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This Is My Song
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Not long ago the Episcopal priest at the church I attend invited members of a fellowship group that meets there is give their testimonies in place of the sermon one Sunday morning. Giving testimonies, or personal stories of faith, is not a standard feature of Episcopal worship. In this case, the members of the fellowship group were street people who had originally begun meeting at the church to get in out of the cold during the winter months. Most told harrowing tales of homelessness and addiction before finding Christ. One tall, gray-haired gentleman named Paul said only a few words but then began to sing in a resonant baritone. I recognized an old Methodist hymn, “Blessed Assurance,” whose refrain includes these lines:
This is my story, this is my song,
Praising my Savior, all the day long.
It was clear from the heartfelt way he sang that Paul intended the hymn to speak for him. This was indeed his story and his song. There was no need even to go into the particulars of the story. The emotion in his voice conveyed everything that needed to be said.
“Blessed Assurance” is an old chestnut, if ever there was one, with an infectious melody that can take root in your brain and stay there. It was rattling around in my head for days after Paul sang it. Because it is written in the first person, I found myself wondering about my own story and my own song. I have been around long enough to know we don’t necessarily write our own story, no matter how much we might think of ourselves as the star of our own show. As for my song, I don’t take that too literally, because I can barely carry a tune.
I was moved to find out more about the author of “Blessed Assurance.” The first thing I discovered is that the hymn writer went by many names, some 200 of them in all, both male and female — pseudonyms her publishers insisted she use because she was so prolific. (They didn’t want their hymnals to appear to have too many hymns by the same author.) When Fanny Crosby — her actual name — wrote that her song was praising her savior all the day long, she meant that quite literally. Even though she didn’t start writing hymns until she was well into her forties, she produced nearly 9,000 of them in her lifetime, and more keep coming to light. Crosby composed the lyrics in her head, as many as 6 or 7 hymns in a day, which she then dictated to someone else. Even though she was well educated by the standards of her day, Crosby couldn’t put pen to paper herself, because she had been blind from infancy.
Blind bards are an old story in music and literature, starting with Homer. Tradition holds that Homer was blind. He was a storyteller in the oral tradition, meaning that The Iliad and The Odyssey, both long epic poems, would have been delivered from memory, and probably to musical accompaniment. Crosby’s hymns were much less of a challenge to remember when she was dictating them; nevertheless, she had prodigious powers of recall. By the age of 15, she had committed to memory the first five books of the Old Testament and the four gospels of the New Testament, as well as the Book of Proverbs, the Song of Solomon and many of the Psalms.
Crosby’s hymns have been dismissed as “gushy and mawkishly sentimental,” which is hard to dispute. Nevertheless, they struck a responsive chord during her heyday in the late Victorian era. Fellow hymn writer George C. Stebbins noted, "There was probably no writer in her day who appealed more to the valid experience of the Christian life or who expressed more sympathetically the deep longings of the human heart than Fanny Crosby."
Notwithstanding her many pseudonyms, Crosby was a well-known public figure, renowned not only for her hymns and popular songs, but also as a rescue mission worker in the Hell’s Kitchen and Bowery neighborhoods of New York City. She performed at the White House, met several presidents and spoke before a joint session of Congress.
You won’t find any entries by Fanny Crosby in the Episcopal Church hymnal. But I confess I have a soft spot for hymns like “Blessed Assurance” that are simple expressions of faith and that are easily sung — which is to say, hymns that I can sing, however badly. Paul, the street person who got up in my church and sang “Blessed Assurance,” had a voice that might well have tackled Handel’s Messiah. But Crosby’s mawkishly sentimental hymn turned out to be the perfect musical expression in that moment of a lost soul who had found redemption.
I could never get up and sing “Blessed Assurance” or anything else without driving people to the exits. But I can preach — and I do. I can take pictures (my work has appeared in galleries and museums all over the Untied States). And I can write brief essays like this one that tell my story, directly or indirectly, in small bits and pieces. I have turned out more than 1,200 of them since I first began writing them nearly 20 years ago.
So what is my song? You can tell by the title of this web site, Godward, that my work is intended as an expression of faith, although the subject of any particular entry is wide-ranging and not always overtly concerned with religious matters. I do not have Fanny Crosby’s gift for simple expressions of faith that appeal directly to one’s emotions. Sometimes matters of faith are not so simply told, although I hope to express them as clearly and directly as I can. As for what my song is about, however badly sung, I am probably the last person to ask. Apart from an overall theme, which is summed up in the name of the web site, the story comes to me in bits and pieces. A word or phrase or image is enough to get me started, then I follow along, sentence by sentence, until I get to the end. I suspected that’s how it will always be, one sentence following another until I get to my end.
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