David the Psalmist

On this still and golden All Saints Day a little remembrance of my father, David Leonard Frost, who died earlier this year with advanced dementia. The illness must have already been advancing when I sent him my little illuminated letter D with King David the Psalmist as a birthday card:  “David, a man after God’s own heart”. (1 Sam 13.)  Even in his glory days my father was volatile in character and mood, so for a long while we in the family didn’t recognise what was happening. A scholar of literature and a talented wordsmith, he was reciting psalms and prayers even in his last delirium as I sat with him in hospital. Although Elizabethan literature was his academic specialism, I think he was most proud of his new liturgical translation of the psalter (1976) which was included in the Anglican ‘Alternative Service Book’ of 1980 and later in the Australian prayer book. He was bitterly disappointed when in 2000 it was superseded in the new ‘Common Worship’: aptly named, he said. - An ancient controversy now, and even at the time it likely passed without a blink before the average congregant. He and his Hebrew-specialist colleagues published the ‘Cambridge Liturgical Psalter’ privately (with another little icon of mine on the cover) and it was adopted by private worshippers and independent churches who mourned the loss of poetry in many modern versions. Not long before he died it was re-released by The Lutterworth Press and so lives on. Rest in peace and rise in glory, my dear father.