A Message of Faith at the Community Band Concert
One of our must-dos each Christmas season is the Cookeville Community Band Christmas concert. This year the Performing Arts Center was packed. The band played the “Huron Carol” again. I told you about that song after last year’s concert. You can learn about this famous Canadian carol here. I hope they never get tired of playing Leroy Anderson’s “Sleigh Bells.” It was as thrilling this year as it is every year.
A new feature of this concert was a reading of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, “Christmas Bells,” better known as the Christmas carol, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” The band played a European song about Christmas bells while a local minister read the poem. Before they performed the piece, the minister told the audience that Longfellow wrote the poem in the midst of the Civil War. Knowing that context helps the listener or reader understand the anguish that Longfellow was suffering.
I’d like to share the poem with you, but first I want to tell you a little more about Longfellow. He was a man of faith. He had suffered great losses by the time he wrote the poem. His wife had died in a house fire in 1861. A month after her death, he wrote these words to her sister:
I thank God hourly–as I have from the beginning for the beautiful life we led together, and that I loved her more and more to the end.
The agony of the Civil War became painfully personal for Longfellow when his son Charley joined the Union Army. Late in 1863, Charley suffered a near-fatal injury when a bullet nicked his spine. When his father heard the news, he rushed to find him, brought him home, and nursed him back to health.
Just over a year after his son came home to recover, Longfellow sat down to put down his own thoughts about what was happening in America. On Christmas Day of 1864, he wrote these words:
Christmas Bells
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
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!
It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said;
“For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”
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.”
Longfellow had learned to rest in God, no matter what was happening around him — no matter what. Through the eyes of faith, we can do the same. God is trustworthy — no matter what. As Moses sang in Deuteronomy 32:
For I proclaim the name of the Lord;
Ascribe greatness to our God!
The Rock! His work is perfect,
For all His ways are just;
A God of faithfulness and without injustice,
Righteous and upright is He.
Deuteronomy 32:3-4