Gurney wrote very little church music, and little of what he did write has survived. His motet for double choir,
Since I believe in God the Father almighty, was written in June 1925, a couple of years before Gurney stopped composing. It is a deeply personal work that seems to look back to Gloucester Cathedral, with extended pauses written into the piece that allow the great acoustic of that building to sing fully. The reasons for Gurney’s attraction to Robert Bridges’s poem are obvious. It speaks of an ambivalent relationship with God. The speaker undoubtedly believes in God, but neither he nor anyone else can know or understand him, particularly as one who had ‘crie[d] angrily out on God’ in poems of the First World War and in his later life. Also, throughout his life, Gurney remained true in his pursuit of beauty. It could have been of Gurney that Bridges wrote of he ‘whose spirit within [him…] loveth beauty’. In the final stanza, while the speaker is cherishing the freedom of belief, Gurney, in his ‘hours of anguish and darkness’, may have been cherishing an idea of a freedom both spiritual and physical; freedom from the mental hospital in which he spent the last fifteen years of his life, where he eventually resigned himself to his hopeless abandonment.
from notes by Philip Lancaster © 2018