Deland 87 87 97

Salib abu 1

This one is a bit out of season, but I always find that Lent comes awfully quickly. The words are by Reverend Ally Barrett, who has written a number of new hymn texts to familiar tunes. I like Picardy as a tune very much, but it strikes me as a bit static for words which are, ultimately, about the transformation of the dust of our lives through Christ’s redemption.

So I wrote a different tune, in triple time rather than duple, with a slur to accommodate the irregular number of syllables in the first line.
Here’s a PDF
Here’s a PDF with the text underlaid between the staves
And here are the usual robot guitars:

Dust to dust, we mark our repentance,
entering a guilty plea,
Ash to ash, we face our sentence,
Sin writ large for all to see:
Bearing signs of all our falls from grace,
Yearning for your strong embrace.

Dust of earth once shaped and moulded,
human form from Godly hand,
Male and female both enfolded,
part of all that you had planned.
Now O Lord reshape our damaged form,
Hold us till our hearts grow warm.

Dust that fuels the lights of heaven,
Stars and planets passing by,
Atoms of creation’s splendour,
Earth to earth and sky to sky,
Now our dust, redeemed, may sing along
with that universal song.

As usual, the music is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike: you can do what you like with it as long as you attribute me and you share under similar terms. Reverend Ally prefers to grant permission for non-commercial use only, though: if you want to use her words for commercial purposes, you have to ask her about it.

Thanks so much to the 23 supporters who funded me composing this music. If you’d like to see more of this sort of thing, you can contribute and help me keep sharing music like this at my Patreon page.