This song by Fr Kevin Bates is sung extremely frequently at our church – it is a reliable eucharist song that everyone knows and will sing. I doubt it is well known outside Australia but it probably should be.
The snippet at AOV reveals a very gentle guitar based folk song that you will have trouble matching with the assembly. This is one of the songs at AOV that can be bought as a single download, which is handy if you don’t want the whole collection.
I also noted that the singer wasn’t following the music slavishly. This makes me feel a little better, because neither do we. The very pretty introduction has a bar of 2/4 before the verse commences – we have always ignored that and stayed in 3/4 the whole way. Also, the second verse has a change in the tune for “food for the journey” which we have steadfastly ignored for years. I did put it in my backing just to hear what it should sound like but I don’t think we can sing it that way now.
Verse 1
Take of my bread and eat, drink my new wine.
Take of my life and live, branch of my vine.Let me befriend you now; eat take your fill.
Don’t be afraid to dream; love has its will.Verse 2
Take up your burden now, walk ’til you find
Just what the journey means; walk while there’s time.Food for the journey will answer your need.
Don’t be afraid to walk; love, my love will lead.Verse 3
Take of my bread and eat, drink my new wine.
Be a sweet nourishment to good friends of mine.Let me befriend you now; eat, take your fill.
Share with your people, that love has its will.Verse 4
Take of my bread and eat, drink my new wine.
Take of my life and live, branch of my vine.
© Kevin Bates 1985.
Thanks for your efforts to provide support to liturgical musicians through this helpful blog.
Like you, we don’t follow every single jot on the music, based on what seems to work for us the congregation 🙂
Thanks. I need to learn this hymn. Your backing track is very helpful.
I remember this “hymn” growing up.
Looking at it now, it promotes heresy and sacrelige.
There is no bread or wine after a valid Consecration.
To sing a sappy, sentimental song in the Mass is an offence against Our Lord and His Holy Church.
It is absolute garbage.
No wonder why so many have lost the true Faith and fallen away.
G’Day Mike.
I’ve reread the lyrics and see nothing that suggests a rejection of transubstantiation.
It does have us singing in the voice of God, which is no longer looked on as favourably as it was decades ago when this was written, but you can’t blame the good Father for that.
It has a sentiment that reveals an aspect of the meaning of Eucharist and to be fair no song would ever encompass the full range of meanings in the sacrament.
I’ve heard it played many times in a mass setting where it was anything but sappy.
So I think you are wrong – it is not garbage. You should accept that people in the Church without your direct line to the mind of God have the very best intentions and work tirelessly to build of the Kingdom.
By all means take it up with Father Bates, but be a little more charitable if you do.
kev@kevinbates.com
cheers Geoff
Ok thanks Geoff for your reply.
I don’t mind spirited discussion. I can take a wrap from someone with a different view. Its not a problem.
I left the church many years ago, because all this syrupy nonsense (like this silly embarrassing song, which if not heretical, tends towards heresy) left me hollow and I went looking for something with more depth in evangelical protestantism.
After some years, I realised that these protestant sects have no foundation in Christ and no authority or mission from God, and teach all kinds of heresies. So I began a more earnest study of the Catholic Church, but as an outsider, and even an enemy of what I thought the Church was.
Several very important doctrines of which I did not have the slightest clue were uncovered in my study of the Church. E.g. I never knew that the Mass is the renewal of the Sacrifice of Calvary in an un-bloody manner, and that same Sacrifice actually takes place upon the altar during Mass. In fact, this is the very heart of the Mass, which the architects of the New Mass of 1969 suppressed, by turning the Mass into a celebration of a meal by the community – a re-enactment of the Last Supper. This is completely false.
I only learned this and a whole lot more when I read my way back into the Church 12 years ago, by reading pre-Vatican II documents, sermons from saints of old, and teachings of Doctors and Fathers.
I realised that I had been short-changed in spite of all my years of Catholic schooling, and going to the local parish Mass each Sunday.
It was as if the pre-Vatican II Church was a different religion compared to the post-Vatican II Church – the only one I had known and grown up with.
Now I don’t accept any of the modernist poison that caused me and my whole generation to simply get up and leave mainly bad theology and bad liturgy.
I just remembered this song from my youth and looked it up to make sure I remembered the lyrics correctly. What a horror.
Talking about sharing a meal of bread and wine is a completely different notion to the renewal of Calvary upon the Altar.
The first is a man-centered, introspective, sentimental thing, and the second is the most wonderful, stupendous and mysterious thing in the entire universe, and even all eternity.
I want to keep the religion that my ancestors persevered in for centuries and handed on to the next generation, and that means I have to avoid the new religion, new church, and new mass that was invented at Vatican II, and which has been the direct cause of almost universal apostasy from the Catholic Church.
So, now I view the very things that made me hollow and drove me away from the Church as dangerous traps, and the people who promote them as my non-Catholic heretical enemies.
Yes, this kind of talk is not welcome in the “nice” modern church, but I’m not a member of that church. I am a member of the Church Militant, and will fight and if necessary, die for Her, by God’s grace.
May I suggest you get out of your local parish and go to the Traditional Latin Mass in your area?
May God bless you,
Michael
I fear I’m beyond your help, Michael.
I hang onto my allegiance to the church by a whisker from the other side. I think modernism can’t understand mystery and any sort of fundamentalism whether Catholic or Protestant fails on that level. I’m closest to a high Church Anglican I suspect, who accepts women priests etc, but it’s hard to go there while they have Sydney Anglicans and their ilk on board.
I do think that liturgy is the engine of formation and that the miracle of Vatican 2 was to start the process of reinvolving the people of God in that mystery and indeed recovering the meal aspects of Eucharist. I just don’t think the Church has gone far enough and you think it has gone too far. At least none of us are happy with the status quo!
I could only entertain a TLM service as a postmodern exercise, which would probably be disrespectful.
Many thanks for your views, Michael, and I wish us all peace.
cheers
Geoffrey
For me the Eucharist is strength for the work Jesus left us to do when he said he would send us his Holy Spirit to continue the work on earth which He started. This is an evolving world. We are not meant to get stuck in the past.
Father Kevin Bates died yesterday 31 Jan 2024.
He was a friend and will miss him tremendously.