Be Thou My Vision - A Prayer for Ordinary Days

"Be Thou My Vision" is old — the original Irish text goes back to somewhere around the 8th century, long before it had a tune we'd recognize, long before it was translated into the English words we sing today.

I find that steadying, honestly. Twelve or thirteen centuries of Christians have prayed some version of this same request. No matter what's happening in my week, that's a long line of companionship and comfort.

The line that stops me every time is the opening one:

Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart;
Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art.

"Naught be all else to me." The flowery language can mask the meaning. In modern English, that couplet would read:  "Lord of my heart, I wish everything else counted as nothing to me, and I could fix my attention on you and you only." That's not a soft request. That's asking to actually reorder what you want.

Many of my prayers, if I'm honest, ask God to help me get the things I already want — help me hit the deadline, help the conversation go well, help me feel less anxious about the thing I can't control. This hymn asks for something harder: to want less of everything else, so that one thing can actually be first.

I don't think the person who wrote this — likely an Irish monk, name lost to history — was pretending it is easy to let go of the trappings of this world. The rest of the hymn goes on to ask for wisdom, for God's presence "waking or sleeping," for God to be a shield and a "high tower" against the ordinary chaos of a day. It's not a hymn written from some spiritual mountaintop. It reads like someone who knew exactly how loud everything else gets, and wanted a vision strong enough to cut through it.

A few years ago, I had the pleasure to visit the Irish island of Skellig Michael on a beautiful spring day when the sky was blue and sea was calm. We climbed the 618 stone steps set into the steep side of this huge, barren rock jutting out of the North Atlantic, seven miles off the coast of County Kerry. At the summit was a small collection of beehive huts, made of stacked stone, built by Irish monks around the same time this hymn was written. This was clear an austere existence on the best of days like the one when I visited; it would be truly horrifying to be there in the middle of a hurricane on a dark winter night.  It's a stark, tangible, and awe-inspiring reminder of how far (literally) some people will go to forsake all worldly trappings and distractions, so they fix their vision solely on God.

I put this hymn in the calendar knowing most people would read its stanza on some perfectly unremarkable Tuesday — not a crisis, not a celebration, just a normal day where the "vision" question is easy to skip past. That's actually the point. The prayer isn't for the extraordinary moments. It's for the ordinary ones, which are most of them.

If today's one of those ordinary days for you too, maybe that's exactly when this prayer fits best.

You'll find "Be Thou My Vision" in Hymnbook Treasures on July 27 — scan the page's QR code to explore its other verses, long history, related scriptures, and listen to recordings.  You can also listen to my favorite recording of this hymn by Glad, from their album "The Acapella Project", on YouTube.