk of working freelance. Hymn royalties supplemented income from workshops, teaching, and lecturing. Within three years, most of my bookings were coming from the United States.

In 1986, Brenda and I separated, after twenty-four years of marriage. To put the matter briefly, I had not been faithful in the marriage, and Brenda was, I think, too afraid of losing my love to put her foot down and insist that I change my behavior. Our divorce was finalized early in 1989. Hilary and Nicholas are adults with their own lives and I am grateful for everything they are. We visit each other as often as we can. Hilary (Wren-Walinets) is a highly specialized speech and language therapist attached to the neurological oncology department of a major London hospital. She lives in London with spouse Joe (Walinets), daughter Jasmine, and son Zephyr—I am honored to be their grandfather. Nicholas does compliance work for the Deutsche Bank in Tokyo, Japan. He speaks and writes fluent Japanese. He and spouse Tomomi live with daughter Mizuki and son Yuta in the outskirts of Tokyo.

In August 1991 I moved to the United States and united in marriage with Susan Heafield (pronounced Hayfield), a United Methodist pastor, whose first degree was in music education. Our partnership had grown out of common interests, friendship, and complementary gifts, and has proven consistently rich and good. I am glad to be step-father to her son, Nathan and step-granddad to his