Church Music

by Bob Millard

The Beacon Book — A Peculiar Legacy

Old volumes of religious songs are dull to begin with, dark, muted, earthy solid colors. Perhaps there's a gold-leaf title on the cover, but often the spine is bereft of words or symbols. These are my estate sale targets.

These covers fade and seem to absorb dust like it was time itself. I have more "stuff” than I need, now, so my interest in estate sales are the things that speak to the interior lives of their former owners. To me they also speak to the history of religious movements, reveal the hearts and minds of our progenitors.

I recently found a book of songs and services named The Beacon Song and Service Book, copyrighted in 1935 and aimed to teach children and young adults that God is a worthy concept, but at best an analogy. Yet, it holds worthy ideas, if not many Christian beliefs.

The compilers, whose names I didn't recognize, "endeavored to provide religious expression congenial to the different types of theological opinion which prevail among religious liberals."

Interesting enough, I thought. It became a mystery, and I love a good historical mystery.

I perused the pages for hymnists. I was looking for prominent Protestant and Reformed Church music figures. I found Isaac Watts, the Brothers Wesley, Martin Luther, and the critically important German-to-English translator Catherine Winkworth.

Among the sources cited in this collection are Hope Publishing Co., The Board of Education of The Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., Presbyterian Advance Publishing Company, and The Presbyterian Board of Christian Education. (We were then still a church divided.)

As I looked further, however, I recognized some of the most important literary voices in 19th century America. They were of the top poets, newspapermen, and novelists of the mid- and late-1800s: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, his brother Samuel, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, even Walt Whitman!

They were not names I'd ever connected to hymnody, or even Christianity, necessarily.

A couple of days' research later I was at least a week behind in school lesson planning, but I had a story.

Henry W. and Samuel Longfellow shared a father, but had different mothers. They were close and made no distinction as to being half-brothers. Henry's mother was of Puritan tradition descent, but their home retained the Puritan highmindedness without its harshness and fanaticism. Samuel, the elder, became a Unitarian minister, hymnist, and later his brother's biographer. Henry, the most popular American poet of the 19th century, "did not care to talk much on theological points, but he believed in the supreme of good in the world and in the universe."

Henry became a Harvard professor at a time when it was a hub for Unitarian and Universalist ideas. Although he was a "free thinker" he had his children baptized, and it seems that with his consent some of his poetry with reverent themes was adapted to hymns. Samuel's hymn texts were mostly written as such.

John Greenleaf Whittier was a Unitarian Quaker poet and a forceful advocate for abolition of slavery in America. He earned his bread editing a number of newspapers in Boston, Haverhill, and Hartford, Connecticut. As a poet and spokesman of conscience he was held in high regard while he lived. Whittier, California was named for him.

Whittier occasionally wrote in meter and rhyme fit for hymns. Peculiarly, his best remembered hymn, still sung today in churches eschewing a gender-neutral Yahweh, is called "Dear Lord and Father of Mankind." It was adapted from a published poem titled "The Brewing of Soma." Having read and re-read Aldus Huxley's Brave New World during my impressionable years, I'll have to find that one someday.

Thoreau and Emerson, of course were naturalist philosophers and planted the Transcendentalist roots in Unitarian Universalism. They were not hymnists. Their writings were adapted. Walt Whitman, while yet a clerk in Civil War-era Washington, D.C., was the original Beat Poet, 90 years before Allen Ginsburg met Jack Keroack, and everyone went On The Road. His contribution to this curious estate sale hymnal find was quiet after the fact, and heavily adapted

The last of the great names of 19th century literature with text credits in The Beacon Book I'll treat is Oliver Wendell Holmes. He was the one-time dean of the Harvard School of Medicine, a scientist, teacher, lecturer, author, and poet. He wrote a number of well-regarded hymns.

As the inventor of the stereoscope, Holmes also left his mark on his time period. As father of the influential Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes, Jr., he left a marker across the legal landscape of our nation for decades to come.

On a hunch I Googled one of the names of the compilers of The Beacon Book: Unitarian minister Vincent B. Silliman. In 1977 he gave a speech whose text summarizes these warmly humanist hymns for worship.

"When I could no longer accept the (Baptist) faith in which I was reared, I still wanted a church, in the best meaning of the word, for atheists, among whom I rated myself," said Silliman, whose personal collection of material formed the core of The Beacon Book project.

It seems a strange self-introduction for a hymnal editor, except that the subject of my last column also declared himself at best an agnostic within the Church of England.

There are beautiful lines of reverence for ethical culture, the grandeur of nature and the exquisite miracle of life in The Beacon Book. As interpretive songs of what God hath made and how God intends us to get along in it, this is good stuff.

But how peculiar, I thought, that one could subscribe to the greatness of God's handiwork, God's plan and God's will for us yet dismiss the existence of that very God. It's like the most scrumptious-looking lemon meringue pie without the lemon pie filling.

Me, I'll always be a whole pie kind of guy.