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Good morning. Last week I passed a large poster which said ‘You are enough’. I was already familiar with the empowering mantra: I am enough. It was nice to have someone else telling me, because repeating I am enough can feel like trying to pick myself up in a bucket. My Nonconformist roots are showing. I’m hardwired to need something more than a wellbeing self-care message to crank me up out of my gloom. I need a bible verse, a old prayer, or a good hymn.

There are plenty of secular anthems which operate powerfully in our lives. ‘I will survive’ has been owned and inhabited by countless wounded lovers as a rock to stand on. Who hasn’t known a moment when Nina Simone’s ‘Feeling Good’ perfectly hits the spot? But there’s something about an old hymn—I may be biased—that reaches parts other anthems can’t reach.

Hymns resonate at levels too deep for us to articulate. They reverberate with scripture and the vast narrative of salvation. Like the mightiest cathedral organ pipes, the sound is below the range of human hearing, but it shakes the very air. it gives a a sense of the supremely ‘Other’ drawing alongside the mundane. I feel this profoundly in hymns like ‘How shall I sing that majesty’ The last verse reaches out in wonder, right to the edges of human imagination:

Thou art a sea without a shore,
a sun without a sphere;
thy time is now and evermore,
thy place is everywhere. Amen.