Living the Musical Prayer - A Sermon preached at First Presbyterian Church, Clarks Summit, PA on July 4, 2021 by the Rev. James E. Thyren
Scripture Readings: Psalm 65; James 1. 17-27 - reflections on "America, the Beautiful."
In the Lifestyle
section of The St. Augustine Record, Lindsay
Terry wrote a column entitled “Story Behind the Song: ‘America, the
Beautiful.’” Acknowledging the special
place the song has in many a heart, Terry explained why it means so much to
her. She wrote, “One of the greatest
experi-ences of my musical career happened on February 6, 2005, and the song
‘America the Beautiful’ was at the center of it. I was asked to train a 150
voice choir – 75 deaf students and 75 blind students – from the Florida School
for the Deaf and Blind to sing and sign ‘America the Beautiful’ just before the
kick-off of Super Bowl XXXIX (39) in
Jacksonville. It was the National
Football League’s way of honoring the famous singer, Ray Charles, who had
passed away just seven months earlier. Charles was a former student at the
school.”
“Charles had presented his
arrangement of ‘America the Beautiful’ to a wide range of audiences and in a
myriad of places all through his career. It was only appropriate that we presented
this song in his honor…On the evening of Super Bowl XXXIX, (with Alicia Keys sitting
at the piano as soloist), ‘America the Beautiful’ was presented as never
before. The event was seen by television
in some 200 countries.”[i]
There is a YouTube clip of the
event. In a somewhat grainy video you
will see those 150 deaf and blind students dressed in white shirts and khaki
pants singing and signing their hearts out, offering up the musical prayer we
are challenged to pray and to live every day, “from sea to shining sea!”[ii]
Like
many of the songs we love to sing, “America the Beautiful began as a poem. Like
many of the poems we know by heart, the words were written by a poet, who kept
tinkering with them until they sounded just right. Like many of the poems we cherish, the story
of its writing and its writer helps us to know more fully what the poem is
saying to us and for us.
America
the Beautiful was written by Katherine Lee Bates, the youngest of four children
born to a congregationalist minister and a school teacher. Katherine’s mother was a graduate of Mount
Holy-oke Seminary, which later became a college with the same name.[iii] Considering education a priority, she
encouraged her daughter to attend Wellesley College, “known to be one of the
few institutions of higher learning open to women at the time.”[iv]
Her course of study included English and Greek, and explored an interest in
poetry which led to an early work being published in the Atlantic Monthly.[v]
Upon graduation in 1880 she began
a career as a teacher, and in 1888 joined the faculty of Wellesley College, beginning
as an English instructor. According to
the World Book Encyclopedia, “Bates was made a full professor in 1891,” one of
few women to hold such rank at the time.[vi]
She and later became the head of the English department.
In
1893, Katharine Lee Bates made a cross country trip by train. Historian Jill Lepore describes some of the
sights taken in after leaving Boston at the end of June: “The next day, she
felt on her face the mist of one of the world’s most stunning wonders and wrote
in her diary about ‘the glory and the music of Niagara Falls.’ ‘Reached
Chicago,’ she wrote two days later, from the site of a world’s fair, the
Columbian Exhibition. She spent July 4
in the prairie, in western Kansas, eyeing its amber waves of grain. She wrote
in her diary that she considered herself ‘a better American for such a Fourth.’
