The composer of our communion anthem, Sir Henry Walford Davies (1869–1941) began as a chorister at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. He was a student at the Royal College of Music, and his peers were C.H.H. Parry (the composer of today’s Psalm chant and postlude) and Stanford. Davies held various church appointments before becoming organist and choirmaster to the Temple Church in 1898. Davies was also an important teacher; some of his students included George Thalben-Ball, Arthur Bliss, Ivor Gurney, Arthur Benjamin, Eugene Goossens, Herbert Howells and Douglas Fox.

One day, Davies got ill and was unable to play for Evensong. So he called upon his student, George Thalben-Ball to play for him. On this particular Sunday, they were singing something from the B-minor Mass of J.S. Bach, and on the organ console was the score that Thalben-Ball was to use. Just before the service, Davies’ assistant leaned over to him, pointed at the Bach score, and said, “By the way, we usually do it down a semitone!” Transposing Bach into another key, at sight, would have sent me running for the hills. Thalben-Ball must have been terrified, or he found that really funny!

We often think of people who we admire in history as memorialized “figures.” But I love these little stories, not only for their humor, but for the glimpses they provide into what it means to be human. Historical legends were actually ordinary people who got embarrassed, who cracked jokes, who doubted themselves, and who probably didn’t think of themselves as any more or less special than you and me. We all share these common experiences, and we have all had the opportunity to laugh at them. Humor has immense power to break up the heaviness that people place on unimportant things. People in “high” places often do lowly, funny things. Don’t put anyone on a pedestal, rather, keep your perception of all humans on an equal playing field. Lowering yourself, doesn’t help either. God sees us all as equal, anyway. It’s time to see as God sees. If you can see the humanness in others, and in the case of composers, hear it in the music they write, it makes your experience of their music more rich and more meaningful. Some people have criticized Davies’ music as being too sentimental. But I say, way to go! Way to be honest with who you are. There are no reasons to be embarrassed for exposing the ordinary, human traits in what you do. Cherish everything that makes you ordinary – it’s our common bond in the loving eyes of God.