1. Entrust your days and burdens
To God's most loving hand;
He cares for you while ruling
The sky, the sea, the land.
For He who guides the tempests
Along their thund'rous ways
Will find for you a pathway
And guide you all your days.
2. Rely on God your Savior
And find your life secure.
Make His work your foundation
That your work may endure.
No anxious thought, no worry,
No self-tormenting care
Can win your Father's favor;
His heart is moved by prayer.
3. Take heart, have hope, my spirit,
And do not be dismayed;
God helps in ev'ry trial
And makes you unafraid.
Await His time with patience
Through darkest hours of night
Until the sun you hoped for
Delights your eager sight.
4. Leave all to His direction;
His wisdom rules for you
In ways to rouse your wonder
At all His love can do.
Soon He, His promise keeping,
With wonder-working pow'rs
Will banish from your spirit
What gave you troubled hours.
5. O bless-ed heir of heaven,
You'll hear the song resound
Of endless jubilation
When you with life are crowned.
In your right hand your maker
Will place the victor's palm,
And you will thank Him gladly
With heaven's joyful psalm.
6. Our hands and feel, Lord, strengthen
With joy our spirits bless
Until we see the ending
Of all our life's distress.
And so throughout our lifetime
Keep us within Your care
And at our end then bring us
To heav'n to praise You there.
In Lutheran Service Book, this hymn by Paul Gerhardt is #754. In LSB the text is set to a new tune by LCMS composer, Stephen R. Johnson, a tune called SUFFICIENTIA. In previous hymnals this text was set to a more somber tune. SUFFICIENTIA is a tune that better reflects the confident trust which believers have in a God who sees and knows and meets their every need, a God who will sustain them through each and every trial that they experience in this fallen world. It is one of my favorite hymns by Paul Gerhardt...yet how does a person choose one from the many gems that he wrote?
Posted by Stephen P. Starke at 11:14 PM
Labels: Hope and Comfort
‘Entrust Your Days and Burdens’ Paul Gerhardt’s 17th-century hymns still enthrall the world – By Uwe Siemon-Netto
Since the Reformation half a millennium ago, 20,000 hymns have been written in Germany, according to American hymnologists David and Susan Cherwien. But other than Martin Luther’s robust songs, none are as beloved as the enchanting poetry of Paul Gerhardt, who was born four centuries ago this month, March 12, 1607, in Gräfenhainichen near Wittenberg.
His work delighted John and Charles Wesley, Bach, Goethe, and especially the anti-Nazi martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who took solace from Paul Gerhardt’s verses while awaiting the hangman. To this day, they are revered in Anglo-Saxon countries as well, thanks to the genius of Catherine Winkworth (1827-78), the foremost translator of German hymns into English.
It is hard to conceive of a more perfect match than the union between Gerhardt and Winkworth, two poets from two different countries divided by two centuries. Here was this pre-modern German pastor whose faith enhanced by great suffering inspired him to write hymns of breathtaking purity, which transcended the upheavals and horrors that beset Europe after his death in 1676.
And there was this Victorian spinster from England, who turned Gerhardt’s elegant meter and clarity of theology into her mother tongue so deftly that they endured despite all hurdles thrown up by the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, liberalism, bloody tyranny, and most recently, postmodern confusion.
She was not Gerhardt’s only translator of course. In this, the great Methodist hymn writer Charles Wesley (1707-88), the tercentenary of whose birth Protestants also commemorate this year, had preceded her by 100 years. But it is the genius of Winkworth, a London silk manufacturer’s daughter, who makes Gerhardt’s sacred songs seem like homegrown products to British and American ears alike.
In a curious way, Gerhardt’s talent spans not only vastly different periods in Europe’s spiritual history but sometimes also manages to bridge the divide between people of faith and disbelievers. When I recently mentioned Gerhardt’s name to a German agnostic, he shot back at first, “I am not a believer.” But then, when I cited the titles of some Gerhardt hymns, he nodded wistfully, “Oh yes, of course, those I know.”
He knew, for example, the haunting chorale, “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden“ (O Sacred Heart Now Wounded),” which Bach so brilliantly wove into his St. Matthew Passion. He knew “Nun ruhen alle Wälder” (Now Rest beneath Night’s Shadow) with which Germans once ended their day, and which they still sing at funerals. And he knew the delightful summer hymn, “Geh’ aus mein Herz und suche Freud” (Go Forth, My Heart and Seek Delight) that has long passed ecclesial confines and joined the repertoire of most of Germany’s 22,000 choral societies with their 700,000 members.
Winkworth’s sublime rendering of this poem is not part of Anglo-Saxon church hymnals, presumably because it is one of the few of Gerhardt’s 139 German hymns that are not principally centered on Christ. Written for the seventh Sunday after the feast of the Holy Trinity, it starts out instead as a magnificent reportage on the joys of summertime:
The trees stand thick and dark with leaves / And earth o’er all her dust now weaves / A robe of living green; / Nor silks of Solomon compare / With glories that the tulips wear, / Or lilies’ spotless sheen.
