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Nothing is more distinctive of the Christian faith than the habit of responding to God in song. There are other gods who require submission, obedience, and sacrifice; the God of Israel requires psalms of praise. There are other gods who elicit silence and mystical reveries; the God of Israel provokes the blowing of trumpets and the clashing of symbols. A huge portion of our scriptures are written in the form of poetry and song. Nearly all the Hebrew prophets were poets just as much as they were preachers. The song of Miriam and the song of Deborah are two of the oldest Hebrew texts to have found their way into our Old Testament. If one goes right back to the foundations of Israelite faith, one finds women singing and dancing and beating their tambourines in time.

In St Luke’s account, the arrival of the Savior is greeted with a whole album of songs. The pregnant Mary sings, “My soul magnifies the Lord!” Zechariah has been struck mute throughout Elizabeth’s pregnancy. But when the child is born, Zechariah’s tongue is loosed and he bursts out singing: “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel!” When the birth of Jesus is near, the shepherds hear a multitude of angels singing: “Glory to God in the highest!” And when the baby is brought to the temple, old righteous Simeon takes the child in his arms and sings over him: “For mine own eyes have seen your salvation!” In St Luke’s account of the birth of Christ, one feels that God has drawn so near that the whole creation is erupting spontaneously into song.

Some years ago I knew a woman in a nursing home who was in the most advanced stages of dementia. Her condition had worsened dramatically with the passing years. First she had forgotten her children; then she forgot her husband; then she forgot her own identity; then she forgot how to speak; then finally she forgot even her body so that she could no longer walk or eat or drink or do anything for herself. But one afternoon each week, a Salvation Army band would come to the nursing home. And the woman who had not spoken a word in years would sit in her wheelchair with a blank expression on her face while her mouth sang along to the old hymns. She had forgotten every Bible verse and every sermon she ever heard. She had forgotten whether she was a Calvinist or an Arminian, a conservative or a progressive. Yet when the band began to play, there were strings somewhere in the depths of her spirit that began to reverberate.

It is sobering to reflect that we will forget our loved ones, our children, even our own names, before we forget the songs that we have sung. Singing touches the nerve center of our lives. Our response to God comes from a place deeper even than ritual or belief. Indeed, as children many of us learned to sing about God—and therefore to love God—long before we ever began to think about God.

During his long pastoral ministry in Swansea, Kim Fabricius adopted the habit of writing hymns and encouraging his congregation to “sing a new song to the Lord” (Psalm 96:1). The hymns collected in this volume range across the heights and depths of the Christian story and Christian experience. There are hymns about doctrine, hymns about justice, hymns of anger and grief, hymns of careful reflection and hymns of simple childlike trust.

But the most striking thing about this songbook are the surprising flashes of humor on virtually every page. Hymn-writing is not traditionally a funny business. Most Christian hymns convey (or seek to convey) a note of spiritual solemnity: and the singing of hymns is often pretty hard work too. But the hymns of Kim Fabricius are marked by a sanctified frivolity and by a colloquialism reminiscent of Martin Luther’s shamelessly popular approach to hymnody. I know of no other modern hymnbook in which one will find songs of praise set to the tunes of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” and “Yankee Doodle Went to Town.”

If praise touches the depths of the human spirit, these hymns remind us that praise does not require a specialized religious idiom. The language of praise is the language of ordinary life, for God meets us not in a special religious compartment of our lives but in the midst of ordinary day-to-day living. Every human experience can become an opportunity to pay attention to God and so to give God glory. If you ask me, that’s something worth singing about—and as Kim reminds us in one of these hymns, “God is in the singing.”

Benjamin Myers

Sydney