JERUSALEM THE GOLDEN

I was an undergraduate at Sewanee in the mountains of Tennessee the first time a hurricane hit home while I wasn’t there with the rest of my family.  I knew in my head that we’d had worse storms and come through them unscathed, but I was still twisted up in knots of worry simply because I wasn’t there.  I didn’t know what was happening; I couldn’t see that everything was fine.  It was a rude awakening to the fact that it is sometimes more stressful to be watching helplessly from the sidelines in a crisis than it is to be there in the middle of it all. It is a feeling that has become familiar now, living, as I do, with an ocean between me and home.

It was during one of those stressful times that a friend posted online about how she had just been caught unawares and struck by the beauty of an unfamiliar hymn: Jerusalem the Golden.  It was one with which I was also unfamiliar.  I looked it up in the hymnal, and listened to it on Spotify.  She was not the only one caught out.  It is a song of hope and promise.  It is an anthem of God’s triumph.  Right from the start we are assured of the joys of God’s Holy City at the last day:

Jerusalem the golden!
With milk and honey blest;
Beneath your contemplation
Sink heart and voice opprest.
I know not, oh! I know not,
What joys await us there,
What radiancy of glory,
What bliss beyond compare.



The hymn grabbed me and it would not let me go. It was so beautiful, so timely, and so appropriate.  Hearing the hymn was similar to those days when the scripture of the daily office seems to have been hand-picked for the challenge that lies before you; it felt as if this text, taken from Bernard of Cluny, translated by John Mason Neale, had been given to me in a time of need by the Holy Spirit.  

How welcome this grace was, because 3,720 miles from our home in north Wales, my grandmother lay in a hospital bed dying.  

It was a good and holy death, in the end.  It was the sort of thing we should all be so lucky to have.  She was ninety-two, she had been living on her own and active until only a few weeks before her passing.  A member of her church’s senior choir, only a few months before she died she’d run into her pastor out and about in town and when he’d asked her what she was up to she said she was “about to go sing for the old folks” because her choir was off to sing in a care home.  She had her health, her mind, and her independence right up to the end, and she was surrounded and supported with the love and care of her children and grandchildren.  

And above all of that, she had her firm and steadfast faith in Jesus Christ.  She’d been an active member of the church her whole life, and was confident that when her mortal body failed she would find her rest with God.  

Confident though she was (and I am) that it was glory awaiting her, in our human frailty the promised joy does not erase the grief and pain of separation; it is a moment in which we feel the reality of “heart and voice oppressed”. After all, it is not the rest of her soul that I mourn, but our parting.  The sorrow was compounded by the fact that I could not be present with my family during this bereavement, scheduled as I was for a return home only a couple of weeks after the funeral. 

Here in north Wales, I thought about my grandmother.  I thought about her faith and her life.  I thought about the challenges she’d faced and overcome.  I thought about the joys she’d had.  I thought about the hardship she’d seen.  I thought about the grace that had been poured out upon her in the midst of good and bad.  And I thought about her trust in what awaited her.  And, the accompaniment for my pondering was, invariably, “Jerusalem the Golden,” which was played on piano or computer enough that it undoubtedly drove my family a bit mad.

Grandma was not only a woman of strong faith, she was also quite traditional, though in a very different way to my own very traditional tendencies.  She was Southern Baptist, anabaptist, and evangelical in outlook.  The only time I’d ever seen alcohol cross her lips was on a couple of occasions in which she partook of the sacrament when I was celebrant.

I, on the other hand, am a high Anglican, ritualist and pre-conciliar in preference, un-precious and country-catholic in practice.  We were, nevertheless, united by a deep love for Christ and a deep gratitude for God’s salvation and grace.  I never doubted how proud she was of my faith and service to the church.  

This soundtrack to my grief was penned by Bernard of Cluny, a monk who satirised contemptuously the failings of society, of the church, and of its leaders.  He composed a mammoth work decrying these shortcomings, urging the church and people to worry less about the transient joys of this life and focus instead on the joys that are to come.  It is from this epic poem that the text for “Jerusalem the Golden” is taken. The specific text we know today was translated from the Latin by John Mason Neale. 


Neale was a priest whose ministry was underappreciated in life, but whose contributions to our hymnody were immense.  Whilst he composed a significant number of well-known hymns including Good King Wenceslas Looked out on the Feast of Stephen he is better known for his translations of ancient, medieval, patristic, and orthodox texts into Anglican hymnody.  He was able to draw on the breadth and glory of other traditions to enrich our own singing and understanding, translating such familiar hymns as All Glory, Laud, and Honour; O Come, O come, Emmanuel, Sing my Tongue the Glorious Battle, Creator of the Stars of Night, and O Wondrous Type! O Vision Fair.  This production and promotion of translated texts was a manifestation of his catholicity, and of the way his churchmanship drew on the fullness and unity of the church’s witness over both distance and time.

Neale was born into an evangelical family (his father was also a clergyman), but was himself a high churchman.  How appropriate then that in the midst of the loss of one who had such hope in the joys of heaven that I should find comfort in Bernard’s text, and that I, a high Anglican of an evangelical family should take solace in the words translated for us by Neale. 



Like everyone, my grandmother had faced hardships in her life.  She’d gone through a necessary divorce in a time in which that was uncommon.  Years later she’d found love again, only to be widowed following her husband’s brief illness only a few months after marriage.  Her prodigious skills and talents were not put to their best use during a time that did not give women fair opportunities.  But as she went to her rest, those wrongs and all other hurts, failures, and shortcomings were put back right.  She was bound for that new Jerusalem, to joys beyond compare.

Though the whole of the hymn is a look forward in hopeful expectation to the promises we find in Revelation about the last day and the end of all things, it was the third verse particularly that I found to be not only a word of reassurance or promise, but of comfort: 

There is the throne of David, and there from care released  
the shout of them that triumph, the song of them that feast; 
and they who with their leader, have conquered in the fight 
forever and forever are clad in robes of white.

I was thousands of miles from home, with a great and tumultuous sea between me and my family, but there will come a day when the sea is no more (Revelation 21:1) and we will find ourselves together once again.  And for one who had fretted and fussed over others for so long, one who spent so much of her life in service to her Lord and in service to others one who persevered through the changes and chances of life, I can think of nothing that would be a greater reward than to be in God’s presence.  She would delight in nothing more than being where “is the throne of David, and there from care released, the shout of them that triumph, the song of them that feast.”

Instead of going to sing for the “old folks” who were fifteen years younger than her, she has taken her place singing before the great throne of God.  Instead of labouring over the meals she so lavishly laid for us at the holidays she is welcomed to the feast.  And she, who after more than ninety years of faithful service in resisting sin, evil, and death had finally conquered in the fight, found herself decked once again as if a bride, forever and forever clad in robes of white.   

So even now, whenever Neale’s translation of Bernard’s words find themselves before me in the hymnal, I find myself once again jumping in the leaf piles she’d left in her well-tended garden for her grandkids to jump in, tucking in to her green beans with fatback and roasted turkey, sitting on the floor in her living room opening presents at Christmas, eating the cinnamon toast she’d make first thing in the morning…. I find myself, just out of the corner of my eye, catching a vanishing glimpse of the moment when I will stand at her side once again with all who have gone on before, joining in the great song of the triumphant in the pastures of the blessed.

And there, forever, bathed in the light of Christ, we will sing together to the old folks, to the lamb, and to the undying Glory of God.