The next day, she reached Colorado Springs, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains,
in all their purple majesty.”[vii]
Bates
traveled to Colorado Springs to present a series of lectures on Chaucer at
Colorado Col-lege. While there she visited Pikes Peak. Jill Lepore
picks up the story once more: “She
taught her course and then, near the end of July, she went on an expedition to
the Garden of the Gods, where red sandstone rises out of the earth in formations
that look like so many cathedral spires. She headed next to a 14,115-foot
mountain called Tava, or Sun Mountain, by the Ute. ‘Pikes Peak or Bust,’ she
wrote in her diary. She boarded a horse-drawn prairie wagon; Halfway up, the
driver switched out horses for more sure-footed mules. At last, they reached the
summit, a view she took in, she later said, in ‘one ecstatic gaze”: below, a
bedspread of green pine; in the distance, peaks capped in white; above a sky the blue of
a robin’s egg. She wrote one more line
in her diary that day: ‘Most glorious scenery
I ever beheld.’ That night, in her room at the Antlers Hotel, she began
composing a poem.”[viii]
That
poem, originally called Pikes Peak was first published in 1895. In it, the
skies were “hal-cyon,” above the “enameled plain.” For America, it prayed, “God
shed his grace on thee, Till souls shall wax fair as earth and air And
music-hearted sea!” In the third verse, the prayer for God’s grace hints at the
correction Bates thought needed some divine help. It ended with these words:
“Till selfish gain no longer stain The banner of the free![ix]
The
skies became “beautiful” in a revision of the poem published in 1904, but the
“pilgrim feet” were just “great.” The
prayer in the second verse again indicated there was still work to be done, as
God is asked to mend “ev’ry flaw” and “confirm thy soul in self-control, thy
liberty in law.” An image from the Old Testament was added in the prayer of the third verse: “May God thy gold refine Till all success be nobleness And
every gain divine.” In the final verse, “And crown they good with brotherhood
from sea to shining sea,” became the last petition.”[x]
The
final version of the poem published in 1911, added that same final request to
the first verse and made the pilgrim feet beautiful. As frequently happened,
the poem was paired with a variety of musical settings over the years in order
to sing it. Lindsey Terry, tells the story of the tune we now associate with
Bates’ words. “The musical setting, now used with Bates’ poem, was written
in1882 by com-poser and organist Samuel Augustus Ward, (of Newark, New Jersey.) He wrote the tune, in his head, while on a
ferryboat trip from Coney Island back to his home in New York City.”[xi] The tune, Materna,
was originally attached to lyrics that began O Mother, Dear Jerusalem, was united with the twice revised words
of Katharine Bates in 1912. As the notes
in the most recent Presbyterian Hymnal, Glory
to God, state, “The combination proved immensely popular during World War I
and afterwards.”[xii]
Whenever
I hear the song or we sing it together, I marvel at how Katharine Lee Bates
combined thanksgiving for what is with a prayer for what is yet to be. Each stanza begins with words referring to
what is or has been, and ends asking God to help forge what is not yet fully
realized. By song’s end, we have asked
for God’s grace, for flaw’s to be mended, for purification, for good to be
crowned with brotherhood or servanthood, for self-control, for liberty codified
in law, for nobleness, for success and gain measured by the metrics of heaven
and not those of earth. Rather than looking to return to a storied past
that may not have been as great as some remember, the poem becomes a prayer
asking God to shape us and our future.
When
we sing this song, we do well to remember the first halves of the stanzas as
blessings, and not as entitlements; as gifts from above and not
accomplishments of our own making. When
we marvel at the beauty and the bounty of the land we love, we are meant to do
so in light of that verse from the Letter of James:
“Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. In fulfillment of his own purpose, he gave us birth by the word of truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creation.” (James 1. 17)
Thirty
days from now (but who’s counting?) I’ll be seated by a window in an airliner
headed to visit our grand-kids (and their parents,) out west. If the weather
cooperates, I’ll have five or six hours to enjoy the sights below: mountains,
green and purple, some of them sporting white caps; and fertile fields of varying shapes and sizes, some of them
brown from tilling, some of them green with growth, all too far below to detect any wave motion of amber grain.
Though
my view from 32,000 feet will be different from that of Katherine Lee Bates as she
rolled across the country, the blessings before my eyes will be the same.
