Hi!
Isn’t this time of year just wonderful? I love listening to Christmas carols and songs. I feel like it adds more of the festive spirit to things. Some of my favorites are O Come, All Ye Faithful, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, It’s Beginning to Look a lot like Christmas, and O Little Town of Bethlehem. A hobby of mine is to go and look at the history of different songs and why they were written and just the whole story behind it.
One interesting story is the one behind O Little Town of Bethlehem. It goes like this:
“When Phillips Brooks, a rising young preacher and staunch abolitionist, was asked to give the funeral address for President Abraham Lincoln, he must have been daunted by the task, and sure that his eloquent eulogy would be the most famous lines he would ever pen.
He was wrong. Shortly afterward, exhausted from years of war and longing for rest, he took a sabbatical from preaching to visit the Holy Land, hoping to find peace.
There, as he visited still-insignificant Bethlehem and looked out at the landscape at night, the lines for a poem jumped to his mind: “O Little Town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie. Above thy deep and dreamless sleep, a silent star goes by.”
Several years later, he came back to the poem and completed it. His organist, Lewis Redner, added the music. It was first performed by the children’s choir in his church, and very quickly, the verse was included in hymnals as a seasonal favorite.
But one child, who wasn’t yet born, would find special meaning in Brooks’ song. Helen Keller, the famous educator who was born blind and deaf, met Brooks years later. He was the one who explained the gospel to her for the first time.
Through her teacher and translator, Anne Sullivan, she told Brooks, “I’ve always known there was a God, but until now I’ve never known his name.”
The carol’s third verse, though written years before Brooks had met Keller, captures perfectly the joy of salvation arriving to a deaf and blind child whose ears could not hear his coming, but whose heart had long recognized his presence:
How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given!
So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of His heaven.
No ear may hear His coming, but in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive him still, the dear Christ enters in.”
Isn’t that a wonderful story? It’s amazing how words can inspire so many. I encourage you to look at some of the stories behind your favorite songs. Most times, it’ll be very inspiring.
