“A Meeting in a Hillside Home”

(Previous entries in this series: First week of Advent; Second week of Advent; Third week of Advent.)

The fourth and final hymn text I’ve chosen for the final week of Advent is one I wrote last year for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, Cycle C.  As is immediately obvious, the text is a meditation on the Visitation of Mary and Elizabeth, as would be appropriate for the final days of Advent when the Church invites us to ponder the events immediately impinging upon the birth of Jesus:

A meeting in a hillside home,
Two women face-to-face:
The ages turning on the hinge
Disclosed in their embrace.

Elizabeth, now great with child
In barrenness begun,
Receives her younger relative
Who bears her own dear Son.

The great Forerunner leaps for joy,
As though to start his race;
Elizabeth cries out with love:
“Hail, Mary, full of grace!”

“O who am I that on my life
Such favor be outpoured:
My home be graced by grace itself —
This mother and my Lord?”

“How blest are they who trust in God,
Whose hope cannot be killed,
Whose faith, unshaken, still declares:
‘God’s Word will be fulfilled!’”

Give us, O God of Advent joy,
The same delights as they:
The faith to see, the grace to dance,
The strength to walk your way.

Copyright © 2009 by The Jan Michael Joncas Trust. All rights reserved.

The first three stanzas of the hymn set the scene.  I wanted to communicate the cosmic significance of the meeting of two pregnant women, one older and one younger, both caught up in and consenting to the mystery of bearing human life.  The last three stanzas paraphrase Elizabeth’s response to Mary’s greeting, a short text that some scholars have nonetheless identified as a canticle (possibly parallel to the Magnificat).  I confess that I wanted the third line of the fourth stanza to read “My home be graced by Grace Himself,” but I then felt that it was inappropriate to suggest that the historical Elizabeth had recognized Mary’s firstborn as Son of God in the way in which Christians confess him.

I took some poetic license with the three requests in the last stanza: like Mary and Elizabeth who recognized in their pregnancies the will of God at work in the world, we beg that God allow us to see divine activity in the seemingly ordinary events of life; like John the Forerunner who leapt in Elizabeth’s womb “for joy,” we ask for the grace to dance our delight in the God we see acting in our history; and like the Christ borne in Mary’s womb, we ask for the strength to walk the way he has opened for us – through service and suffering, through death to life.

Since the text is in Common Meter (86.86), there are a myriad of hymn tunes to which it could be sung.  In an earlier Advent hymn commentary I mentioned how MORNING SONG (or CONSOLATION when one doesn’t repeat the last two lines of each stanza) has strong Advental associations for me; “A Meeting in a Hillside Home” could certainly be sung to that tune.  However, a less-familiar hymntune composed by Freeman Lewis (1780-1859) appearing in the 1854 Southern Harmony entitled DUNLAP’S CREEK would be my preferred melody for this text.  This D major pentatonic tune is notated in 4/4 time but seems to me more accurately sung in 2/2.  While some might be put off by the half notes at the beginning of each phrase matched to relatively unimportant syllables in the text, this defect is more than compensated for by the delightful cascade of eighth notes at the end of the third line which both illustrates the hinge turning in stanza one and the dance of grace in the final stanza.