April 2020 Magazine

Touch The Earth Lightly
Shirley Erena Murray
Aotearoa/New Zealand hymn writer Shirley Erena Murray died on 25 January.
No fewer than 23 of her hymns are in CH4, including such favourites as Brother,
Sister, let me serve you, Touch the Earth Lightly and For everyone born a place at
the table.
In 2008 she was interviewed by Douglas Galbraith and talked about snow-free
carols, travel brochures, her Ullapool forebears, and what prompted her to reach
for her pen. With Douglas’ permission part of that interview is given below.
It was in the safety of my congregation at St Andrew’s on the Terrace
Wellington, where I first dared to come out of the hymn writers’ closet.
It’s a very public thing, hymn writing, and I’m not a public kind of person. I first
became aware of the frustrations of the preacher not finding relevant hymns early
in my married life, when my husband John would groan over the limitations of the
hymn book (the Revised Church Hymnary). It was not so much the stale theology
of much that did exist as the gaps in the subject index and the non-inclusive
language of the time. There did not exist, in the present-day sense, a body of
hymns on human rights, world peace (as opposed to inner) or social justice in its
varied forms.
At home in New Zealand, it is enormously important to me to be able to
sing our story from our own soil, hence some ‘national’ hymns alluding to our
history and hopes, and especially our efforts as an anti-nuclear nation, standing in
the Pacific for world peace. ‘Where mountains rise to open skies’ is one which has
been sung at the ANZAC (Australia and New Zealand Army Corps) service in
Westminster Abbey, and I have now followed this with a specific Anzac Day hymn,
which includes a verse honouring conscientious objectors whom our country
treated very badly in the wars of last century.
Another need that the nations of the Southern Hemisphere have is for snow-free
carols for our upside-down Christmas! I've found carols to be the ultimate
challenge: how to move on from the Christmas story with a childhood kind of faith
into something real - the Incarnation made relevant.
Close to my heart are the hymns which spring out of protest or complaint
about an issue which touches me to the quick: the abuse and slavery of children,
the degradation of women - subtle or not, violence of every kind, and the
desecration of our beautiful environment. 'Touch the earth lightly', whose first line
was suggested by a poster, goes back to the time of the French nuclear testing in
the Pacific, against which New Zealand had for years protested at the United
Nations - 'agents of death for all creatures that live'.