Blessings upon My Head

I come to you today acutely aware that I am an amateur addressing an audience of experts. To speak to church musicians is a daunting prospect for one who doesn’t even play the piano. But I take heart in the definition of amateur, which means “lover.” I am a lover of music in general, and of hymns and religious music in particular.

The Lord declares that he delights in “the song of the heart” and that he will answer the “song of the righteous” with “a blessing upon their heads” (D&C 25:12). I bear witness of this promise. For the Lord has surely showered blessings—blessings upon blessings—on me and on my family as we have sung hymns to him with all our hearts. Through hymns, I have taught and been taught lasting and life-changing gospel lessons. The hymns have moved me to “repentance and good works,” strengthened my “testimony and faith,” comforted me, consoled me, and deepened my determination to endure.¹ Hymns have mediated the Spirit in powerful ways. Indeed, some of my sweetest and most tender spiritual experiences are associated with hymn singing.

I recall, for example, a precious family experience Sunday evening just a few weeks ago as my wife, Susan, and I gathered spontaneously around the piano with our teenaged children and a few of their friends to sing the songs of Zion. This scene has been repeated often in our family. On this occasion, I went to the living room by the piano and started to sing. Soon I was joined by Susan, who sang with and accompanied me. One by one, our children joined us. One daughter even brought her friends. As we sang, the Spirit came tangibly into the room, filling our hearts with love for the Lord and for each other. We each chose favorite hymns. The texts let us speak of truths that lay close to our hearts, while the music let us express tender feelings of testimony and joy which, in contemporary culture, parents and teenaged children rarely share so openly or without embarrassment.

As I looked around the room, my heart swelled with joy, and I felt the urge to seize this precious moment in time. But “the fugitive moment refuses to stay” (“Come, Let Us Anew”). So I fixed the scene in my mind as a treasure for future reflection, like Wordsworth’s jocund daffodils. I shall now take to my grave the memory of that tender tableau of loved ones gathered around the piano fervently singing hymns from our hearts as the sun cast its soft fading glow on a peaceful Sabbath. Surely this moment was a taste of heaven on earth and a foretaste of what joys await us in heaven when we shall sing a new song before the throne of God (Rev. 5:9; 14:2–3). We lifted our hearts in song to God, and he answered with a blessing upon our heads.

I treasure many such moments in my memory, including memories from my youth. Now I do not come from a particularly musical family. No one in my family played well enough even to comfortably accompany hymn singing. Yet I grew up singing and loving the hymns. My mother sang hymns such as “I Am a Child of God,” “Light Divine,” and “Love at Home” as lullabies. And she taught us to sing together while we did household chores, just as she had done with her sisters. My father would often conclude family gatherings by marching us around the house to a rousing rendition of “Count Your Many Blessings.”

But perhaps my sweetest childhood memory of the hymns is of singing them on long family trips from Southern California to Utah and back. Each of us took turns choosing a favorite song; often we chose hymns. I always chose “Carry On” first. I am not sure why, because my favorite hymn as a child was “I Stand All Amazed.” But “Carry On” was a long piece, by page count the longest in the old hymnal, and I liked that. Plus it seemed well suited to our desert journey. And as I grew older, I came to hear an apt but unintended pun on “carrion.” Now, unfortunately, the chorus always makes me think of road kill.

My fondest memory of these trips is of curling up late at night in the front seat between Mom and Dad, listening to them sing hymns and old-fashioned favorites. There, in the black night, the sky studded with myriad of stars, I would listen to my parents’ voices blend as they sang such sweetly sentimental lines as “There’s a long, long trail a-winding to the home that I love,” and “I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses.” The songs often focused on the Savior. They sang of their testimony of Him:

I know that my Redeemer lives.
What comfort this sweet sentence gives!
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
He lives to bless me with his love.
He lives to plead for me above.
He lives my hungry soul to feed.
He lives to bless in time of need.

