MY HOPE IS BUILT
Lyrics: Edward Mote
Music: William B. Bradbury
Arrangement: Philip Percival & Alanna Glover
Emu Music Ltd. Sheet music £2.50
emumusic.com
In historian Andrew Snyder’s provocative book On Tyranny: Twenty lessons from the Twentieth Century, he encourages reflection on our past to see how even democracies can collapse into authoritarianism. Without a link to the past through books and Scripture, he says, we cannot see the errors of the present.
With this and current conflicts in mind, I found myself listening to EMU music’s reworking of the 1834 hymn, My Hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness. I was reconnecting to another age, which had none of the benefits of modern medicine, but had a clarity about where true hope lay. I thought, what a good practice it is to sing something in church that is older than yourself.
