Groves

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yeutter

Puritan Board Senior
When I was a lad, my parents sent me to Camp Greenwood, a UPCUSA Church camp, for a week most summers. At camp we learned a song, The Ash Grove, how graceful. It was sung to a very nice Welsh tune. The song concluded with the words, "and others were there looking downward to greet me, the Ash Grove, the Ash Grove again is my home." When I came home and sang it; my father concluded that it was pagan, and I was forbidden from singing it.

Recently, a guy I went to school with, recalled the same song; and expressed horror that we were taught it at church camp. He equated the ash grove with the groves that were associated with the false religion that Judea and Israel so often turned to in times of apostasy.

Were the pagan groves that were a snare to Israel of the same nature as the Welsh enchanted ash groves?

What is the nature of the groves that were associated with the pagan worship of the peoples in Palestine?

Was this a kind of pantheistic worship?
 
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I had to look it up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ash_Grove

For others who want to look at the text, it appears that the discussion concerns the Oxenford lyrics.

It reeks of sentimentality, but I'm not really seeing much in the way of theology, either Christian or pagan. Some reference to the deceased looking down on the living.
 
Thanks for the link to lyrics. My classmate told me that in pagan times in Wales, an ash grove was planted adjacent Druid ceremonial sites.
 
My classmate told me that in pagan times in Wales, an ash grove was planted adjacent Druid ceremonial sites.

When I think of pagan groves, I generally thought of oaks or evergreens. Maybe they used ash in Wales.
 
Missionary Bishop, St. Boniface chopped down a giant white oak in Germany, when he confronted the pagans there.
It may have been different in the British Isles. I have seen references to fairy trees and fairy groves on the Isle of Man and in Wales being Elder or Ash. I do not know if fairy groves are related to the Druid ash groves.
 
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