O dearest Friend (website only)
O dearest Friend, my nearest and most faithful Friend,
Do not discard me though I grieve you much.
I look for you at every cliff-walled trail’s end,
In crowds and lonely rooms, to feel your touch.
I mourn the vows of love I made but have not kept,
I call you from a heart you made your own.
Remember me as one who in the Garden slept
While you were on your way to earn my fadeless crown.
Create in me a heart as clean as newest born,
A heart, my God, that beats for you alone;
Make it a temple your free Spirit would adorn,
With living flesh replace my heart of stone.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
Recapture, oh, the thrill of our first love,
Securely hold me, mold me your creation,
Delight me yet again with such disarming love.
Text by Jaroslav J. Vajda © 1987 Concordia Publishing House. Used with permission under license number 24:12-4. cph.org. Congregations are required to contact Concordia directly at copyrights@cph.org to secure a license reproduction permission.
Metre: 12.10.12.10.12.10.12.12
Tune: Londonderry Air
Ideas for use
This hymn by the American hymn writer Jaroslav Vajda is posted here in response to the idea of ‘Soul repair’, the theme for Lent 4 in the Soul Food worship resources produced by the Methodist Church, Lent 2025.
The week’s subtitle is ‘Nourished by unconditional love and forgiveness’, and both the opening two lines and the closing lines of verse 1 allude directly to Jesus’ post-resurrection encounter with his disciple Peter in John 21:15-17 (pictured left). ‘Do you love me?’, he asks Peter three times, reminding Peter of his failure to stand by his teacher as the authorities came to take him away. Jesus nevertheless still stands by Peter, as he stands by us, unconditionally.
As Vajda wrote, Peter is “the chosen friend who let down his dearest Friend and yet could hope to be given another chance”. The idea is evoked beautifully in a single phrase from perhaps Vajda’s most famous hymn, ‘Now the silence’: “Now the heart forgiven leaping” (see below).
In his hymn collection, Now the Joyful Celebration (1987: Morning Star), Vajda adds that the first two stanzas of “O dearest friend”, taken together, “can echo the similar experience of [King] David as expressed in Psalm 51. It was the singing of the Offertory based on Psalm 51: 10-12 that became my frequent penitential prayer.”
Jaroslav Vajda was inspired to write this hymn by a transcription of Londonderry Air, which is familiar to most congregations.
More information
Though not well-known in British Methodist circles, Jaroslav Vajda (1919-2008) is often described as one of the leading hymn writers of the twentieth century, sometimes as the “the dean of hymn writers in North America”. Vajda (pronounced ‘vaheeduh’) was of Slovak descent but was born in Lorain, Ohio, the son of a Lutheran pastor. Raised in the Lutheran tradition, he himself pastored to several Slovak-English Lutheran congregations before becoming a magazine editor for the Lutheran publishing house Concordia, in St. Louis. He was a member of the worship commission that compiled the 1978 Lutheran Book of Worship.
Vajda began translating classical Slovak poetry at the age of eighteen but was 49 before he wrote his first hymn. His output was considerable – well over 200 hymns, including many translations of Slovak and German texts, a good number of them published widely in different hymnals. Sing Peace, Sing Gift of Peace (2003: Concordia Publishing House) is a collection of his complete hymns and translations.
Introducing his earlier 1987 publication, Now the Joyful Celebration, Jaroslav Vajda affirms that “the hymn writer must speak for the generation in which he is writing. And that means adapting the expressions of the saints of old to current conditions and experiences”. How, for example, “can today’s families express their needs in hymns that come out of a pattern [of family life] no longer familiar to one-half of worshippers?”
Vajda is perhaps most well-known for God of the sparrow God of the whale (a hymn about how we and all creation serve God), and an early hymn, Now the silence Now the peace, which is a remarkable encapsulation of the eucharistic liturgy,
His regular collaborator, the musician Carl Schalk, observed that Vajda had an affinity for hymn meters and forms not normally associated with traditional hymnody. He comments that many of Vajda’s texts present “a unique challenge to musicians who would attempt to set [them] to music intended for congregational singing”. Perhaps musicians more at home with contemporary worship song writing would recognise in Vajda a writer who breaks beyond traditional hymn singing boundaries.