The Creeds - Those Who Sing Well, Pray Twice

The Nicene Creed

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all that is, seen and unseen. We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in Being with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us men and for our salvation, he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered died and was buried. On the third day he rose again in fulfillment of the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end. We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets. We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

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The Nicene Creed
Rosalind Hughes (2017)	Rowland H. Prichard Hyfrydol (1830)
1. We believe in one God the Father the Almighty, Who made all things in earth and heaven that are seen, and unseen, too. We believe in one Lord, Christ Jesus, sole begotten Son of God; of the Father eternally begotten, through Him all that is was made,	2. God from God, true God from true God, Light from Light, Who’s always been, before time from time eternal; with His Father one true Being. Now for us and our salvation He came down to earth from heaven; by the Holy Ghost and Virgin Mary He became a man.
3. Suffered under Pontius Pilate, crucified for us, He died. From the tomb He rose in three days, Scriptures told of His return. He ascended into heaven, sits at God’s right hand on high. He will return to judge us in glory, and His kingdom will never end.	4. We believe the Holy Spirit gave us life; will always be with the Son and Father worshipped, Three in One and One in Three. Through the prophets spoke the Spirit; we believe the Church is One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic. By one baptism guilt’s undone.
5. We look for the resurrection, of the dead to glory or woe. We look for the world’s new life and all creation remade anew. Alleluia. Amen.

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…Et in Spiritum Sanctum, Dominum et vivificantem, qui ex Patre Filioque procedit; qui cum Patre et Filioque procedit; qui cum Patre et Filio simul adoratur et conglorificatur; qui locutus est per Prophetas. Et unam Sanctam Catholicam et Apostolicam Ecclesiam.…

The Apostles’ Creed

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son Our Lord, Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into Hell; the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into Heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. Amen.

George Wither (1588-1667)	Jesu Corona, Rouen Church Melody Harmonized by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)
1. In God the Father I believe, Who made all creatures by His Word; And true belief I likewise have In Jesus Christ, his Son, our Lord;	2. Who by the Holy Ghost conceived, Was of the Virgin Mary born; Who meekly Pilate’s wrongs received, And crucifiéd he was with scorn;
3. Who died, and in the grave hath lain; Who did the lowest pit descend; Who on the third day rose again, And up to heaven did ascend;	4. Who at his Father’s right hand there, Now thronéd sits, and thence shall come To take his seat of judgment here, And give both quick and dead their doom.
5. I in the Holy Ghost believe, The holy Church Cathólic too; And that the saints communion have, Undoubtedly believe I do.	6. From God’s free grace I beg likewise A pardon for my sins to gain. And when my flesh from death shall rise, May everlasting life obtain.

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On the use of Puritan, George Wither’s Apostles’ Creed:

Margo Todd, in a 1980 article, accepts the Puritans’ use of catechism but discounts the originality of Elizabethan Puritan catechists. Todd wrote that Puritans simply imitated Catholic humanists. “It was the humanist promotion of religious and classical education, at least as much as Protestant biblicism, which established the strong trend toward household instruction that characterized religious families of early modern England…. Thus in the very crucial area of household religious teaching, Puritan doctrine varied little, if at all, from that of Catholic humanists…. Milk for Babes: The Catechism in Reformation England 1550-1640
William Howard Dannemaier
College of William & Mary – Arts & Sciences – 1989

St. Patrick’s Breastplate

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I Bind Unto Myself Today – St. Patrick’s Breastplate
Saint Patrick (372-466) Cecil Francis Alexander (1818-1895)	Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924) St. Patrick LMD. St. Patrick’s Breastplate.
Atomruig Indiu – I Bind Myself Today Minor mode melody 1. I bind unto myself today the strong Name of the Trinity by invocation of the same, the Three in One and One in Three.	2. I bind this day to me forever, by power of faith, Christ’s incarnation, His baptism in the Jordan river, His death on cross for my salvation, His bursting from the spiced tomb, His riding up the heavenly way, His coming at the day of doom, I bind unto myself today.
3. I bind unto myself today the virtues of the starlit heaven, the glorious sun’s life-giving ray, the whiteness of the moon at even, the flashing of the lightning free, the whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks, the stable earth, the deep salt sea around the old eternal rocks.	4. I bind unto myself today the power of God to hold and lead, God’s eye to watch, God’s might to stay, God’s ear to hearken to my need, the Wisdom of my God to teach, God’s hand to guide, God’s shield to ward, the Word of God to give me speech, God’s heavenly host to be my guard.
Tochuiriur Etrum Indíu (The Lorica) Major mode melody 5. Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me, Christ beside me, Christ to win me, Christ to comfort and restore me.Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ in quiet, Christ in danger, Christ in hearts of all that love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.	Atomruig Indiu – I Bind Myself Today Minor mode melody 6. I bind unto myself the Name, the strong Name of the Trinity by invocation of the same, the Three in One and One in Three, of Whom all nature has creation, eternal Father, Spirit, Word. Praise to the Lord of my salvation; salvation is of Christ the Lord!

