For Your gift of God the Spirit

I. Textual History

Canadian hymn writer and educator E. Margaret Clarkson (1915–2008) offered a brief account of the conception of this hymn in her anthology A Singing Heart (1987):

This was written at the Severn River, Ontario, in 1959. I had been asked by C. Stacey Woods, General Director of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, to write a teaching hymn on the Holy Spirit for use in student work.[1]

In an interview with David W. Music, she added, “He felt so many young people in the school groups didn’t really know anything about the Holy Spirit, so I began from there. . . . It was a difficult poem to write.”[2]

Intervarsity, a campus ministry to college students, published Clarkson’s hymn in Anywhere Songs in 1960. In this first printing, the hymn had nine stanzas of four lines. Musically, it was set to SHARON, a sturdy English tune by eighteenth-century composer William Boyce (1711–1779), which traces back to A Collection of Melodies for the Psalms of David (1765). At the time, King James English was still commonplace and would have been intended as a measure of reverence, thus the opening line was originally “For Thy gift of God the Spirit,” and the old pronouns “Thee” and “Thy” appeared a few other times throughout.

Clarkson included the hymn in her own collection, Clear Shining After Rain, in 1962. In preparation for InterVarsity’s collection Hymns II (1976 | Fig. 2), Clarkson revised her text extensively. Most importantly, she softened the King James pronouns to the more natural “You” and “Your,” which meant replacing the rhyme scheme in the first stanza, thus also removing the archaic “e’er.” In order to have the hymn fill a double-length tune (8.7.8.7.D), she added four lines to the first stanza and paired the rest into groups of eight lines, with a little bit of rearrangement.

To go along with her updated text, the editors used a newer tune, MEAD HOUSE, composed by Cyril Taylor (1907–1991), taken from the BBC Hymn Book (1951). Like Boyce’s tune, this setting is classically conceived with a harmonic rhythm of changes on every beat.

Clarkson revised her text once more, as she would later explain: “In 1984, in an effort to remove all archaisms from the text and make it totally contemporary, I made this final revision. Since this is by far the best version of the hymn, no further permission will be granted for publication of the earlier versions.”[3] At the time, her hymn was being prepared for inclusion in Rejoice in the Lord (1985 | Fig. 3), and her final version first appeared there.

In this collection, Clarkson’s hymn appeared with yet another English tune, this time with BETHANY, composed by Henry Smart (1813–1879), which first appeared in Psalms and Hymns for Divine Worship (1866).

The header of this example gives the date as 1982. Erik Routley (1917–1982), who initially led the committee for Rejoice in the Lord before his death on 8 October 1982, had proposed Clarkson’s hymn for inclusion in May of 1982. The version he gave to the committee was the text from Hymns II (1976).[4] What spurred Clarkson to revise the text is unclear, but for this hymnal she changed two lines: “brooded o’er the pathless deep” became “brooded on the lifeless deep,” and “Hold us in His mighty sway” became “work in us His sovereign way.”

Clarkson’s text is sometimes also set to BLAENWERN, a tune by William Rowlands (1860–1937), distributed informally during the Welsh revival of 1904–1905, then published formally in Cân a Moliant (1915). According to Bert Polman, “The tune’s name refers to a farm in Pembrokeshire where Rowlands convalesced as a youth.”[5]

II. Analysis

According to Clarkson, the hymn was intended as a teaching text on the Holy Spirit; this hymn serves that purpose very well. Reformed scholar Bert Polman summarized the hymn this way:

If “Veni Creator Spiritus” is the classic prayer text to the Holy Spirit, “For your gift” is the best teaching text on the Holy Spirit. Inspired by biblical passages about the work of the Spirit in creation, the church, and our personal lives, this text reads like a study of doctrine on the Holy Spirit. It is a splendid example of sung theology, which brings our heart’s confession onto our lips.[6]

Clarkson was able to convey a number of key ideas about the person and work of the Holy Spirit through her text. The Spirit is a renewing power (Eph. 3:16). By the Spirit we “are being transformed into the same image [of God] from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor. 3:18). In the first stanza, Clarkson set the context of the delivery of the Spirit as the “crowning gift” of the Resurrection, promised at the Ascension, a full part of the Godhead (the Trinity).

In the second stanza, the text takes worshipers back to the beginning, as the Spirit moved across Creation (Gen. 1:2), then explains how the Spirit still moves “across our nature’s darkness” (Rom. 8:10, Titus 3:5). The Spirit brings awareness of sin (John 16:8). We are born of the Spirit (John 3:5) and sealed by the Spirit (2 Cor. 1:22, Eph. 1:13, 4:30), who is our Advocate or Helper (John 14:26).

Clarkson described the Spirit as the “Living Author,” consistent with how 2 Timothy 3:16 describes Scripture as being “breathed out” or “inspired” by God. The Spirit also acts as interpreter (1 Cor. 2:7–13). The Spirit helps us when we don’t know how to pray, interceding for us (Rom. 8:26–27). The Spirit dwells within us (Ezek. 11:19, 36:26–27) and gives us strength (Eph. 3:16). The Spirit helps us to resist temptation (Gal. 5:16) and equips us in battles of spiritual warfare (Eph. 6:10–20).

In her final stanza, addressed as a prayer to the Father, she asks for the Spirit to rule, “grieved not” (Eph. 4:30), and “quenched not” (1 Thess. 5:19). She also asks to be filled with the Spirit (Acts 2:4, Eph. 5:18), and finishes by asking for “your perfect will be done,” a reference to the Lord’s Prayer (Matt. 6:10) and/or Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matt. 26:39, Lk. 22:42).

As an educator and a writer and a poet, Clarkson’s task was fulfilled skillfully, not only by injecting the hymn with Christian doctrine, but by crafting a text with a smooth flow of trochaic lines using easily understandable words. This hymn on the Holy Spirit deserves a place among the finest texts on the subject, worth preserving for generations to come.

by CHRIS FENNER
for Hymnology Archive
27 May 2020

Footnotes:

1. Margaret Clarkson, A Singing Heart (Carol Stream, IL: Hope, 1987), p. 35.

2. David W. Music, “An interview with Margaret Clarkson,” The Hymn, vol. 45, no. (July 1994), p. 8: HathiTrust

3. Margaret Clarkson, A Singing Heart (Carol Stream, IL: Hope, 1987), p. 35.

4. “Hymnal Project: ER 31,” typescript agenda (May 1982), from the files of Norman Kansfield.

5. Bert Polman, “BLAENWERN,” Psalter Hymnal Handbook (Grand Rapids: CRC, 1998), p. 268.

6. Bert Polman, “For your gift of God the Spirit,” Psalter Hymnal Handbook (Grand Rapids: CRC, 1998), p. 576.

Related Resources:

“For Your gift of God the Spirit,” Hymnary.org: https://hymnary.org/text/for_your_gift_of_god_the_spirit