A hymn without a story

William Jennings Bryan knew how to deliver a speech, a talent he picked it up as a kid. He was the youngest man ever to be nominated for President. "The Great Commoner" some  called him because he knew exactly which keys to hit when speaking to ordinary folks. During the election of 1896, he basically originated the stump speech, and delivered it glowingly across the nation. Historians estimate he spoke to as many as five million people--no cameras, no video, no mikes. He just laid it out there, and people went home nodding.

William Jennings Bryan once claimed that the best preacher he'd ever heard was a man named Henry Clay Morrison, a Methodist circuit rider, a prim-looking Virginian who parted his soft, white hair down the middle. In the middle of an old time tent revival, Henry Clay Morrison was converted to faith in Jesus when he was 13 and became a licensed man of the cloth before he reached his 19th birthday. Listen to this: William Jennings Bryan, who lit up crowds as if angels had loosed his tongue, once called Henry Clay Morrison " "the greatest pulpit orator on the American continent." That's what they call "high praise."

Morrison claimed he found Jesus at Boyd's Creek Meetinghouse near Glasgow, Kentucky. In case you'd like to visit, don't. It's long gone. Still, to be able to say that you were just 13 years old when you found the Lord at the Boyd's Creek Meetinghouse--that'd be rich, don't you think?

Anyway,  one night at a rip-roaring tent meeting, Henry Clay Morrison, probably unbeknownst to him, spoke to the heart of a man named Thomas Obadiah Chisholm, age 27, another Virginian, a teacher, just another face in the crowd, an ordinary guy aboard a wooden folding chair in the kind of tent revival where Morrison himself got saved.

Thomas Obadiah Chisholm fancied himself a poet--and was. He often claimed his most famous hymn text had no dramatic story behind it, but then it seems that there wasn't much drama in his life either. Farm kid, teacher, editor, office manager, preacher, farmer again, and life insurance salesman, his life story seems--how might we say it--"unsettled." Through it all, he kept writing poems, 1200 of them throughout his life, many of them hymn texts. 

I think I've sung one of those texts a thousand times. When Dad-in-law lived in the home, my wife and I most every Sunday would visit during chapel time to take Dad down to hear some man or woman deliver the goods. To say none of those speakers were William Jennings Bryan or Henry Clay Morrison is not to denigrate what they did: bringing joy to a room full of folks singing their last stanzas takes more juice than a stump speech.

Each week, another church would bring the Word, and each week some church committee would try to figure out what the service down at the home would look like--who would play the piano and what would we sing with the old folks. More often than not, some committee member would say "Oh, gracious--how about 'Great is Thy Faithfulness.' Those old folks love 'Great is Thy Faithfulness.'" The others would assent, which meant that the next Sunday the old folks would sing it again. And again. And again. And again.

Dad's been gone now for more than a few years. We no longer attend Sunday chapel at the home, probably wouldn't know any of the residents. There's only one way people leave.

So it isn't often we sing Thomas Obadiah Chisholm's most famous hymn, "Great is Thy Faithfulness." When I consider the old days at the home, I can't help remembering what seemed a broken record. When we do sing it today, my ordinary ornery self says "here we go again." 

So we sang it again a few nights ago at the 50th birthday of our church, as apropos that night as the old hymn was at any of those renditions at the Home. I have to admit it--it felt good, once again, to go through the familiar lines Pastor Chisholm scribbled out on a sheet of paper 101 years ago. 

This time, when I looked down the row, I couldn't help seeing, towards the end, a widow, a woman known as someone specially blessed with sincere piety, someone ever leaning on the promises of God. She wasn't singing, and I couldn't help think I knew why because when I saw her lips tighten I stopped singing too, not because that old hymn is tired but because His faithfulness isn't. 

That's what I saw written on her face, her mouth closed in a half-smile. That's what I saw when we sang Chisholm's old standard, a song, he used to say, without a story.