Folk-Tale of the Power of the Sign of the Holy Trinity (The Elfin Knight)

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About This Site

All music on this site is © William Keevers except those commonly attributed to prior arrangments. (This is so I can’t be deprived of the ability to play, correspond about and continue my own work.) Most music arrangements on this site are unique pairings of text to tune made and recorded by the proprietor. Any arrangement you’ve never previously heard is probably covered.
sing-prayer.org
Those who sing well, pray twice. Some accounts portray God as singing creation into existence. Implicit in the listing of the two main Divine attributes, knowing and loving, is the ability to render thought into speech; our sharing this intellectual attribute with God and His angels is one of mankind’s greatest gifts. A people who do not fully exercise speech by intoning it in song frequently in their daily lives are in the process of losing the abundant life of thought, intention and praise of God. If you don’t sing every day, your voice is being stilled, to the great pleasure of the enemy of souls, and you are allowing a vital means of our fullfilling our commission to persuade those at the ends of the earth about The Truth to atrophy into uselessness. (The shrewd and clever who serve the enemy are not remiss in using music to do their dark work.)
     In Mike Aquilina’s book How the Choir Converted the World: Through Hymns, With Hymns, and In Hymns, it is shown that the normal vehicle for catechizing converts in the early Church was song.
     Some passages in the New Testament are clearly poetry, song. (John Senior asserted that prior to 1750, all didactic content was versified.) If you want to help the Church to recover from the destructive legacy, the liturgical sabotage of Rembert Weakland’s "Hootenany Masses", you need to sing every day, in your home life
     My grandfather … kept up the ancient Christian custom of singing at the dinner-table, and it did not seem incongruous when he sang The Fine Old English Gentleman…. – G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography(¿What, you’re not singing “It’s Raining, It’s Pouring, The Old Man is Snoring”, “This Old Man…Knick-Nack Paddywhack” and “There Was a Dog that Had a Bone and B.I.N.G.O. Was His Name-O” with your children around the table?), and include song in your prayer life–on this site, "sacred-vernacular" hymns in English replete with traditional catechetical depth. (Children 18 months to 4 years use song as their primary vehicle for cogitation, before they get told “shut up that noise, stop singing”.) Your essential humanity is hard-wired to sing. You cannot foster restoration of the Church’s priceless cultural patrimony without giving it a living home in your own members as it was intended by our Blessed Creator.
     Common people prior to the displacement of active culture by the passive consumption of radio & talkies, had the customary, frequent habit of singing popular, folk and classically-informed home music. (Middlebrow culture, modestly informed by high culture.) Simply stated, before radio, if you wanted music, you “had” to make it, and most people, except the deaf and tone-deaf, did with unforced enthusiasm, having fun “doing it themselves” on a self-determined basis which programmed school handicapping today makes extremely unlikely to recover. In the decade prior to the end of World War One, there were 300 piano brands in the U.S. alone, annually there were an average of ten million-selling sheet music issues, the average person could, and did, sing the lyrics to 200 songs, in three or four parts. Whereas, even highly cultivated aficionados today of some particular music specialty are not known to crack their voice with a single song, for decades of their lives.
     The time a century ago was no idealilzed "golden age", yes, it was heavily, commerically-marketed and, indeed, much of the music was rather silly–and the people knew that full well. But they shared in common with other periods, stretching back into the mists of folk music pre-history, the fact of everyone singing everyday, in their ordinary lives, in all times prior to our own.
     To get the sense of a common activity that everyone did, consider that 50 years ago, every man took a vital interest in sports scores–nostalgic for a time before men were thrown off the farm by International Harvester, when vigorous physical labor was considered proudly manly. Today, nearly everyone cooks a personal specialty dish–before cooking robots rob us of our culinary culture forever. But a century ago, everyone shared in a strong social-cultural stream, in song. “The ‘Audience’ were the ‘Performers'”.

The ‘Audience’ were the ‘Performers’

sing-prayer.org
     A century ago, the love of music was active, the love of singers, those who lived song. Everyday singing was the default cultural condition, a widespread social habit more ingrained than just a hobby, a full dimension of interpersonal life completely atrophied today, but at that time casually practiced by nearly everyone.
     Today, the corrosive effects of consciousness emulation by electronic technologies, artificial algorithms emulating nearly to extinction, echoing to the point of sensory snow-blindness, our once-original activity, are threatening to dispense entirely with our own involvement, as they enslave us into device-dependent thralldom. (Computers will always be able to flawlessly perform feats of mere technical prowess much more efficiently than humans, but computers are only soulless shells, never able to originate creative works under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost–but computers can be made to enslave humans with indolence and lower their gaze from the stars, pedaling narcotic divertissements denatured at their core of spiritual essence.)
     We have been rendered as cultureless automatons, because we don’t practice culture, we merely consume with indifference the “content” of past ages which did actively practice culture, allowing our receptors of active culture to be deceived with ersatz quasi-cultural glitz.
     A century ago virtually everyone sang, on a frequent basis, in their personal, social, cultural lives. Prior to the rollout of radio and sound film from 1923-1930, common people had long, routinely practiced a vigorous home song-culture – unknown to today’s techno-media consumers.
Culture isn’t something you consume, it’s something you practice.     The ordinary, common people a century past, prior to the expulsion of active personal culture in the period 1923-1930, were possessed of a surprisingly high average culture level. The average person was highly engaged in active musical culture, at some level, high or low, to an extent completely unsuspected today.
     Hundreds of old films, even into the 1950s, portray average people in this last period of active song decades prior, as engaged in an active choral life in homes, restaurants and pubs, civic spaces and churches. These are portrayals of active, casual, personal and social music practice not as a novelty, but as backward-looking nostalgia for an actual historical period decades prior that would never return.
     People today are completely oblivious to the fact of their having come up, in a culturally strangulated environment, raised as passive spectators, cultural pate de foie gras, completely disconnected from their own culture by decades of techno-gadget history.

Popular Music Before Radio & Talkies
You Did It Yourself

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