Visible are the results of farmers who till the soil, and like the folks in the
seedy parables Jesus told, scatter seed and have to wait for the miracle of
growth to occur, “first the blade and then the ear, then the full corn shall
appear.”[xiii] “The fruited plain” is a gift, sent “down by
the Father of lights,” and we are fools if we take it for granted, or fail to
do whatever it takes to preserve and protect that gift by lessening the impact
of our presence on the planet.
Some of us spent our youth
organizing what were called “teach-ins,” lobbying for schools to pause on what became
“Earth Day” to plan strategies for protecting the environment so we don’t
be-come the weeds that choke off the growing vegetables and fruit we depend
upon. Each of us is called to resist efforts to treat the good earth as an
entitlement or an inexhaustible re-source for our benefit alone. All of us are
charged to remember what the Scriptures teach about stewardship and
responsibility to make sure the harvest is shared with those in need.
One of the dangers in singing
“America the Beautiful” in a purely patriotic vein is to ignore the need to
pray those prayers contained in the second half of each stanza. The poem didn’t
arise solely from a series of awe-inspiring moments brought about by
breathtaking views. The heart that was stirred by those sights belonged to a
woman whose life exhibited her faith in tangible ways.
Among my books is a resource that connects hymns with scripture texts. Among the texts listed under Katharine Lee Bates’ poem were today’s verses from the Letter of James, which speaks of “being doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves,” and declares: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”(James 1. 22; 27). Remember the line Bates included in the first version of her poem? “Till selfish gain no longer stain The banner of the free!”[xiv] It makes you think she had something more in mind than just the flag!
In
a broadcast essay heard on All Things
Considered, NPR correspondent Eric Westervelt said of America the Beautiful:
“The song and the poem reflect a belief in community and social justice,
values that came out of Bates’ hardscrabble upbringing on Massachusetts’ Cape
Cod. Though she grew up rich in heritage, her grandfather having been a college
president, the house-hold where she spent her child-hood was a poor one.”[xv]
Westervelt describes those formative years this way: “Living in Falmouth on the Cape, Bates’ minister father died when she was just a month old. To feed and clothe her four young children, her widowed mother had to be thrifty and find ways to share and barter. She sewed for neighbors, sold eggs and asparagus, and the Bates boys would chop wood for other widows.”[xvi]
Quoting
Bates’ biographer, Melinda Ponder, Westervelt relates that Bates ‘said in her
little autobiography that Falmouth practiced a kind of neighborly socialism,”
adding, “And I think by that, she meant that it was as her mother said: ‘Share
and share alike.’ Katherine grew up seeing her mother put these principles into
practice.”[xvii]
The
broadcast essay goes on to tell how Bates put into practice what she learned as
a child, saying, “As an Adult, Bates and her companion of 25 years, fellow
Wellesley professor and social activist Katharine Coman, got involved in the
reformist settlement house movement, helping organize a settlement home for
immigrant workers in Boston. [Her biographer] Ponder says the family’s
chal-lenges gave Bates a deep empathy and lifelong interest in helping those
struggling to make ends meet: ‘She wrote a line about “not wanting to feast
with a few,” she says, “She wanted everyone to be included in whatever bounty
there was.””[xviii]
From
first to last, every version of Katherine Lee Bates’ poem ended speaking of a
“patriot dream That sees beyond the years Thine alabaster cities gleam Undimmed
by human tears!”[xix]
The power of those words comes as a prayer lifted by someone who knew well that
there were plenty of tears shed in the cities and towns and villages of America
at the time.
