Thought for the Month May 2026

Classical music, like pop, has its one-hit wonders – spare a thought for Gustav Holst., the Chesney Hawkes of Classic FM. Only his Planets suite gets played much, and even that always seems a bit anti-climactic after the big tune half-way through. But he also wrote choral music, often setting unusual texts. I have been listening to some, and it has got me thinking. His Hymn of Jesus, for example – if you want to know where Sydney Carter got the idea of Lord of the Dance from, it’s here, in a setting from one of the apocryphal gospels which didn’t make the final cut when they were putting the Bible together. 

As a church organist I play for a fair number of services I would prefer not to, and this year I decided to give Ash Wednesday a miss. This is the one where the vicar puts a mixture of ash and oil on your forehead (plenty to cover in my case) and tells you “Dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return”; to which the unspoken reply is “Now tell me something I don’t know”.  Which is exactly what Holst’s Choral Fantasia, a setting of verses from a poem by Robert Bridges, does. It’s a chance to rethink our attitude to death. Most funerals I play at these days are very similar. There isn’t much religion in them and what there is takes the verse “in my Father’s house are many rooms” to imagine the deceased rehomed in some kind of celestial granny flat, picking up the threads with partners and chums already on the premises while those left behind console themselves in the thought that the service constituted a “good send-off”. Those old spoilers at the party, Judgment, Sin and Hell, are not invited. But is this rather desperate kind of wake-woke bonhomie the only possible response?

We have obviously no real knowledge of what awaits us, but what emerges from Biblical texts is that in life after death something of us will be preserved – identity, awareness, capacity for emotion, and as a concomitant of these, memory.  And surely one of the things we want most, finally is to be remembered, hopefully with affection. Bridges imagines those who have passed on tuning in to our world to catch any conversation or anecdote or passing thought with them in it. And if we think of the dead like that, then our idea of death – and life – changes profoundly. We move closer to those religions where the unseen presence of those who have gone before is a reality. So we might perhaps start by thinking about what we are doing to the world they bequeathed us and what we ourselves are going to bequeath when we too become unseen – but still sentient – ancestors.

A second thought from the Bridges poem. What is likely to make us remembered? After all, eighty years or so after our death, anybody who knew us when we were alive will be dead too. Bridges’s answer is to have a bucket list of concrete things to do. Not to obsess that “all flesh is grass” and go around looking at the beauty of the world, thinking how sad it is to leave it, but instead to leave behind something that gives pleasure and gratitude. Art. Music. Farm. Feat of engineering. Cure for disease. Your choice.

A final, rather different slant. I always write my Thought with the words of my fellow “Thinker”, Danny, echoing in my mind: don’t ignore the difficult things in the Bible. Work on them. Bridges emphasises this too: we have to “strive” to understand God, because he “veileth” his cosmic wisdom. We within our world are bound by appearance and limited by language. In the end, God may be unknowable, his purposes unfathomable, but his love is to be trusted.

David

Eternal Father, who didst all create,

In whom we live, and to whose bosom move,

To all men be Thy name known, which is Love,

Till its loud praises sound at heaven’s high gate.

Perfect Thy kingdom in our passing state,

That here on earth Thou may’st as well approve

Our service, as Thou ownest theirs above,

Whose joy we echo and in pain await.

Grant body and soul each day their daily bread

And should, in spite of grace, fresh woe begin,

Even as our anger soon is past and dead

Be Thy remembrance mortal of our sin:

By Thee in paths of peace Thy sheep be led,

And in the vale of terror comforted.                                                     

Robert Bridges 1895