When life experience gives birth to song
Most everyone who knows the beloved hymn “It Is Well with My Soul” also knows the tragic story of its text. Horatio Spafford wrote the text in 1873 after the death of his four daughters in a shipwreck at sea. While the text can stand as a powerful witness to the gospel apart from its connection to this man’s personal tragedy and subsequent confession of faith, its impact is intensified when, knowing its backstory, one sings,
When peace like a river attendeth my way
When sorrows like sea billows roll,
Whatever my lot, thou has taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul.
In my own experience as a writer of hymn texts, those that are drawn out of the day-to-day experiences of life have the most authentic connections and emotional impact. Put simply, life sings.
Beginning with the most recent example of such connections in my own life, here is a hymn that was born from the sad but universal experience of losing a loved one. Following my final visit with my sister-in-law before her death, the Spirit led to these words.
As our eyes grow dim and weary,
As our breath and heartbeat slow,
Whether fear or resignation
Is our usher as we go;
Through the veil that all must enter
In the darkness or the day,
Jesus, you are there to meet us,
Jesus, you our strength and stay.
Through your suffering, by your dying,
Empty cross and emptier tomb,
You have passed this way before us,
Felt death’s sting and dreaded gloom.
Yet your rising gives us courage
Knowing death is not the end,
But a portal to your promise
That through you we live again.
As our eyes grow dim and weary,
As our breath and heartbeat cease,
You are life beyond our dying,
Jesus, you alone our peace.
First born of God’s New Creation,
Only you have silenced death.
Jesus, you are there to meet us,
Breathing resurrection’s breath.
My sister-in-law was a woman of faith, and being with her to experience her “eyes grow dim and weary,” while accepting, even anticipating, her conviction that Jesus was there to meet her was inspirational. Quite honestly, the text, in a manner of speaking, rolled out of my pen.
On a much lighter note, the text for “Hasten the Moment” came from a conversation between my spouse and me following a hike near our home in the Pacific Northwest. About ten minutes into our hike on Camano Island, I noticed that I was missing my wallet. I was rather confident that it was in the car, and decided that there was no reason to make my wife anxious about what seemed to me a concern, but not a crisis. Returning to our car, sure enough the wallet was on the console between the seats exactly where I had left it. Expressing my relief, my wife wondered aloud how long I realized it was missing. “Pretty much the entire length of our hike,” I fessed up. “Why didn’t you tell me?” And then I uttered a sentence I don’t believe I’d ever said before in my life, “Why would I want to hasten that moment?”
Over the next several weeks, “hasten the moment” kept running through my mind, and before long, it took on a life of its own in the Advent text.
Together they traveled a road paved by God
Together, toward Bethlehem’s stable they trod.
From Gabriel’s visit to Mary’s consent,
With Joseph’s resolve, to the future they went.
They faithfully followed the plan from above,
To hasten God’s moment of love.
To hasten the moment that God had designed,
The moment of moments that ends broken time.
Creation refashioned by Word-enfleshed birth,
The moment Christ hastened to earth.
Without a doubt, this text would never have seen the light of day had I not lost my wallet on a hike.
What are the moments in your life that hasten God’s moments of love? There is no better place to begin your journey as a poet and text writer than by paying close attention to those moments and experiences that buoy your faith, stick in your imagination, enliven your soul. Jot them down. Let them resonate and marinate in your other activities of daily living. And not just the so-called holy ones. Of course, you can make those experiences a part of your devotional and prayer life. But also pay attention to how they cross your mind when you’re washing the dishes, fighting traffic, getting a haircut or swimming laps. Might water inspire you to think baptismally?
In 2019, I received a commission from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America to write a new hymn text celebrating the retirement of our former bishop in the Northwest Washington Synod, The Rev. Wm Chris Boerger, upon his retirement as the Secretary of the ELCA. They chose a writer from the Pacific Northwest who had known Chris, but the connections didn’t end there. The commission came with the request that the hymn be set to his favorite tune, Lobe Den Herren, that it be baptismal in theme, and that it contain at least one allusion to the Pacific Northwest. Quite honestly, it was the most limiting commission I had ever received. Here you can see how my experiences both as a baptismal theologian and a resident of the Puget Sound influenced how I approached this task. This is the third and final stanza of “No Deeper Well.”
Deep, storied waters rush o’er us, transforming, transcending.
Baptism’s flood sweeps away all proud human pretending.
Waters abound! Ocean, creek, river, and sound
Streaming with grace never-ending.
Having had the privilege to baptize so many and think with their parents about what those baptisms meant certainly colored the theological language and concepts of this text. The lion’s share of my ministry took place in Washington, far from my native Pennsylvania, a continent away from Puget Sound. I feel certain that had I lived there and not here, the thought of ocean, creek, and river being combined with sound would never have become a part of the hymn. Perhaps a pond. Maybe a Pennsylvania pond would have crept in there. But I’m glad it was sound.
I’ll conclude as I began with life’s universal experience of death. Remember how Isaac Watts put it in “O God Our Help in Ages Past”?
Time, like an ever-rolling stream
Soon bears us all away;
We fly forgotten as a dream
Dies at the op’ning day.
A co-worker and friend confided in me following his spouse’s death of the poignant visions she experienced while dying and the requests to which those visions led. Her call to new life in Christ, compelled her to ask for shoes, for her hat. And as she was dying, she wanted to sing. This conversation with my friend coincided with a concert I attended that included Jake Runestad’s setting for double choir of Todd Boss’ stunning text, “And So I Go On.” Challenged by this concept, I set out to encapsulate my friend’s experience with his dying spouse, paired with the death of Christ, and this is the resulting text, as yet unpublished.
She wanted her shoes
to walk the road
all mortals go
Feet shod
to make her way
from dust
to life
She wanted her hat
to shield her face
from blazing sight
crystal rivers
flowing
with living
water
She wanted to sing
one final song
words were her life
arced into verse
like branch and vine
and church
like Christ
arisen
He had no shoes
to walk the road
alone he would go
bare feet scraping along the path
of dust
to death
He had no hat
his brow adorned
by woven vine
and brutal thorn
dripping
with loving
mercy
He had no song
that final day
his word was life
he was the Word
the Way the Truth
the Life
as Christ
arisen