Provocative thinking, maybe…

Epilogue – December 13, 2011 December 13, 2011

We’ve been singing—and then talking about—a different song every Sunday during Advent. This week, it was the song, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” Many people knew the song. Some even knew that the lyrics to the familiar Christmas song were actually written by the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. But no one I spoke to after church could remember ever having sung the fourth verse.

Verse four lends great understanding to the carol. From Longfellow’s poem Christmas Bells, the fourth stanza reads this way:

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Having sung this verse on Sunday, we discovered that the poem/song is, in part, a tale of the tragic fortunes of war. The cannons that “thundered in the South” were Civil War cannons. Longfellow’s son Charles had left home, without his father’s permission or blessing, to join the Union Army. This was not long after Longfellow’s wife Fanny had died in a fire in their home.

During the battle of New Hope Church in Virginia, Charles was seriously wounded. Longfellow received word of his son’s injury on December 1, 1863, and traveled to Washington, D.C. where he met his son and took him home to recover. That Christmas of 1863, Longfellow made no entry in his journal, echoing his grief over the loss of Fanny from the previous Christmas when he wrote, “I can make no record of these days. Better leave them wrapped in silence. Perhaps someday God will give me peace.”

Then on Christmas Day of the following year, Longfellow wrote the epic poem that gave us the familiar words we sing at Christmastime. In the meaningful lyrics, we hear Longfellow’s heartbreak, his disillusionment, and ultimately the restoration of his hope, hope that came via the sounds of Christmas bells ringing. It’s a wonderful Christmas message. But it’s so much more poignant when you sing verse four.

This afternoon in the car, one of the radio stations was playing “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” They played verse one. They played verse two. Then they skipped right to verse seven, the last stanza of the poem, which is:

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep;
God is not dead; nor doth he sleep!
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men!

The final stanza is a great message of hope. But it means altogether more when hope is scarce. God did not take human form and enter the world because things were going great; God did so “to save us all from Satan’s power when we were gone astray.”

Oh, wait. That’s next week’s song. Stay tuned.