And they sang of their need for his presence:

I need thee, oh, I need thee;
Every hour I need thee!
Oh, bless me now, my Savior;
I come to thee!

Even now, after so many years, the memory of my parents singing these songs brings a lump to my throat. From such moments I learned about my parents’ love for their Utah home, for the Savior, and for each other. What a blessed memory! What blessings have been answered upon my head because my parents lifted up to God the songs of their hearts!

Now no doubt my parents had us sing not only to edify us but also to control and curb the chaos created by about a dozen restless children crammed for hundreds of miles in a station wagon. Susan and I have adopted the same strategy as parents, as I am sure many of you have. When we travel, we frequently sing to forestall a fight, even on the short trips to and from her home in Salt Lake. Many a child’s spirit has been subdued and softened, many a quarrel quelled by the mollifying magic of music. Singing is an effective form of parental crowd control.

But it is more. It is a moving and memorable way to teach the gospel. Hymns can be powerful sung sermons. As the First Presidency says in the preface to the 1985 LDS hymnal, “Some of the greatest sermons are preached by the singing of hymns. Hymns move us to repentance and good works, build testimony and faith, comfort the weary, console the mourning, and inspire us to endure to the end.” I like this statement. I especially like its implicit recognition of why hymns can be such effective sermons: “hymns move us.” Similarly, the First Presidency states, “Music has boundless power for moving families toward greater spirituality and devotion to the gospel.”²

Hymns combine the power of poetry and of music. Anciently, poetry was praised for its ability to “teach and delight.”³ How much more apt is this maxim for hymns, which at their best wed inspired poetry with inspiring melody. Music doubles the delight and deepens the power of words to teach. It enables us to remember the words better, which can come into our minds almost unbidden on the wings of song. And it suffuses the verse with emotion, thus bringing the message home to our hearts and not just to our minds.

However, since I am not competent to account for what is, for me, the ineffable power of music, let me focus on hymn texts that have instructed and delighted me and my family. In so doing, I shall describe how we have tried to “teach [our] children to love the hymns,” as the First Presidency enjoins,⁴ which in turn has been the source of so many rich blessings upon our heads.

Many of the things we have done to communicate love for the hymns can be illustrated by “Lead, Kindly Light,” a family favorite. First, it is good to have favorites. Most family favorites are associated with particular family members and memories. “Abide with Me!” for example, reminds our family of a daughter who hates change, who sees change as loss, and hence who takes special comfort in the line “O thou who changest not.” “Lead, Kindly Light” has been a favorite for Susan and me since the first of our marriage. Our children associate it with stories from our days in graduate school. They know that the phrase “one step enough” was our family watchword in the early years of our marriage as Susan and I tried to walk by faith, not knowing “the distant scene.” We have told them often of how the hymn inspired us. We have discussed a devotional talk I gave on this theme.⁵ We have taught them the doctrine the hymn teaches about walking by faith. And now, as young adults, they are striving to apply the doctrine by discerning and following the light that illuminates their own footsteps into uncertain futures. We have also tried to teach them something about the history of the song. I have explained the circumstances under which John Henry Newman composed it. And I have taught them that my great uncle, President Harold B. Lee, loved this song, that he lived close to the Spirit, and that he loved the last lines because he looked forward to the day when he would see again “those angel faces smile” of his wife, Fern Tanner, and his daughter Maureen, whom he “loved long since, and lost awhile.” We sing the song often. And many, if not all, of the family have learned the words by heart.

Now let me single out a few of these points for emphasis. First, learning the words by heart. I love this metaphor for memorization: “to learn by heart.” Memorization is unduly disparaged by our culture. But there is great power in committing things to memory, where they can work their way into our being and be recalled in times of need. A few years ago, a keynote speaker at this workshop reminded us of how memorized hymns helped a pilot shot down over Vietnam endure five and a half years in prison camp.⁶ I encourage my children to memorize by telling them that the best present they can give me for my birthday or holidays is to memorize a poem, a scripture, or a piece of music. That way they get to keep what they give away. More of us should memorize the words to our hymns. And even if we don’t know them perfectly by heart, we ought to sing them in a way that is not so book-bound. Perhaps then we might sing up and pay attention to the message. There is too much passionless, anemic singing in the Church, especially in North America. We ought to sing more lustily and with more feeling—as if we mean it.

