These hymns were written during my tenure at Saint Francis Lutheran Church in San Francisco. The first hymn was written for a preaching series on the Ten Commandments. Since Luther's classic hymn, That Man A Godly Life Might Live, didn't make it into the Lutheran Book of Worship, I decided to do a brief hymn based on the Decalogue. The title of Luther's hymn is quoted in the last verse of the new hymn.
The second hymn,
The Season Now for Sighing, was written to be accompanied by Arbeau's
Pavane, which I first heard on a disk of medieval music in the 70s.
I had always wanted to write something based on this hymn tune. The result
was this hymn for Lent. There are, perhaps, too many verses, and one should
feel to choose not sing all of them.
MTH 2/7/2006
