Walking Close with God

For Sunday, September 7, 2025
O For a Closer Walk With God by Charles Villiers Stanford

By David Jolliffe

            There’s a standing joke in the St. Paul’s Choir about the phrase “one of my favorites.”  As our beloved choirmaster Jack Cleghorn introduces hymns to us so we can practice them in advance of a service, Jack regularly designates a hymn as one as his favorites.  We choristers have concluded that Jack has so many favorites that it might be simpler to let us know which hymns are not his most favorites.

            I think it’s safe to say that the anthem the choir will sing at the 11 a.m. service on September 7 in not only one of Jack’s favorites but also one of the choir’s favorites as well.  Charles Villiers Stanford’s O for a Closer Walk with God has become one of the most beloved and frequently performed anthems in twentieth and twentieth-first century churches as it knits together three elements:  A lovely poem that provides the lyrics, an ancient hymn tune that provides the melody, and a beautiful arrangement by a master of choral and orchestral composition.

            The lyrics come from a piece by William Cowper, an eighteenth-century British poet who works precede and anticipate the achievement of more famous “nature poets,” notably William Wordworth.  Here is Cowper’s poem, originally published in 1779 as one of his “Olney Hymns”:

Oh! for a closer walk with God,
A calm and heavenly frame;
A light to shine upon the road
That leads me to the Lamb! 

Where is the blessedness I knew
When first I saw the Lord?
Where is the soul-refreshing view
Of Jesus and his word? 

What peaceful hours I once enjoyed!
How sweet their memory still!
But they have left an aching void,
The world can never fill.

Return, O holy Dove, return!
Sweet the messenger of rest!
I hate the sins that made thee mourn
And drove thee from my breast.

The dearest idol I have known,
Whate’er that idol be,
Help me to tear it from thy throne,
And worship only thee. 

So shall my walk be close with God,
Calm and serene my frame;
So purer light shall mark the road
That leads me to the Lamb.

Stanford’s anthem incorporates only three of the stanzas.  Listen carefully on the morning of September 7 to see which parts of the poem come to the fore.

            Having plumbed the eighteenth-century for the lyrics, Stanford went even a bit farther into the past for the anthem’s melody.  Accurately labeled as a “hymn anthem”—a choral composition that embodies and enhances a traditional hymn tune—O for a Closer Walk with God builds on the tune “Caithness,” originally found in the Scottish Psalter of 1635, also knows as “the old psalter” or “John Knox’s psalter.”  In our current hymnal, the tune shows up in a smaller arrangement of “O for a closer walk” and in Hymn 121, “Christ, when for us you were baptized.”

            It took the ardent artistry of Stanford (1852-1924) to draw these elements together.  The anthem, published in 1910, is a choral masterpiece in which the harmony, counterpoint, phrase length, and organ accompaniment are handled with increasing skill, particularly in the elegant final verse (“So shall my walk be close with God, calm and serene my frame) with its combination of emotional fervor and faithful confidence.