I am always in awe of people who can creatively put words together to express profound ideas, especially those who can write hymn texts with a rhyming scheme.

One of those persons is Carolyn Winfrey Gillette, an ordained Presbyterian minister who happened to attend Princeton Theological Seminary at the same time as my good friend, Joan Ishibashi.

According to her website, “Carolyn Winfrey Gillette grew up in a family that was, and continues to be, active in the United Methodist Church. She remembers being a very small child and standing on the pew next to her parents and brother in worship, holding a hymnal (before she could even read it), and trying to sing along as the congregation sang the beloved hymns of the Christian faith. Her father was a college English professor until he retired, and both her father and her mother encouraged her to love language and writing.”

This gifted hymn writer posted her new hymn, “We grieve 100,000” to be sung to the Passion Chorale (“O sacred head now wounded”). It is the melody Bach used extensively in the St. Matthew Passion and perfectly captures the mood of this somber text.

She posted it on Facebook, along with the photo of the cover page of the New York Times listing the names of only 1% of the people who died from coronavirus.

We grieve 100,000— yet we can’t understand;
we cannot grasp how many have died throughout this land.
We cannot see their faces or hear the stories told
of all the ways they blessed us— the young ones and the old.

O God, we grieve the struggle of those who died alone—
so far from friends and neighbors, from all they’d ever known.
We grieve for precious people who could not say good-bye;
we weep for those, now mourning, who sit alone and cry.

O God, we grieve for millions who now are unemployed
who cannot feed their families— whose hope has been destroyed.
We grieve that needed workers must worry for their health
while some with lives of privilege stay home and build their wealth.

O God of love and mercy, we cry to you, “How long?”
In troubled times remind us: Your love is ever strong.
Now as we grieve the suffering, Lord, show us how to be
a healing, loving presence in each community.

Tune: Hans Leo Hassler, 1601; harmony by Johann Sebastian Bach, 1729
Text: Copyright © 2020 by Carolyn Winfrey Gillette. All rights reserved.
Email: [email protected] New Hymns: www.carolynshymns.com

Carolyn Winfrey Gillette