Do you know the eucharistic chant, “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence”?

Let all mortal flesh keep silence,
And with fear and trembling stand;
Ponder nothing earthly-minded,
For with blessing in His hand,
Christ our God to earth descendeth,
Our full homage to demand.

That’s a translation by Gerard Moultrie from the ancient Greek Liturgy of St. James. In the Episcopal churches of my childhood, we sang it as a communion hymn, using the Ralph Vaughan Williams arrangement of “Picardy”, a French medieval folk melody. It’s a haunting melody and an elegant arrangement, and I must admit that the words too are beautiful—but they don’t fit my idea of what communion is all about.

So, of course, I wrote words of my own. Here’s my wife, Kelly Autrey-Webber, leading the singing for a Sunday service:

Sheet music for “As the Loaf Is Broken Open” is available on our web site here. As usual, it may be freely downloaded and copies for noncommercial purposes.