Another way to love the hymns is to talk about the lyrics. I like to call attention to rhymes and to puns, such as carrion or, more profoundly, the concluding line of “Because I Have Been Given Much”: “thus shall my thanks be thanks indeed” (and in deed). I like to explain archaic phrases, such as “in the sultry glebe,” “hie to Kolob,” or “without a city wall”—the latter meaning, of course, outside the wall. I like to discuss the structure of the texts—such as Ed Hart’s “Our Savior’s Love,” which focuses in each successive verse, respectively, on the Savior, Spirit, and Father. I like to interchange tunes and texts so as to bring the words to life in new ways. Using Karen Lynn Davidson’s book Our Latter-day Hymns as my guide, I like to tell stories about the composers or the uses to which the hymns have been put.⁷ For example, I like to recall the Kirtland Temple dedication when we sing “The Spirit of God”; and when we sing “Ye Elders of Israel,” I like to remember the practice of some early saints who, as they embarked from the docks at Liverpool, sang “O Babylon, O Babylon we bid thee farewell; We’re going to the mountains of Ephraim to dwell.”

I also like to call attention to thematic groupings in the hymnal. My children know, for example, that I am fond of the group of hymns unified by imagery of the sea—which I sometimes facetiously call “drowning hymns”—such as “Jesus, Lover of My Soul” and “Jesus, Savior, Pilot Me.” “As a mother stills her child, Thou canst hush the ocean wild.” What a wonderful line!

It is good for families to develop favorite hymns and for children to learn what songs their parents love. My children know that I like the lovely Swedish lullaby “Children of Our Heavenly Father” (which I keep expecting the Church to discover), “Away in a Manger,” and any hymn by Cecil Frances Alexander. They know that I like comforting hymns, like “Jesus, the Very Thought of Thee” and “How Gentle God’s Commands,” and rousing anthems, like “Press Forward, Saints,” “For All the Saints,” and “Hark, All Ye Nations.” And they know that the second verse of “Hark, All Ye Nations” has special meaning for their grandparents, who sang it in Czechoslovakia immediately after the fall of communism: “Searching in darkness, nations have wept; Watching for dawn, their vigil they’ve kept. All now rejoice, the long night is o’er. Truth is on earth once more!”

They also know that I love the unsung verses of “How Firm a Foundation,” especially verses 4 and 7, which appeared in the first LDS hymnal:

When through the deep waters I call thee to go,
The rivers of sorrow shall not thee o’erflow,
For I will be with thee, thy troubles to bless,
And sanctify to thee thy deepest distress.

The soul that on Jesus hath leaned for repose
I will not, I cannot, desert to his foes;
That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake,
I’ll never, no never, no never forsake!

I want my children to love these lines. I want the Church to love them. For these verses can sustain us through deep waters, as they have sustained the saints in the past. Let me conclude this section of my talk by recounting a story of one such early saint, for whom these verses became themselves an answer from the Lord and a blessing upon her head.

Her name is Amanda Smith, “a woman of great faith and a survivor of the Haun’s mill massacre.”⁸ A Campbellite convert from Ohio, she arrived with her husband and five children at Haun’s Mill, Missouri, just in time to be caught up in a brutal massacre. When the mob attacked, Amanda fled to the woods with two of her children, bullets flying around her. Others in her family were not so fortunate. As she returned from hiding, “the first sight that greeted her eyes was her eleven-year-old son, Willard, carrying his brother, seven-year-old Alma, unconscious and dripping with blood. A Missourian had put his rifle through the cracks in the mill, pressing the muzzle to Alma’s hip, and pulled the trigger.”⁹ Sister Smith also discovered that her husband was dead, one of the mob having shot him and dragged his body back and forth on the floor to pull off his boots “before the d—d Mormon was done kicking.”¹⁰ Her ten-year-old son was also dead. A Missourian had put a gun against the boy’s temple and, despite the protest from a fellow Missourian, callously pulled the trigger, because “nits make lice.”¹¹

