Into Your Hands We Commend Our Spirit, O Lord NLPHB 115

This is Ray Repp’s “Into Your Hands We Commend Our Spirit, O Lord” which takes inspiration from Psalm 30 (31) for the refrain and Psalm 21 (22) for the verses. It is something to sing in times of distress when God seems far away, although copying Christ’s use of these psalms from the cross seems a little dramatic. It depends on your circumstances I suppose, but it would make it somewhat difficult to sing communally except in narrow circumstances.

When I blogged this some years ago the only sheet music I had was from the New Living Parish Hymn Book I am currently working my way through. It looks like John de Luca left the chords very simple – I have seen more elaborate arrangements at guitar tab sites – but I don’t doubt he made his usual effort to make songs like this more playable on the organ.

I had no luck finding a current source for sheet music, but Mary at Godsongs found it under it’s Spanish title at OCP and if you know to search for it under that name, OCP will let you buy the sheet music in English – go figure. They only gave four verses, so I posted all six for completeness.

I made a new backing:

Refrain

Into your hands we commend our spirit, O Lord;

Into your hands we commend our hearts,

For we must die to ourselves in loving you;

Into your hands we commend our love.

1 O God my God why have you gone from me,

Far from my prayers, far from my cry?

To you I call and you never answer me;

You send no comfort, and I don’t know why.

2 Our fathers trusted, and you delivered them;

To you they cried and they escaped;

In you they trusted when darkness came their way,

And in your goodness you made them free.

3 You’ve been my guide since I was very young;

You showed the way when I needed someone’s hand,

And now I’m lonely; nobody’s by my side;

Stay near me, Lord, and be my friend.

4 My days are weary with people hating me,

Each place I go, each place I stay;

My heart is tired, my body aching.

Give me courage to face each day.

5 On ev’ry side my neighbours stare at me;

They pierce my heart with unkind words.

But you, O Lord, don’t stay so far from me;

Send me your comfort, and rescue me.

6 I will proclaim your name to all my friends,

God of our fathers and our God, too;

Your praise shall sound from ev’ry voice, O, Lord,

Soon ev’ry heart will worship you.

The original, with oddly tuned guitars:

Given the OCP treatment:

A nice vocal plus MIDI version:

Chris Brunelle adds class:

It needed sax:

The Midday Voices Choir:

Down to D and with chords:

On the mighty Yamaha: