Simple Gifts: One Man's Search for Grace - Softcover

Preface
FIRST SONGS

I treasure some of the grand old hymns. My great joy is to sing them with people like me who hold them deep in their memories and call them forth with passion.

At the nondenominational Rockbound Chapel, fastened to a granite boulder on a hill over the sea near Sedgwick, Maine, I sing songs with other summer visitors -- strangers and people I barely know. In untrained, inelegant, often too-loud or too-soft voices, we sing to each other of our pain, loneliness, and fear, topics we would hesitate to admit flat out in gatherings after services. We also sing of love, grace, trust, hope, peace -- sentiments that are left out of the usual daily patter. We sing words that matter to us.

We are a mixed lot in age, sex, and occupation. We are fishermen, poets, CEOs, clerks, teachers, publishers, builders, mechanics, retirees, holiday rusticators, and others. We sing out our souls for each other. Our hymns are like hugs.

We are Protestants, Catholics, and those who would prefer not to be labeled. Some of us are of troubled faith and others are more agnostic than not. Even if our pew companions don't exactly share creeds, our hymns carry all of us to those Thin Places described by the Irish, elevated states of consciousness where almost all barriers between mortals and gods vanish.

Most of us Rockbound singers, like everybody else, spend portions of our days listening to music on our radios, TVs, or CD players. We are sung at. But in the tiny chapel we find our own voices. It makes no difference how well we sing, only that we do so. We raise our notes to each other and to heaven. No celebrity musician ever receives as much fan-love as we humble amateurs do, from each other, from the spirit within and around us.

My friend Scott Savage, a conservative Quaker, tells me that often hymns "break out." His family's favorite is "The Holy Ghost Is Here," written in 1834 by Charles H. Surgeon. Scott writes: "At the noon prayer before lunch this hymn breaks out, or while we cut up apples for canning applesauce, or on a walk, or returning from meeting, my wife and our two children sing it together unprompted and quite sweetly, while Ned the horse finds his way home."

At the Rockbound Chapel, songs don't break out in quite the same way. We raise our hands before the service and call out the page numbers of cherished songs, while Jim Lufkin, our energetic pastor, scribbles notes and prepares the agenda. After we get rolling, accompanied by a grand older lady, Alice Egland, on the piano -- she knows scores of hymns by heart -- or with the help of a visiting fiddle, flute, or even a saw player, the spirit breaks out in earnest. In an hour we might cover two dozen hymns, first and last verses, sometimes all the verses. Old, old hymns. Never anything modern.

Words, mere words, flat on the page or preached dead in the air, can ruin faith and often divide congregations. Theological niceties spun by divine theorists for centuries have led to ridiculous and murderous quarrels. Are we saved by grace or works? Does God recognize full-body baptism or a sprinkle? On and on the words of dogma spin into an eternity of nonsense.

As Kierkegaard put it rather bluntly: "When a lark wants to pass gas like an elephant, it has to blow up. In the same way, all scholarly theology must blow up, because it has wanted to be the supreme wisdom instead of remaining what it is, an unassuming triviality."

A great preacher can almost lift mere words into the realm of song, but some don't even come close. Their verbiage leaves me annoyed, bored, betrayed, or asleep. During some sermons in various churches, I daydream that I had brought a basket of ripe fruit to lob at the pulpit. Why should I sit here politely listening? I think, gazing out the window at the blowing tree limbs, the rushing clouds, or the tombstones of the blessedly dead.

We forget such sermons as quickly as possible. We also may forget even the words of wonderful sermons. But hymns -- the classic, lasting hymns -- resonate from childhood on. Even those of us who haven't warmed a pew in decades can recall hymns we learned in Sunday School, and in such songs our childhood faith is often restored.

William James observes in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902): "In mystical literature such self-contradictory phrases as 'dazzling obscurity' 'whispering silence' and 'teeming desert' are continuously met with. They prove that not conceptual speech, but music rather is the element through which we are best spoken to by mystical truth."

Music is transcendent theology. Hildegaard of Bingen, the twelfth-century mystic and composer, took music so seriously that in one of her plays, while the soul and the angels sing, the devil has only a speaking part. Music has been denied him. Because of his unmelodic nature, he can't approach the Thin Places.

