<em>Sarah Sands on her brother, Kit, and the Psalms.</em>
The Book of Psalms has already been singled out by the Revd Jonathan Aitken for this publication (December 2023) and particularly the penitential <em>De Profundis</em>: “Out of the depths have I called to you, O Lord! Lord, hear my voice.” For Aitken, once a prisoner, now a prison chaplain, the psalms were a personal path to atonement and to solace.
I came to the Psalms only last year, as a companion to music and wonderful poetry. My brother, Kit Hesketh Harvey, had been a head chorister at Canterbury Cathedral and a choral scholar at Cambridge before following a career as a cabaret performer; after he died last February I went to visit his mentor, the composer of sacred music John Rutter.
Rutter talked to me about music coming from the same source as faith, which is mystery. Kit’s fellow chorister Harry Christophers, who founded The Sixteen, also pondered the closeness of music and faith when I asked him what being a chorister would have meant to Kit. He said that audience members who have listened (especially to Bach) sometimes say: “I don’t believe in God, I don’t believe there’s a heaven, but if I did, I have been there.”
For Christophers, and for my brother, the Psalms were part of their choral training; for the rest of us they are part of our Judeo-Christian culture even if we don’t recognise it. In the lead-up to Boris Johnson’s resignation as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in July 2022, he acknowledged the transience of power with a modified reference to the Psalms: “all flesh is grass.”
The most moving music of the Psalms comes from Brahms’s German Requiem. There is infinite pity in both the words and the music; Brahms thinks of those left behind as much as the dead.
Blessed are those who the grief bear<br>For they shall comforted be<br>Who with tears sow<br>Will with joys harvest<br>They go forth and weep<br>And bear precious seeds<br>And come with joy<br>And bring their sheaves. (Ps 126:5-6)
Being a former chorister, my brother was well versed in the ceremony of death and he particularly favoured the all-night vigil. He sat up with the coffin of my father, playing a recording of the German Requiem, among many other favourite and mostly German pieces, and we played Brahms again the following year for Kit as his coffin lay in the Norfolk church where he wrote and composed and where he died. Kit’s treasured piano, which originally belonged to his musical models Flanders & Swann, was nearby.
The Psalms have had a wider public resonance in the past months because of the war in the Middle East. When Hamas attacked Israel last October, many Jewish people felt an existential threat to their homeland. CS Lewis, who studied the Psalms and found some of them a little violent for modern tastes, saw them also as the story of Jewish exile.
“Century after century,” he wrote, “by blows which seem to us merciless, by defeat, deportation and massacre, it was hammered into the Jews that earthly prosperity is not in fact certain or even the probable reward of seeing God … But the astonishing thing is that the religion is not destroyed. In its best representatives it grows purer, stronger and more profound. It is being, by this terrible discipline, directed more and more to its real centre.”
For me, the Psalms are the solid earth beneath John Bunyan’s torrential river; in times of sadness and conflict, they are the promise of peace of mind and spirit.
St Basil the Great wrote: “A psalm implies serenity of soul; it is the author of peace, which calms bewildering and seething thoughts. For it softens the wrath of the soul and what is unbridled it chastens. A psalm forms friendships, unites those separated, conciliates those at enmity. Who, indeed, can still consider him an enemy with whom he has uttered the same prayer to God? So that psalmody, bringing about choral singing, a bond, as it were, towards unity, and joining the people into a harmonious union of one choir, produces also the greatest of blessings, charity.”
Psalms are at the heart of choral singing, and I think it is heartening that the hymn best-loved by the British public speaks of “quiet waters”, of gentleness, and goodness and kindness: the metrical version of Psalm 23.
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.<br>In grass meadows He makes me lie down,<br>By quiet waters guides me, My life He<br> brings back.<br>He leads me on pathways of justice for<br> His name’s sake.<br>Though I walk in the vale of death’s<br> shadow, I fear no harm.
For You are with me.<br>Your rod and Your staff – it is they that console me.<br>You set out a table before me in the face<br> of my foes.<br>You moisten my head with oil, my cup<br> overflows.<br>Let but goodness and kindness pursue<br> me all the days of my life.<br>And I shall dwell in the house of the<br> Lord for many long days.
