How is it possible to suffer so much, and yet despite your pain--or perhaps because of it—countless people you’ll never meet will be blessed because of what was birthed in you?
It wasn’t the first time he’d been widowed.
Married at 24 to his childhood sweetheart, Henry was overjoyed when Mary became pregnant with their first child four years later.
Yet while accompanying her husband on a study tour abroad in preparation for his upcoming professorship at Harvard, Mary miscarried at six months. Several weeks later, she too was gone. Henry returned to the United States a widower at 28.
No one can replace a first love, lost. As he had buried his wife, Henry now entombed himself in his work teaching Modern Languages. If grief is the price one pays for love, Henry paid handsomely. Not one to verbalize his pain, it poured out through his pen instead.
A year passed, then another. Then five more.
After eight years of mourning Mary and their unborn child, Henry married a vivacious brunette named Frances, the daughter of a prominent Boston industrialist. Fanny was the gleam that lightened Henry’s gloom, the luminescence in his dark firmament.
Just as she breathed new life into her husband, Fanny birthed six children over the next dozen years—two sons and four daughters. Like Henry’s first wife, Fanny knew the sorrow of losing a child, too--her tiny namesake.
As his family grew over the next dozen years, so did Henry’s literary reputation. He was handsomely paid, lauded as a poet, feted wherever he went.
Yet despite the happiness of his household, the land Henry loved was bitterly divided, restive, full of rumors of war and wild talk of conspiracies both real and imagined. There seemed no middle ground, no place for independent thought. One nation under God was now believed divisible as state after state seceded from the Union.
In the year of our Lord 1861, the inferno that would come to be known as the Civil War ignited. There was nothing civil about it.
A conflagration in his own home that same year shattered Henry’s heart once again. Fanny’s hoop-skirted gown caught the flicker of a candle, or perhaps an ember from the fireplace. Awakening from a nap to her cries, Henry beat at the flames with a rug, then his own body, suffering severe burns to his face and hands. Despite his frantic attempt to save his beloved bride, Fanny died the next morning. Henry was too badly burned to attend her funeral.
A widower once more, Henry now had five children to raise alone. At 17, his oldest son Charley begged his father to allow him to enlist as boys younger than himself joined Lincoln’s army--their eyes seeking glory, their bodies strewn across battlefields.
Intent on honoring his promise to Fanny to keep their son safe, Henry refused permission only to discover Charley’s room empty one terrible morning. His son was not to return home until bullets had strafed his body, nicking his spine, the army surgeons warning of near certain paralysis.
It was December 1863. Advent season. Yet the coming of what, exactly?
Grief takes no holidays. Trouble doesn’t pause to let us pass unmolested because we wish to celebrate instead.
Fearful of losing another child, the widowed father could hardly rouse himself to mark Christmastide for his other children. Nighttime brought terror. Better to let sleep find him in his chair if it would.
That Christmas Day, dawn broke over Cambridge. Church bells were ringing throughout the city. At the sound, something stirred in the grieving man’s soul.
And Henry Wadsworth Longfellow reached for the quill pen that had lain idle for so long, reaching deeper still for words at odd with his world.
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
A visual picture of bells merrily marking the Incarnation.
A celebration of Christ’s birth.
A repetition of the familiar words of the angels recorded in Luke’s gospel.
How could a broken man birth words like these at the height of the worst conflict his country had ever experienced?
Henry-the-poet wrote as if the world was good, except Henry-the-man knew it was not.
Two more verses poured forth—fiery references to cannon thunder, a rending of the continent, households made forlorn by death. Verses often omitted from our modern hymnals.
Yet when Longfellow’s words were set to music, they became a most unusual Christmas hymn--a carol for the despairing. Those who sang these words had lived them, too.
And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"
All is not well in our world either. War rages in the Middle East, North Africa, Asia. A health care executive is gunned down on a Manhattan street and social media applauds. Once thriving American cities lay in ruins following hurricanes.
Yet into the warring madness, God came down.
Not only the God of those who suffer but the God who suffers with us.
The God who took on human flesh to move into the neighborhood of our pain to share it.
A Man of Sorrows, well acquainted with grief.
In 1863, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow knew this terrible chapter was not the end of the story.
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men."
In the middle of the bloodiest war in American history, a grieving widower wrote a ringing reminder of hope.
God has come to us.
He is for us.
He is not dead.
He is not asleep.
He is Immanuel –God with us.
And still today in the midst of a world gone sideways, we sing.
We sing.
- Maggie Wallem Rowe, 2024
IT’S YOUR TURN. In the most challenging seasons of your life, how have you been able to convey hope or help to others?