But it is not the ghastly horror of these events that I want to recall here; rather, it is how Amanda learned that, even in this hell, God had not forsaken her. Not only did the Lord reveal to Amanda how to care for Alma’s hip so that the boy miraculously recovered to walk without a limp, the Lord also revealed to Sister Smith that he would not forsake her—no, not even in her deepest distress. And he did so in the words of the hymn.

Amanda tells this part of her story as follows:

I cannot leave this tragic story without relating some incidents of those five weeks when I was a prisoner with my wounded boy in Missouri, near the site of the massacre. . . . All the Mormons in the neighborhood had fled out of the State excepting a few families of bereaved women and children. . . . In our utter desolation, what could we women do but pray? Prayer was our only source of comfort; our Heavenly Father our only helper. . . . One day a mobber came from the mill [with an order from his captain] “The captain says if you women don’t stop your d—d prayer he [the Captain] will send down a posse and kill every d—d one of you!” And he might as well have done it [i.e., killed us], as to stop us poor women from praying in that hour of great calamity.¹²

Amanda tried to pray in silence but could not bear it. So, she continues:

I stole down to the corn field, and crawled into a stalk of corn. It was as the temple of the Lord to me at that moment. I prayed aloud and most fervently. When I emerged from the corn a voice spoke to me. It was a voice as plain as I ever hear [sic] one. It was no silent, strong impression of the spirit, but a voice, repeating a verse of the Saint’s hymn:

That soul who on Jesus hath leaned for repose
I will not, I cannot, desert to his foes;
That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake,
I’ll never, no never, no never forsake!

From that moment I had no more fear. I felt that nothing could hurt me.¹³

And, in fact, no more harm came to her. When the mob came back to her house, she confronted them boldly, and they dispersed. The two men she thought had stayed behind to kill her, took pity on her instead and left her a fat hog to eat. Shortly thereafter, when Alma had recovered enough to leave, Amanda walked boldly into the captain of the mob’s home and demanded her horses back. “I did not fear the captain of the mob,” she says, “for I had the Lord’s promise that nothing should hurt me.”¹⁴ She took one horse from his home and another from his mill. Rather than kill her, as was threatened, he gave her flour and honey, and sent her on her way. “The Lord had kept his word,” she concludes. “The soul who on Jesus had leaned for succor had not been forsaken even in this terrible hour of massacre.”¹⁵

We should remember Amanda Smith’s story when we sing “How Firm a Foundation.” God did not desert this noble sister who resolved to lean on him, and he will not forsake us, “though all hell should endeavor to shake.” It pleases me to know that, when the Lord wanted to reassure Amanda of his support, he quoted a hymn. In this case, the prayer of the righteous was answered with the words of a hymn, a hymn which the Lord himself obviously knows and loves.

Finally, in the last section of my talk, let me tell you about the way that writing hymns has blessed my life. I was asked to discuss this topic when I received the invitation to address you today. I don’t do so to boast. As you will see, I have little to boast about. I have not written many hymn texts and those I have written are still, often, works in progress that have been privately circulated among family and friends. Still, my efforts at hymn writing, meager as they are, have been answered with blessings upon my head.

The first hymn texts I wrote were on fasting. One of these is in our hymnal. It came about in this way: one fast Sunday in the early 1980s, I felt like I was merely going hungry rather than fasting. So I determined to follow a suggestion that I thought I remembered President Kimball making for improving our Sabbath worship: namely, to write devotional poetry. I decided to write on fasting.

