Come Down, Oh Love Divine: Guest post by Mr Long Jr

A few months ago, my son and housemate Nick responded to a request from the editor of our church's Parish magazine to write a piece about his favourite hymn.

To mark Whit Sunday, or Pentecost, I asked him if I could publish his piece as a guest post on my blog. With the country still giddy with excitement about the Royal Wedding, not least about the showstopping address by American Pastor Bishop Michael Curry on the power of love, it seems as good a moment as any to publish what I find to be a very powerful statement about Nick's brand of understated yet very real Christianity; it gives me great pleasure to know that it owes much to his father and late grandfather. I hope that those who feel that Christian faith is all about narrow-minded, dogmatic adherence to a set of beliefs irrelevant to the modern world will read this and see that maybe the timeless values expressed by Jesus of Nazareth are as valuable today as at any time in the past:-

When I was asked that I write about my favourite hymn for the magazine this month, I assumed my task was a simple one. But it has only dawned on me, in writing this, that I’ve never actually considered what my favourite hymn is. Now, having considered it for some time, I still don’t know. The choice, it turns out, is too hard.

What follows, then, is my thoughts on one of my favourites, amongst many. I’ve chosen to write about “Come Down, O Love Divine”.

Come down, O love divine, seek Thou this soul of mine,

And visit it with Thine own ardour glowing.

O Comforter, draw near, within my heart appear,

And kindle it, Thy holy flame bestowing.

O let it freely burn, ‘til earthly passions turn

To dust and ashes in its heat consuming;

And let Thy glorious light shine ever on my sight,

And clothe me round, the while my path illuming.

Let holy charity mine outward vesture be,

And lowliness become mine inner clothing;

True lowliness of heart, which takes the humbler part,

And o’er its own shortcomings weeps with loathing.

And so the yearning strong, with which the soul will long,

Shall far outpass the power of human telling;

For none can guess its grace, till he become the place

Wherein the Holy Spirit makes His dwelling.

For me, “Come Down, O Love Divine” represents our faith at its most fundamental. It is a meditation on a simple, powerful concept: God is Love. The words – written by Bianco Da Siena in the 15^th century, and translated by Richard Littledale in the 19^th Century – explore what “God is Love” could mean for us in our lives.

Despite the hymn’s ancient provenance, the tone of the thoughts expressed feel very modern to me. There is no talk of sacred truths, nothing boastful, no sense of anything absolute or definitive. Instead there is something cautious in the “yearning”, “lowliness” and “seeking” described. It is a Christianity I understand.

What I perhaps like most about the hymn’s words, though, is the manifesto for living that the verses deliver. In four beautifully-crafted verses, we are gently invited to imagine a life that is led by love. Verse two, for example, explains exactly why Christian living is desperately needed in the modern age. In a world addicted to “stuff”, where we consume natural resources with impunity, where our short-term thinking is quite literally putting our planet’s survival in doubt, the call for earthly passions to “turn to dust” rings true. In verse three, the “lowliness of heart” described could be seen as an important antidote to any one of our numerous failings as a species, from our contempt for the natural world, to our obsession with the “self” over the collective, to the empty grandstanding that characterises all levels of our politics.

As I understand the final verse, it presents a daring speculation, a hope, as to the world that could exist if people were to follow this way of love, and “become the place wherein the Holy Spirit makes his dwelling”. It speaks, to me, of the prospect that we might one day come to see ourselves as one planet, and properly work together to create meaningful lives for everyone on it. That would, for me, be the true meaning of “Love divine”.

Let me write a final word or two on the music. I said at the beginning that my choice of hymn was a tough one. What swayed me was that this hymn’s music was written by Ralph Vaughan Williams, my favourite composer. All of his work is infused with a traditional English folk influence, which means that – despite his music being relatively new (by the standards of sacred music) – it has a timeless quality. I can think of no better accompaniment to a timeless message.

Powerful stuff from a gifted writer if I may say so. And he's not a writer by trade. He's a Physics teacher. And just in case you have never listened to this hymn beautifully performed, here it is:

We Are(n't) Family

You know sometimes there are incidents whose significance doesn’t dawn on you until you reflect on them in a quiet place on your own some time later?

Well I had one of those this last Friday, April 27^th 2018.

I had enjoyed a lovely evening of food and chatter with three friends at a restaurant near Victoria Station in London. There was me, Ellie, Steph and Izzy. We had spent the evening eating, drinking and chatting - nay gossiping - and laughing, and the time had come to pay the bill. Cue further laughter and chit-chat as we tried to work out who had eaten and drunk what. Our waitress for the evening had done a good job in striking the balance between efficient service and friendly banter, without being too intrusive, but when we were about to leave she couldn’t resist the temptation to ask: what was the connection between the four of us?

I guess most groups in a restaurant on a Friday evening are easy to read - intimate couples, celebrating families, boisterous work colleagues - but she clearly couldn’t work us out. “Have a guess”, I said, and her unconvincing guesses included father and three daughters, a boss and his employees: both basically saying “old guy with young women” But she had to give up, and was then visibly struck when we said that we were just friends from different parts of the country who share a medical condition.

All very obvious really, but the more I think about it the more it serves as yet another reminder of what a precious thing the diabetes peer support network known as the #GBDOC is. To a muggle like that waitress, it is clearly puzzling to see the likes of me socialising with the likes of Ellie, Steph and Izzy. Whereas to us, it’s just, well, what we do.

And of course that was just the start of it. The four of us were gathering for a weekend centred around the third TADtalk event, a day-long meet-up of people with diabetes organised by an endocrinologist from Portsmouth who happens to believe - passionately - in the power of connectivity among those who share a condition and those who help them to live well with it.

I, and many others have written and spoken about the power of peer support before, so in that sense this post is repetition of, or at least a variation on, a familiar theme. However, every time I meet with my fellow diabetics in groups large or small, every time I exchange easy banter with them on Twitter, I am reminded just how precious this phenomenon has become to me and to many others.

I will not describe the TADtalk event in detail, as others have already done it better than I can in tweets, or for example in this post by the organiser, but I will just remind myself and others that I have the good fortune to be part of something very special. As I adjust to retirement from a long career in a people centred job in which I was surrounded and kept young at heart by some wonderful young people, I now find myself surrounded - often virtually, but sometimes literally – by dozens of friends who have nothing else in common other than a pesky, 24/7, potentially life threatening medical condition. We are young and not-so-young, female and male, rich and poor, shy and extrovert, gay and straight, black and white, religious and secular. In short, we are people. The thing about Type One diabetes is it does not discriminate. So neither do we.

And the point is really this: with most of these people, I hardly ever talk about diabetes these days. Of course if the need and occasion arises, they are a wonderful, wise and well-informed source of information and support about every aspect of living with diabetes. But above all, we are just friends who chat, laugh and cry together like friends do. Or perhaps more accurately, like families do. Because for me, that is how the GBDOC feels, and I make no apologies if this sounds cheesy in the afterglow of such a fun weekend. We are indeed an extended family, and like any family we sometimes fall out, we sometimes bicker, but in the end we know that blood sugar is thicker than water.

As Sister Sledge put it: We Are Family, and I for one am grateful that I have "got all my sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, cousins and whoever with me."

This post comes with my thanks and greetings to all these #FacesOfGBDoc both those who were present last weekend and those who were unable to join in. Here they are - an update to this picture will be posted on Twitter when I have added all later additions to this picture: