Lenten Reflections

Abide with Me

As I left the house to run an errand, I plugged my iPhone into the car and as usual I heard the first notes of “Abide With Me.” That’s because the device always begins playing my 600 stored songs in alphabetical order. I usually skip over “Abide With Me,” but this time I let it play.

“Abide With Me” hasn’t always been the first song in my iPhone. I added it on purpose to avoid the embarrassment of having “The Acid Queen” pop up first. That song is from the rock opera “Tommy,” and I have most of that album on my iPhone. It’s a relic of the ’70s that I happen to like, in part because it has a hint of a messianic story line. I’d delete that song, but I’m a hoarder of music. Still, I couldn’t abide the name of that song popping up on my dashboard every time I plug in my phone, so I downloaded a vocal arrangement of “Abide With Me” by Irish singer Hayley Westenra.

This version of “Abide With Me” has its own irritation: The first over-long vocal note sounds like a siren. Once with a friend in the car, I plugged in my phone and he jerked his head around and asked, “Where’s the ambulance?!”

Most of the time when I hear that sound I skip past “Abide With Me” to find something more current and trendy, or something that has been rattling around inside my head. Sometimes I just touch the Random button on my dashboard and take whatever comes. But this time, as I turned a corner and faced the sunset for the first time in more than a week, I decided to let Hayley have her say:

Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide;
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, oh, abide with me.

It was good to abide in that song for a change. And in listening to it, to abide for a moment in the presence of the Lord.