I first attempted to set a famous scripture on fasting into metrical verse. I knew from my study of Puritanism that this was a venerable, time-honored practice. So I took Isaiah’s text on the true fast and rendered phrases from it into common meter. This text has never been set to music, but it could, of course, be sung to countless hymn tunes:

The True Fast

To loose the bands of wickedness
And let th’ oppressed go free,
To break off yokes and burdens lift,
This fast God did decree.

To share our bread with hungry souls,
The homeless poor befriend,
The naked clothe, our neighbors serve,
Our fast through deeds commend.

This done, then let our light break forth
As dawn in morning sky.
May God, our guide, now hear our prayers,
And answer, “Here am I.”

This clarified and deepened my understanding of the true fast, as articulated by Isaiah, and enriched my Sabbath worship.

On that same Sunday, I also began drafts of two other fasting texts. Both these texts develop the interplay between the physical and spiritual dimensions of fasting. The one entitled “Fast Day” is organized around three physical challenges of fasting—hunger, thirst, and faintness—and articulates corollary spiritual needs. It also evokes Christ’s fasting in the desert. Here is the text, which again has not been set to music:

Fast Day

I hunger, Lord, and sense my need,
Yet not for want of bread alone,
But on the bread of life I’d feed
And shun the tempter’s loaf of stone
While traveling through this wilderness,
Where none but thee fills emptiness.

I thirst, dear God, and parched I seek
For water from thy cooling well,
A living drink that quenches deep.
Thy fountain must this thirst dispel
Or in this arid world I’ll die
My deepest thirst unsatisfied.

I faint, Oh Lord, and feel the lack
Of nourishment for my weak flesh.
My weaker spirit, too, grows slack.
Thy power must my strength refresh
While in this desert I endure
The tempter’s wiles and sin’s allure.

I’ve lifted up my prayers to thee;
With hungry souls I’ve shared my bread.
Hear, then, my cry and heartfelt plea.
Say, “Here am I!” Upon me shed
Thy light to guide my pathless way,
And make my darkness as noonday.

The third fasting text begun that Sunday is the one that was eventually included in our hymnal. It, too, is organized around three aspects of fasting, as we observe this principle in the Church: prayer, offering, testimony. Each verse is built around a pattern of reciprocal action: I first describe what we do and request the Lord to grant a corresponding blessing. Thus, we speak to God in prayer in the hope that he will speak to us. We share our bread with others in the hope that the Lord will share the bread of life with us. And so forth. Following each verse, the chorus emphasizes the paradox that fasting physically can be feasting spiritually. I feel very blessed that this hymn has become part of our worship services in the Church.

I didn’t write another hymn text for many years. My next attempt was a Christmas carol. I wrote it to a famous Welsh folk tune, “Ash Grove,” which I had just heard and loved—and which I subsequently learned had been used by other denominations for a Thanksgiving hymn. This tune had a lovely pastoral feel to me, but a tricky rhythm. It was not easy to work with. I focused on the condescension of God evident in the birth of Christ. The first verse focuses on Mary and Joseph, alone that night in a stable, perhaps shunned by their own relatives, and likely very poor. The second verse focuses on the shepherds, lowly but “just and holy men” according to Alma 13, who are transformed into courtiers of a king that night. My thoughts were influenced by Elder Holland’s wonderful talk on Christmas. Here is the result:

One Night in a Stable

I.

One night in a stable, the fair virgin Mary
Gave birth to a baby while far from her home,

With no one but Joseph to comfort or carry
The wonderful knowledge that this was God’s son.

While warm in the inns wealthy lodgers lay dreaming,
A savior was born who would love them so well,

That he made them room, while his mother was weeping,
In mansions so splendid as no tongue can tell.

II.

That night on a hillside poor shepherds heard singing
And, summoned, came hasting to honor the Lamb.

With wonder they worshiped, from poverty bringing
Such rare gifts as pure hearts, bent knees, and clean hands.

No kings from the East could have brought to that stable
More dignified gifts—not gold, incense, or spice.

And there at the manger, by God’s grace enabled,
Poor people like us were made courtiers of Christ.