Of course, not all hymns take us there. In fact, some hymns propel us in the opposite direction. They leave us lip-syncing the verses, deflated by trivial or sappy tunes and lyrics, Muzak for the well-fed, somnolent mind. For me, a mediocre hymn is as bad as a lousy sermon, because I am expected to participate in the debacle by at least pretending to sing along. I snap shut the hymnal and stand in silence until the last note relieves the congregation.

But oh! When it hits! When a great old hymn reaches way down inside where you live: then the problem is not shall I sing, but can I manage to sing at all. I choke up and stumble over words and notes. Nothing can mean so much as a classic hymn.

Such hymns go to a source in us beyond our control and leave us overwhelmed with joy and recognition. Suddenly, when words and music combine, I see, as in the tremendous line of "Amazing Grace" -- "I was blind but now I see." On paper that line may not mean much. In song, it's almost more truth than I can bear to express.

I rediscovered such a wallop when I sorted through my father's possessions after he died. In his cellar workshop I came across records he had made of himself and our family singing together.

I remember my dad as a shy and mostly silent man. He almost never expressed extremes of emotion and reproved his three children for excessive enthusiasm. "Don't gush," Pop would say. He spent most of his evenings quietly in the cellar, after working all day for General Electric. In his workshop he constructed wood and mechanical projects: a wagon for my brother and me (the "Bill/Bob"); a crutch for my mother when she fell and broke her ankle; a snow-blower concocted out of an ancient fruit tree sprayer; and the device that allowed him to create these records.

His forty-five-RPM vinyl discs were scratchy and definitely homemade, but on one my father's passion for hymns was obvious. He both sang and accompanied himself on the piano. The record label said "Francis, 1948":

"TAKE TIME TO BE HOLY"
Take time to be holy
Speak often with God
Find rest in Him always
And feed on His word.

Make friends with God's children
Help those who are weak
Forgetting in nothing
His blessing to seek.

His voice was a determined whisper, as if he was embarrassed to be recording himself, but behind that whisper I felt a need that he couldn't express in any other way. In his reserve and shyness he often found it difficult to "make friends with God's children." Here he almost cries out that he wants to do just that.

In another of Pop's recordings, I heard my mother and me in 1946 singing "Jesus Loves the Little Children":

Jesus loves the little children
All the children of the world
Red and yellow, black and white
They are precious in His sight.

And "Jesus Loves Me":

Jesus loves me!
This I know
For the Bible tells me so.

On a record dated "Christmas 1950," I tentatively plunked out my nine-year-old's piano version of "O Little Town of Bethlehem" while my mother encouraged me, "Good, Billy, very good," and Pop stood by with his marvelous machine.

In church, in Sunday School, and at home, we sang together. As World War II ended, the nuclear age began, the Cold War descended, and the Korean War erupted, hymns became our everyday certainty. They lifted us above the world and assured the Henderson children that a greater power than all others protected us in love.

At our church, Philadelphia's Oak Park Fourth Presbyterian, I joined the Junior Choir with my younger brother, Bob. At Christmas and Easter we sang for the congregation. My favorite was "Christ Arose":

Up from the grave he arose
With a mighty triumph o'er his foes
He arose a victor
From the dark domain
And He lives forever
With his saints to reign
He arose! He arose!
Hallelujah! Christ arose!

I loved the imaginary pyrotechnics. There was Jesus low, very low, in the dark domain (whatever that was), and suddenly up he rushed, like a huge whale from the ocean depths, with a great splash as he surfaced and surged upward to the sky.

Since I was the tallest child, I was positioned on the back row in front of the altar on the highest step. Attired in my black and white robe, I could sing to all in the stone church below me. "He arose!" I shouted from my pinnacle, as the whale jetted to the stars. "He arose!"

In grade school I started trumpet lessons and my brother tackled the trombone. One July we serenaded the Wednesday night singers at our little summer church on the outskirts of Ocean City, New Jersey. I remember the bare plank floors, wooden folding chairs, an out-of-tune piano, and a few dozen of the faithful. Our first-ever recital. Bob and I stood in front of the group as the sun set through the windows and the ocean sighed a block away. "Trust and Obey" was our duet, a rather simple hymn. We had practiced it hard and were quite confident. We hit the first few notes OK, lost our place, and stopped dead with stage fright. Finally, after a long...