#631: Love Divine, All Loves Excelling

The first verse has the slightly weird phrasing "all thy faithful mercies crown," "crown" being used as a verb (request). Are we asking Jesus to increase our own mercy, or finish off his many instances of being merciful to us by appearing incarnate? This caught my eye because we get a more familiar phrasing at the end: "till we cast our crowns before thee." The image of throwing down our own crowns in the presence of God shows up elsewhere, and is probably a motif from Revelation or something, because it's also the etymology of the Christian rock band Casting Crowns!

#653: Where True Charity and Love Abide

This is an old-school plainsong version of Ubi caritas--the refrain is the same text (in Latin and English), but there are also other verses in plainsong, including the prayer that "contention, envy, ill will, [and] spite" end. You wonder what those 9th-century monks were getting up to.

This text is sometimes associated with the foot-washing ceremony during Maundy Thursday.