Abide With Me (Abram Van Engen)

From Albert Wier, A Book of a Thousand Songs (public domain)

When I was growing up, we went to church twice on Sundays. The evening gathering was always smaller, the service slightly different, the sense of togetherness both more informal and more intimate. Few churches continue this twice-Sabbath practice anymore, and these days we can’t even gather once on Sunday. Occasionally I miss it, but I won’t pretend that I liked it as a kid. When I was eight, one service was well enough.

Yet even when I was dragged against my will back to church, there was still a particular event I especially loved. Every now and then, we’d just sing hymns for a long while, one after another. Congregants could suggest a title or a number, the pianist would pick out the tune and harmony, and all would begin to sing. We always chose whatever everyone knew best, and the one I remember most is “Abide with Me.”

Maybe it was the song, maybe it was the singers. The evening service tended to attract mostly older folks. Shocks of white hair from the aged heads of the Dutch Reformed would be scattered all about me. And the setting light would touch on that hair like tongues of flame. Standing still, hymnbooks in hand, working their way through a somber tune with the tops of their heads all ablaze—it was as Pentecostal as the Dutch Reformed ever got.

Of course, an evening in northern Indiana can have any kind of light, depending on the season. In the winter, it would be dead dark all around, the church offering its own comfort of light inside. In early fall or late spring, however, a setting sun would often make its way through the windows to the bare pews and walls. And that’s how I mostly remember it—that dimming light, that white hair glowing, the elders warming to the hymn:

Abide with me, fast falls the eventide.
The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide;
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, oh, abide with me.

I think of that hymn often now, and how many could use its words. In Italy, I heard recently, priests stand covered in protective gear with a cross scrawled on their white coats saying prayers from the doorway for the dying. They cannot hold hands. They cannot anoint with oil. They cannot perform in a proper way the Last Rites most longed for. All across the world, people are passing away alone in an empty room.

It is no small thing in such circumstances to believe that one abides. It is no small thing to believe that there is help for the helpless—that God is near to them, closer than any priest or pastor, inside each room and beside us at that moment when our breath grows short. It is no small thing to believe that when we seem most alone, we are not alone. 

But it is no easy thing to believe either, as the church itself has long recognized.

I have another favorite hymn, also drawn from a childhood memory. Visiting my grandma in the far corner of rural Iowa, I once witnessed all the old folks from her church rise and sing in Dutch Psalm 42: “As a deer in want of water, so I long for you, O Lord.” I’ve been told that Psalm 42 was the most sung psalm in the Christian Reformed Church during my parents’ and grandparents’ generation—a psalm of intense longing and lamentation. The second verse incorporates the very question that has so often been asked: 

Bitter tears of lamentation
are my food by night and day.
In my deep humiliation,
“Where is now your God?” they say.

Christianity has been asked that question often—accused sometimes of being a delusion meant to comfort the afraid. I’m not sure why any comfort, true or not, should be dismissed or denied. But when I think of my elders singing “Abide with Me” in the sanctuary of my mind, or when I think of my grandma singing Psalm 42 on those Iowa plains, delusion does not seem right. Scripture never promised them prosperity or security or an easy life, and many never knew such things. It promised them the comfort of God’s presence to the end—a face when all faces are masked. 

O my soul, why are you grieving,
why disquieted in me?
Put your hope in God, believing
he will still your refuge be.
I again shall praise his grace
for the comfort of his face;
he will show his help and favor,
for he is my God and Savior. 

I cannot say how God abides with others or makes his presence known. But when I hear Psalm 42 and “Abide with Me,” I am transported back to those evening services in a plain Protestant church with a setting light igniting the hairs of my elders. I abide there, with that group, among those congregants who came back to church longing for something more. And in my memory of these hymns, I sense a love that brought this longing to fruition.

For me, that is enough—for it seems to me that such a powerful love must be its own strong thing, something independent that pulls these believers together and unites them in song, a divine love that meets the needs and makes sense of the deep expressions of human longing. I feel surrounded by that love when I sing. It is there in all those who have sung this hymn before, and is there as well in that presence, that something more, that makes the singing possible at all.

I do believe that God abides with us, and that he dwells in each room and by each bed where darkness deepens. And I hope that his presence, however known and felt, can be a comfort when evening falls. 

Abide with me, fast falls the eventide.
The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide;
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, oh, abide with me.

 Abram Van Engen is a Carver Project Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.

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