White Lent

Thanks to Dr Jim Jordan for introducing us to it and the Clerk of Oxford for posting a great recording of the French Carol and Lenten Hymn: White Lent.

1. Now quit your care
And anxious fear and worry;
For schemes are vain
And fretting brings no gain.
To prayer, to prayer!
Bells call and clash and hurry,
In Lent the bells do cry
'Come buy, come buy,
Come buy with love the love most high!'

2. Lent comes in the spring,
And spring is pied with brightness;
The sweetest flowers,
Keen winds, and sun, and showers,
Their health do bring
To make Lent's chastened whiteness;
For life to men brings light
And might, and might,
And might to those whose hearts are right.

3. To bow the head
In sackcloth and in ashes,
Or rend the soul,
Such grief is not Lent's goal;
But to be led
To where God's glory flashes,
His beauty to come nigh,
To fly, to fly,
To fly where truth and light do lie.

4. For is not this
The fast that I have chosen? -
The prophet spoke -
To shatter every yoke,
Of wickedness
The grievous bands to loosen,
Oppression put to flight,
To fight, to fight,
To fight till every wrong's set right.

5. For righteousness
And peace will show their faces
To those who feed
The hungry in their need, 
And wrongs redress,
Who build the old waste places,
And in the darkness shine. 
Divine, divine,
Divine it is when all combine!

6. Then shall your light
Break forth as doth the morning;
Your health shall spring,
The friends you make shall bring 
God's glory bright,
Your way through life adorning
And love shall be the prize.
Arise, arise,
Arise! and make a paradise!