Still There Is Love

You get piano/SATB and vocal score pdfs, mp3 of the recording, piano-only mp3, and rehearsal mp3s for each of the four vocal parts. In the Amidons’‘Twenty-five Anthems for Interfaith & Community Choirs‘. Recorded here by the Starry Mountain Singers, Cora Kelly soloist.  Edith Newlin Chase (1905 – 2004) was a pre-school educator and poet who lived in Alstead, New Hampshire. Her friend Andy Davis shared her poem with Mary Alice Amidon who set it to music to sing at Mary Alice’s mother’s funeral.  Later Peter Amidon created this arrangement for a Guilford (VT) Community Church service.

• Twigs from My Tree – poems by Edith Newlin Chase
• The New Baby Calf – by Edith Newlin Chase, illustrated by Barbara Reid

LYRICS

Still There Is Love
©1977 Edith Newlin Chase

When human hands cannot afford relief,
To hopeless ills and pain beyond belief;
When human hearts are stunned and dumb with grief,
Still there is love.

There was a face we knew
a hand, a form,
Where lived a spirit brave and true and warm;
Surely that spirit cannot come to harm,
While there is love.

Its symbols tenderly are laid away,
The face, the hand, the form we cannot stay.
The spirit still is with us day by day,
And there is love.

We cannot see beyond this earth’s near rim.
But did we know at birth the world we’re in?
Then we can trust our future life to win;
For there is love.

(In the arrangement the first verse is repeated a cappella at the end.)