It is well documented that the “alabaster cities” image was inspired by Bates’ visit to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago on her way to Colorado. Historian Jill Lepore helps put those words in perspective for us. The world’s fair had opened a year earlier to celebrate “the 400th anniversary of the voyage of Christopher Columbus. Its features, spread over 600 acres of fair-grounds, included a White City, immortalized in ‘America, the Beautiful,’ as ‘thine alabaster cities.’ Not mentioned in Bates’ poem are the fairs many other exhibits, which included more than 400 indigenous Americans on display in what amounted to human zoos, exhibits that had elicited protest. Potawatomi Simon Pokagon sold at the fair a booklet he printed on birch bark, called ‘The Red Man’s Rebuke,’ in which he bitterly in-formed ‘the pale-faced race that has usurped our lands and homes, that we have no spirit to celebrate with you the great Columbian Fair.’”[xx]
Bates
was fully aware of the tears in her day. Lepore writes: “Americans of Katherine
Lee Bates’ day were as politically divided as Americans of this day—arguably,
they were more divided—over everything from immigration to land use to racial justice
to economic inequality. And her America
was similar to this America in more ways, too: It was wondrous and cruel, rich
and poor, merciless and merciful, beautiful and ugly.”[xxi]
In
the face of that, Bates articulated a vision of a time and place beyond the
years “Undimmed by human tears.” One
need only read the Sunday paper, turn on the evening news or glance at
head-lines that pop up on whatever little screen you open to know such a day is
still a long way off. So is the day when
our good will be crowned with brotherhood.
The broader concept of servanthood noted by an asterisk in the hymnal
has been drowned out by claims to rights without thought given to
responsi-bilities.
All
the more reason to sing the prayerful phrases with gusto and to double-down on
our efforts to model Christian behavior that welcomes the stranger, seeks to
serve rather than be served, and measures greatness by focusing on what we can
give rather than what we think we should get. All the more reason to repeat the
truth when lies are circulated as grounds for fear and hate. All the more
rea-son to point out those places where the fruit of the Spirit is as visible as
the amber waves of grain in heartland.
Living the musical prayer offered by
Katharine Lee Bates, is by no means easy.
But when the song is lifted in a stone church on a hill or a standing
room only stadium it has the power to lift spirits and plant seeds of hope.
So, let’s get to singing and living, remembering these words from the Letter of James:
being not hearers who forget but doers who act--
they will be blessed in their doing."
James 1.25
(c) 2021, James E. Thyren
[i] Lindsay Terry, “Story Behind the Song: ‘America the Beautiful,’ The Saint Augustine Record, staugustine.com, June 30, 2016, p.2[ii] YouTube: Alicia Keys – America the Beautiful Live Super Bowl.
[iii] Thoughtco, Katharine Lee Bates, About the Author of America the Beautiful, p. 2
[iv] ibid., Biography.com.
[v] ibid.
[vi] The World Book Encyclopedia, B, Volume 2, (Chicago, World Book, Inc., 1994), p. 163
[vii] Jill Lapore, “From Sea to Shining Sea,” The Foreward to America the Beautiful, A Story in Pictures, (Washington, D.C., National Geographic, p. 17
[viii] ibid., p. 18
[ix] Bates, Katherine Lee (1897) “America. A Poem for July 4” (https://books.google.com/books?id=uXbOAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA151) The American Kitchen Magazine. 7:151 Retrieved May 13, 2016
[x] Sherr, Lynn, America the Beautiful: The Stirring True Story Behind our Nation’s Favorite Song, (New York: PublicAffairs, (2001), p.78
[xi] ibid, Terry, p. 1
[xii] Glory to God, Hymn #338,
[xiii] Henry Alford, 1844, “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come”, Hymn # 368, Glory to God, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013)
[xiv] Bates, Katherine Lee (1897) “America. A Poem for July 4” (https://books.google.com/books?id=uXbOAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA151) The American Kitchen Magazine. 7:151 Retrieved May 13, 2016
[xv] Eric Westervelt, (April 4, 2019). “Greatness is Not a Given: ‘America the Beautiful’ Asks How We Can Do Better”(https://www.npr.org/709531017) printed transcript, p. 2
[xvi] ibid.
[xvii] ibid.
[xviii] ibid. p. 2-3
[xix] Glory to God, Hymn #338, v. 4
[xx] ibid., Lepore, p. 19
[xxi] ibid., p. 18
.JPG)
well done!
ReplyDelete