Advent Sunday Introit XII

The metrical Psalm ‘To thee I lift my soul’ from the Church Hymnary (Third Edition).

Why the Third Edition? Because the version of Psalm 24 (they call it 25 of course) in the (current) Fourth Edition starts about halfway through (unless there's a full version somewhere that I missed). In fact, there's another, splendidly rugged version in the old Revised Edition, but I can't see it tripping off the tongue very easily. The version in the Third Edition begins thus:

To thee I lift my soul:
O Lord, I trust in thee:
My God, let me not be asham'd,
Nor foes triumph o'er me.
Let none that wait on thee
Be put to shame at all;
But those that without cause transgress,
Let shame upon them fall.

For: This is a translation - and a pretty faithful one - of Psalm 24, the source of the Advent Sunday introit. It comes from the metrical Psalter of the Church of Scotland. Catholic hymnal compilers are used to raiding the treasuries of the Anglican/Episcopal church, and more recently the "praise and worship" music of the Evangelicals, but here in Scotland there is surely a case to be made for drawing on the Kirk's great corpus of metrical Psalmody - for ecumenical as well as musical reasons. Note also that the Kirk Psalter includes the complete cycle of Psalmody, and additional paraphrases of other scriptural passages: it would be possible to furnish versions of most antiphons in the Graduale from this source. This particular version of Psalm 24 is in Short Metre, so there are plenty of hymn tunes that would fit it.

Against: This translation has not been approved by the competent Catholic authorities. The tunes to which it might be sung are unrelated to the chant of the Graduale, and the antiphon-Psalm alternation would be lost.