Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart;
Nought be all else to me, save that Thou art
Thou my best Thought, by day or by night,
Waking or sleeping, my presence, my light.

Be Thou my wisdom, Thou my true word
I ever with the, Thou with me, Lord;
Thou my great father and I thy true son.
Thou in me dwelling, and I with the one

Be Thou my battle-shield, sword for the fight,
Be Thou my dignity, Thou my delight.
Thou my soul's shelter, Thou my high tower.
Raise Thou me heaven-ward, O Power of my power.

Riches I seek not, nor man's empty praise,
Thou mine inheritance, now and always.
Thou and Thou only, first in my heart
High King of heaven, my treasure, Thou art.

High King of Heaven after victory won,
May I reach heaven's joys, O bright heaven's sun
Heart of my own heart, whatever befall,
Still be my vision, O Ruler of all

Translated from the ancient Irish by Mary Elizabeth Byrne (1880-1931)
Turned into verse by Eleanor Henrietta Hull (1860-1935)
This tune, Slane, is a traditional Irish air from Joyce’s Old Irish Music and Songs.

The midi file is here

The following should be read in conjunction with the The Million Dollar Question

More Meaningful Coincidences
Before typing the words above, the idea came to me to find the hymn book which I discovered a couple of days ago in a pile in the bedroom. I hadn’t seen that book for ages, perhaps a year, until I had found it then.  I thought that it might have verses set in a form which was easier to type from. I was fairly sure that it was the one we found in a charity shop a couple of days before we went to our first service at the Mount Albert Methodist Church. This proved to be the case. It was the full music version of the 1950 edition of The School Hymn Book of the Methodist Church. That book was indeed labelled 4th October 2002. And there was another version of the Methodist hymn book, also a full music version, in that charity shop that day. The woman in the shop gave them to us. ‘Nobody wants those nowadays’, she added.

The shop was at Kelston in West Auckland, an area where we had gone for dentist appointments. These ‘book findings’ to use a term once employed by an Anglican priest of my acquaintance, confirmed for us that we should go along to Mount Albert Methodist Church with a view to joining the choir on the following Sunday, 6th October. By ‘chance’ it was also the eighth anniversary of my first arrival in New Zealand. I remembered 6th October particularly, because it was the anniversary of William Tyndale’s execution in 1536.  His heinous crime was translating the Bible into English, the New Testament from Greek and the Old Testament from Hebrew.   And Tyndale was to link powerfully into my choir experiences in November 2002, in connection with our singing the Te Deum in two different choirs in two different languages.  For the full story, see Enigmas of Easter, Vol 2  The Alpha and Omega Codes.

And between my finding those books on 4th October and going to that first Mt Albert Methodist Church service on 6th came the ‘Lost Chord’ Coincidences.

Rather curiously, there is yet another strange time recurrence involved here.   When I came to improve the voicing on this midi file for this page today, I found that Mac Lynch, my fellow tenor at St Mary's Bombay at Easter in 2003 had first produced it on 5th October, 1997, some seven months after our paths crossed professionally.  That had been as a result of problems on a waste water treatment plant at  Waikato by Products on the Waikato river on Good Friday, 1997.