My Favorite Ignorance
Author: Chuck King
April 10, 2025
Editor’s note: For our sixth blog post of Lent, Chuck King describes how his ignorance of an ancient hymn sparked the creation of a wonderful hymn tune and an instant Christian classic.
My Song Is Love Unknown
(Samuel Crossman, 1664; rev. in Hymns for Today’s Church, 1982)
My song is love unknown, my Savior’s love for me;
love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be:
But who am I, that for my sake my Lord should take frail flesh and die?
He came from heaven’s throne salvation to bestow;
but they refused, and none the longed-for Christ would know:
This is my friend, my friend indeed, who at my need his life did spend.
Sometimes they crowd his way and his sweet praises sing,
resounding all the day hosannas to their king:
Then “crucify” is all their breath, and for his death they thirst and cry.
With angry shouts they have my dear Lord done away;
a murderer they save, the Prince of Life they slay!
Yet willingly he bears the shame that through his name all might be free.
Why, what has my Lord done to cause this rage and spite?
He made the lame to run, and gave the blind their sight:
What injuries! Yet these are why the Lord most high so cruelly dies.
Here might I stay and sing of him my soul adores;
never was love, dear King, never was grief like yours!
This is my friend in whose sweet praise I all my days could gladly spend.
In seven brief stanzas (modern hymnals print only four or six), the author—a clergyman in the Church of England—movingly points us to essential elements of our salvation: God’s love for us, the reason for the Incarnation, mankind’s fickleness (“hosanna!” then “crucify!”). The hymn walks us through Jesus’ final week, when he suffered shame in silence, all for my sake, for our sake! The depth of God’s love is truly “unknown.” This hymn works on multiple levels at the same time: theology, devotion, and praise. Is it the perfect hymn? Well, it is an excellent model.
We sing this intimate hymn in our Good Friday service, the capstone of Lent and the nadir of our Lord’s Passion. It has been sung in English-speaking churches for 360 years. But I first read it 26 years ago. It is a bonus in my vocation that I have the leisure and the responsibility to look for and evaluate lots of music for use in worship. I have no idea how often my ignorance benefits or hinders us as a congregation. But in this season of the church year, I want to tell you the story of my favorite ignorance. If I had encountered the words with a melody, I’m not sure how they would have struck me.
I first read the text in The Worshiping Church (Hope Publishing, 1990). I was literally left breathless when I encountered this text. How could I have been in the church for over 40 years and never have sung or even read it? The suggested tune was familiar to me, but it requires the repetition of the final line of each stanza. (RHOSYMEDRE, a great Welsh tune: you can hear this hymn with that tune here.) That didn’t work for me.
I was too uninformed to know that another tune had been written for this text. In fact, it was in wide use among some worship traditions, and almost exclusively so in England. (LOVE UNKNOWN, heard here.) I just didn’t know.
So I asked a friend, organist and composer Ed Childs, if he knew of a different setting of this hymn, or would perhaps compose one himself. Ed put his musical gifts together to come up with a completely new, and absolutely stunning, arrangement for “My Song Is Love Unknown.” So on Good Friday 1999, the congregation of College Church in Wheaton was the first to sing the tune GUNNAR* with the words of a 17th-century poem that continues to speak to congregations in the 21st century.
I recall with deep feeling the impact of this hymn as the choir learned it in preparation for that Good Friday service. All of us found that the tune planted the words very sensitively (and sensibly) in our hearts. As I ran errands that week, these words drilled into my heart: “a murderer they save, the Prince of Life they slay.” The first public use of this new melody had a visceral impact on the congregation—as it had on the choir. It was immediately evident that this hymn, with this tune, was going to mark every Good Friday after.
“My Song Is Love Unknown” (GUNNAR) was published that year and is now sung in many churches across our country. For many of those churches, as for ours, this is the tune of “My Song Is Love Unknown.” Thankfully, in this matter, ignorance truly was bliss.
Chuck King is Director of Music for New Covenant Church.
* GUNNAR is the name Dr. Childs gave his tune. It is the surname of the first missionary sent out by College Church.
Hear the hymn, and visit more of ETC's splendid choral music:
https://edwintchilds.com/music/publishedWorks/My_Song_Is_Love.mp3
https://edwintchilds.com
Arranged by Edwin T. Childs
Published by MorningStar Music Publishers
Image: Christ at the Cross / Cristo en la Cruz, Public Domain.
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