Lift up Your Hearts

For the fourth Sunday in Advent, as the church considers the imminence of the birth of the Christ, part of the Invocacio ad Mariam from the Second Nun's Prologue of the Canterbury Tales, translated by Neville Coghill (Tr 1913).

Image of the Mother and Child in the Haileybury Chapel

Thou maid and mother, daughter of thy Son,

Thou well of mercy, balm to sinful nature,

In whom God chose His dwelling, as in one

Humblest and highest over every creature,

Who gav'st such nobleness to human feature

That God had no disdain to clothe and wind

His Son in flesh and blood of human kind.

Within the blissful cloister of thy womb

There took man's shape the eternal love and peace,

Lord and guide of the trinal circle, whom

The heavens and earth and sea shall never cease

To glorify, pure virgin the increase

Of whose fair body, never by man mated,

was the Creator of all things created.