In the first seven stanzas, Gerhardt describes charmingly “the richly gifted nightingale,” the “lark soaring into space,” “fleet-winged swallows” and the “never-wearied swarms (of bees),” the “hen and her brood,” and “brooks… gurgling through the sand.” But then he pulls all this together in one powerful theological crescendo:
Thy mighty working, mighty God, / Wakes all my powers; I look abroad / And can no longer rest: / I too must sing when all things sing, / And from my heart the praises ring / The Highest loveth best.
What is it that makes this song pull at the heartstrings even of today’s secularists? Could it be their awareness of their own spiritual penury? Here we are, jaded after six decades of prosperity and world peace, strangely incapable of rhyming our gratitude. And there was Gerhardt, overcoming the trauma of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), and jubilating in 1653:
I think, Art thou so good to us, / And scatterest joy and beauty thus /
O’er this poor earth of ours.
It is the experience of suffering that made Gerhardt and other hymn writers of the 17th century rise to a soaring level of gentleness that ultimately issued into the great choral works of the German baroque. Malcolm Muggeridge called suffering the only method by which we have ever learned anything. Nothing corroborates this insight more profoundly than Gerhardt’s poetry.
For most of his childhood, youth and maturity, this Saxon pastor experienced this horrendous war, one of the worst calamities that ever afflicted Central Europe, and one that delayed the beginning of his career and family life until he was in his forties. But his ordeals gave his work a unique quality that led Winkworth to this conclusion: “The religious song of Germany found its purest and sweetest expression in his hymns of Paul Gerhardt.”
We live in a world often marked by cheap piety with saccharine platitudes assuming the place of the traditional chorale with its theological weight, choice of words and musical splendor. As one contemporary mantra runs: “He is able more than able / To accomplish what concerns me today / He is able more than able /
To handle anything that comes my way.” Contrast such inane lines with the exquisite beauty of Gerhardt’s songs, for example:
Entrust your days and burdens / To God’s most loving hand; / He cares for you while ruling / The sky, the sea, the land. / For he who guides the tempest / Along their thunderous ways / Will find for you a pathway / And guide you all your days.
This was written soon after the Westphalian Peace, when Germany lay in ruins; when the country still mourned the loss of 20 to 30 percent of its population; when its agriculture, indeed its entire economy was destroyed.
“A remarkable mix of ‘Trost und Trotz’ (consolation and defiance) lends Gerhardt’s hymns its unique allure,” according to Heidelberg theologian Christian Möller, citing as an example a stirring song that has its place in the hymnals of many American denominations:
Why should cross and trial grieve me? / Christ is near with his cheer; / Never will he leave me. /
Who can rob me of the heaven /
That God’s Son for me won / When his life was given.
These lines express a defiance directed against pain, and the consolation stemming from trust in God’s governance and goodness – and from the knowledge that all torment will pass. Gerhardt’s genius lies in his insight that one would not work without the other, said Möller: “Consolation without defiance turns into a whine, while defiance without consolation embitters you.”
What makes Gerhardt so unique is his ability to describe the reality of the cross in a Christian’s life. In his day, Germans were keenly aware of this reality, and precisely this awareness turned into one of the greatest assets of the 17th century: For all its darkness, this was a century in which, in Winkworth’s words, the very genius of the German people expressed itself in religious rhymes.
In an interview with the German magazine, Zeitzeichen (Signs of the Times), Möller explained Gerhardt’s greatness in part with the fact that he “belonged to the era of Lutheran orthodoxy, which was attentive to doctrinal clarity, and was therefore able to sing with clarity.” Möller went on, “I do wish those days of doctrinal clarity would come back… leading to more clarity in people’s lives and song.”
The Rev. Henry Gericke, a St. Louis pastor, organist and choirmaster, doubts that Gerhardt would have found his moving words for luminous hymns such as, “O Lord, How Shall I Meet You?” and “A Lamb Goes Uncomplaining Forth,” had he not himself led a life bearing the Cross. Disease robbed him of his wife and four of his five children. There was his personal illness, too, and there was the loss of his powerful pulpit, Berlin’s Nikolaikirche, after a fierce political and theological contest with Frederick William I of Prussia, called the “Great Elector.”
Gerhardt later called this deprivation his “small sort of Berlin martyrdom,” which was all the more tragic as he was now separated from his organist Johann Crüger, one of the great 17th-century composers who had put many of Gerhardt’s poems to music. Yet still in his lifetime Gerhardt’s hymns became the most popular throughout Germany, next to Luther’s. And astonishingly, only 30 years after his death in 1676 – less than a generation after Europe’s last big war of religions – in the small town of Lübben, then Saxony, Gerhardt became probably the first Lutheran poet to have a song published in a Roman Catholic hymnal.
That hymn, “On Sacred Head Now Wounded,” has deep roots in medieval mysticism and specifically a tradition going back to St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), a Cistercian abbot in France. It involved pondering and saluting separate body parts of the suffering Christ, such as his head in Gerhardt’s evocative verses.
Gerhardt is buried in the crypt of the ancient parish church of Lübben, which now bears his name. And there, an inscription under his portrait reminds visitors of his tribulations: “Theologus in cribro Satanae versatus” – a theologian sifted in Satan’s sieve.
– Uwe Siemon-Netto, a veteran German foreign correspondent and Lutheran lay theologian, is scholar-in-residence at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis.
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