Once again, I have not yet published this carol. But I have shared it with friends and family, and they have sung it in ward choirs and around my own hearth at Christmas. I have used it in talks, and it has deepened my appreciation of Christmas every season since I wrote it. Writing it has been answered with blessings upon my head.

These were the only hymns I had composed before this talk. A pretty meager output! I felt I needed to do something more for you. So I determined that I would write a new hymn text for this address. I was in York, England, a couple weeks ago when I decided what I would write about. I chose to do new texts based on the psalm of Nephi, because I am currently writing an article on Nephi for a new encyclopedia of the Book of Mormon and because I have long loved this psalm.

I decided to compose two texts, one to the tune of “Finlandia” (“Be Still, My Soul”) and one to an American folk tune. I chose “Finlandia” because its meter matches the climatic line of the psalm, which is iambic pentameter with a strong caesura (break) between the second and third feet: “Awake, my soul! No longer droop in sin!” Note how this matches the rhythm “Be still, my soul; The Lord is on thy side.” This was a tough form to work with because I had to build a natural break between the second and third foot of every line and because I limited myself to imagery drawn from Nephi’s own text. Plus, I foolishly chose to write in couplets.

At any rate I composed a first draft in England, only to realize that I had composed a text with four-line stanzas, while the tune “Finlandia” requires six lines. So, when I returned home, I reworked the poem. This is the result:

Awake, My Soul

I love the Lord. In him my soul delights.
Upon his word, I ponder day and night.
He’s heard my cry, brought visions to my sleep,
And kept me safe o’er deserts and the deep.
He’s filled my heart with his consuming love,
And borne me high on wings of his great dove.

Yet oft I groan, “O wretched man am I!”
My flesh is weak and I’m encompassed by
A world of sin, which holds me in its thrall,
If I give in and to temptations fall.
Then strength grows slack, I waste in sorrow’s vale.
My peace destroyed, my enemies prevail.

Awake, my soul! No longer droop in sin.
Rejoice, my heart! And let me praise again
The Lord my God, who is my rock and stay
To keep me strict upon his straight, plain way.
O let me shake at the first sight of sin
And thus escape my foes without and in.

I knew, as soon as I decided to write on Nephi’s psalm, that I also wanted to set it to a folk tune called “Poor Wayfaring Stranger.” I felt that, although the setting may not work as a hymn for a congregation, it might make a nice solo as a religious ballad. It has a plaintive, yearning quality, and the melody changes between quatrains in a way that seemed well suited to the modulations in Nephi’s mood from remorse to resolution. Plus, the tune dates back to the period when Joseph Smith was translating the Book of Mormon, which pleased me. It comes out of a tradition of religious ballads sometimes called “White Spirituals.”¹⁶ Here is the text:

Sometimes My Soul

Sometimes my soul, in deep affliction,
Cries out, “O wretched man am I!”
When I’m encompassed by temptation,
When flesh is weak and I comply.

Yet still I know in whom I’ve trusted,
He’s heard my cries by day and night.
He’s filled my heart with love consuming,
He’s borne my soul to mountain height.

Then why in sorrow should I linger,
My strength grow slack and my heart groan?
I’ll not give way to grief or anger,
For God’s great mercy I have known.

Awake, my soul! And cease from drooping.
Rejoice, my heart! And praise thy God,
Who is the rock of my salvation.
I’ll strictly walk grasping his rod.

I testify again that the Lord showers blessings upon the heads of those who lift up their hearts in song to him; thus he redeems his children, in part, through song; and that our salvation is “the song of [his] redeeming love” (Alma 5:26). Let me conclude with the injunction of the First Presidency:

Brothers and sisters, let us use the hymns to invite the Spirit of the Lord into our congregations, our homes, and our personal lives. Let us memorize and ponder them, recite and sing them, and partake of their spiritual nourishment. Know that the song of the righteous is a prayer unto our Father in Heaven, “and it shall be answered with a blessing upon [your] heads.”¹⁷

In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.