{"id":5543,"date":"2010-12-20T00:01:25","date_gmt":"2010-12-20T06:01:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/?p=5543"},"modified":"2010-12-19T23:43:23","modified_gmt":"2010-12-20T05:43:23","slug":"a-meeting-in-a-hillside-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/2010\/12\/20\/a-meeting-in-a-hillside-home\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;A Meeting in a Hillside Home&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>(Previous entries in this series: <a href=\"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/2010\/11\/28\/christ-comes-the-promised-peace-of-god\/\">First week of Advent<\/a>; <a href=\"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/2010\/12\/06\/we-are-yearning-for-the-season\/\">Second week of Advent<\/a>; <a href=\"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/2010\/12\/13\/wild-the-man-and-wild-the-place\/\">Third week of Advent<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The fourth and final hymn text I\u2019ve chosen for the final week of Advent is one I wrote last year for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, Cycle C.\u00a0 As is immediately obvious, the text is a meditation on the Visitation of Mary and Elizabeth, as would be appropriate for the final days of Advent when the Church invites us to ponder the events immediately impinging upon the birth of Jesus:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A meeting in a hillside home,<br \/>\nTwo women face-to-face:<br \/>\nThe ages turning on the hinge<br \/>\nDisclosed in their embrace.<\/p>\n<p>Elizabeth, now great with child<br \/>\nIn barrenness begun,<br \/>\nReceives her younger relative<br \/>\nWho bears her own dear Son.<\/p>\n<p>The great Forerunner leaps for joy,<br \/>\nAs though to start his race;<br \/>\nElizabeth cries out with love:<br \/>\n\u201cHail, Mary, full of grace!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cO who am I that on my life<br \/>\nSuch favor be outpoured:<br \/>\nMy home be graced by grace itself &#8212;<br \/>\nThis mother and my Lord?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHow blest are they who trust in God,<br \/>\nWhose hope cannot be killed,<br \/>\nWhose faith, unshaken, still declares:<br \/>\n\u2018God\u2019s Word will be fulfilled!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Give us, O God of Advent joy,<br \/>\nThe same delights as they:<br \/>\nThe faith to see, the grace to dance,<br \/>\nThe strength to walk your way.<\/p>\n<p>Copyright \u00a9 2009 by The Jan Michael Joncas Trust.  All rights reserved.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The first three stanzas of the hymn set the scene.\u00a0 I wanted to communicate the cosmic significance of the meeting of two pregnant women, one older and one younger, both caught up in and consenting to the mystery of bearing human life.\u00a0 The last three stanzas paraphrase Elizabeth\u2019s response to Mary\u2019s greeting, a short text that some scholars have nonetheless identified as a canticle (possibly parallel to the Magnificat).\u00a0 I confess that I wanted the third line of the fourth stanza to read \u201cMy home be graced by Grace Himself,\u201d but I then felt that it was inappropriate to suggest that the historical Elizabeth had recognized Mary\u2019s firstborn as Son of God in the way in which Christians confess him.<\/p>\n<p>I took some poetic license with the three requests in the last stanza: like Mary and Elizabeth who recognized in their pregnancies the will of God at work in the world, we beg that God allow us to see divine activity in the seemingly ordinary events of life; like John the Forerunner who leapt in Elizabeth\u2019s womb \u201cfor joy,\u201d we ask for the grace to dance our delight in the God we see acting in our history; and like the Christ borne in Mary\u2019s womb, we ask for the strength to walk the way he has opened for us \u2013 through service and suffering, through death to life.<\/p>\n<p>Since the text is in Common Meter (86.86), there are a myriad of hymn tunes to which it could be sung.\u00a0 In an earlier Advent hymn commentary I mentioned how <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hymnary.org\/tune\/morning_song_dare\">MORNING SONG (or CONSOLATION when one doesn\u2019t repeat the last two lines of each stanza)<\/a> has strong Advental associations for me; \u201cA Meeting in a Hillside Home\u201d could certainly be sung to that tune.\u00a0 However, a less-familiar hymntune composed by Freeman Lewis (1780-1859) appearing in the 1854 <em>Southern Harmony<\/em> entitled <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hymnary.org\/tune\/dunlaps_creek\">DUNLAP\u2019S CREEK<\/a> would be my preferred melody for this text.\u00a0 This D major pentatonic tune is notated in 4\/4 time but seems to me more accurately sung in 2\/2.\u00a0 While some might be put off by the half notes at the beginning of each phrase matched to relatively unimportant syllables in the text, this defect is more than compensated for by the delightful cascade of eighth notes at the end of the third line which both illustrates the hinge turning in stanza one and the dance of grace in the final stanza.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The fourth and final hymn text I\u2019ve chosen for the final week of Advent is one I wrote last year for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, Cycle C.  The text is a meditation on the Visitation of Mary and Elizabeth, as would be appropriate for the final days of Advent when the Church invites us to ponder the events immediately impinging upon the birth of Jesus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[17,22],"tags":[464,539,534],"class_list":["post-5543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liturgical-spirituality","category-music-hymns","tag-advent","tag-michael-joncas","tag-hymn-commentary"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>&quot;A Meeting in a Hillside Home&quot; - Home<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/2010\/12\/20\/a-meeting-in-a-hillside-home\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"&quot;A Meeting in a Hillside Home&quot; - Home\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The fourth and final hymn text I\u2019ve chosen for the final week of Advent is one I wrote last year for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, Cycle C. 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