Put By Your Business Worry

For Christmas

Words: “Laisse quy tas aiffares,” Besançon Noël

Translation by Rev. J. O'Connor

Music: Besançon Noël

Source: Richard Runciman Terry, Two Hundred Folk Carols (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne Limited, 1933), Carol #66, pp. 18-19.

Refrain:
Put by your business worry,
Appointments and entanglements,
And to your Master hurry
And rest with Him on hay.

Verses:

1. The Lord most High
    Vouchsafed to lie
Between slow ox and labouring ass;
    Our eyes have seen God come to pass!
The light of all the ages,
    Resplendent in obscurity.
Arising not from ocean,
    But from eternity.

2. This true men know:
    Not roses blow
Not jewels were or shall be mined
    So winsome as a human child:
This gem divine and human
    Shows rarest in abandonment,
Is not our Rose of roses
    More wondrous for His wild?

3. If lowlihead
    On truckle-bed
Overtake me, flung aside and sere,
    Omnipotence will hold me dear
And mindful of His manger
    Will have no dread of loneliness,
And flouting woe and danger
    Companion my distress.

4. For wisdom's breach
    Is more than speech
Or thought, or light, or sword, or lyre:
    Salvation hungers in a byer;
Eternal Comfort shivers
    That we may know the body's stress
The anguish loosing rivers
    Is food for holiness.

Sheet Music from Richard Runciman Terry, Two Hundred Folk Carols (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne Limited, 1933), Carol #66, pp. 18-19.

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