Line upon Line

This hymn from the church’s new hymnbook already feels like an old favorite because the truths it beautifully teaches are both timeless and profound.

In honor of Thanksgiving, we are offering our “It is Well With My Soul” Gratitude Journal at the lowest price it has ever been. They are $10 each, but also have a bulk discount on any purchase of 5 or more that takes another $2 off a piece. You will be hard pressed to find anything this meaningful at that price point to give to your neighbors, youth group, family, or friends, jump on this price before the sale ends by CLICKING HERE.

As we transition by degrees towards the church’s new Hymns for Home and Church, it can feel a little shaky and uncertain to raise our voices, half sight-reading, half hoping for the best, in songs that are sometimes completely unfamiliar to us. I have always loved the feeling of singing an old familiar hymn and being moved anew by a wave of the Spirit left over from a long-ago revelatory encounter with that hymn. Often, a song is marked by the devotional you remember hearing it at, or the girl’s camp testimony meeting you opened with it, or the funeral that made it poignant forever. But these new songs don’t all come with the association of years like that for us.

Strangely for me, though, I recently showed up to practice in a small women’s choir for my ward and sang a new hymn that so strongly carried the nostalgia of its meaning that it already felt like an old friend. So much so, in fact, that I cried through my first ever singing of it (perhaps betraying the fact that I had not attended the previous two rehearsals for this number).

This hymn became an instant favorite of mine, and it has particular relevance to this week of Thanksgiving. I hope that you can incorporate it into your family’s celebration, even if it is merely playing in the background as you cook.

The hymn is called “Thou Gracious God, Whose Mercy Lends”. Here is an arrangement sung fairly recently by the Tabernacle Choir:

 Oliver Wendall Holmes Sr. was a part of the Harvard graduating class of 1829 and was known among his classmates for often penning a poem for their annual reunions. He wrote 39 of them over 50 years. But for their 40^th reunion in 1869, he was asked instead to write a hymn. The lyrics to this song were his response. I invite you to read it out loud, as it was always intended to be heard, not just read:

Thou gracious God, whose mercy lends

The light of home, the smile of friends,

Our gathered flock Thine arms enfold,

As Thou didst keep Thy Saints of old.

O Father, hear us while we raise

In sweet accord of solemn praise

The voices that have mingled long

In joyous flow of mirth and song.

For all the blessings life has brought,

For all its sorrowing hours have taught,

For all we mourn, for all we keep,

The hands we clasp, the loved that sleep,

The noontide sunshine of the past,

These brief, bright moments fading fast,

The stars that gild our dark’ning years,

The twilight ray from holier spheres—

We thank Thee, Father! Let Thy grace

Our loving circle still embrace,

Thy mercy shed its heav’nly store,

Thy peace be with us evermore.

I am moved by the idea at the very start that it is the Lord’s mercy that lends us the light of home and the smile of friends that we so hope will fill our homes this week. As I ponder on those dear sights, I would offer you the advice that was offered to me recently.

Plan to be Intentional

In an episode of the podcast Down the Well, host Elle Rolley discusses the deliberate ways we can ensure that we experience the precious moments of our holiday season rather than skipping past them in the rush. She says, “Be the last to sit and the last to rise at dinner. Linger 5 extra minutes, light a candle, ask one more question. In hugs, be the last to let go.” It is in those intentional extra moments that we come into the present and see it in real time. It is not just reflecting on the smile of friends from times past, but in fully taking in and treasuring the smile of your friend right in front of you that you can find connection, right now.

Rolley also mentioned the concept of really holding your child’s gaze when they speak to you. In my stage of life, it is easy to keep tabs on the frenetic blur of my children rushing about my house with my peripheral vision. I can see that they are not hurting themselves or the house in their wild explorations, without looking too long at them. Since hearing this podcast, however, I have stopped to just watch them; not to supervise, just to enjoy. Taking a few extra seconds to see every little expression of discovery as they experience the world has increased my joy in motherhood exponentially.

Voices that have Mingled Long

In the second stanza of the song above, I love the vivid feeling in the thought of “the voices that have mingled long.” They are joined together in solemn praise, but also in a “joyous flow of mirth and song”. It is poignant to think of the voices that are so often heard alongside yours. The sound of chatter at your Thanksgiving will probably have some familiar tones to it because that is the harmony that is made from the sound of your voice and the sound of your sisters’ or what it sounds like for both mother and father to be calling out from the kitchen. It is tender to think of the voices of your family that have so often mingled with yours over so many years together. It is a kind of music that exists nowhere else in the world, but around your table at a gathering like Thanksgiving dinner.

I can’t help but think too about the voices that I miss that used to be part of that joyous sound. Perhaps that is one of the things that makes me weepy every time I hear this song: the feeling it brings of listing what we are grateful for and including in that gratitude our sorrows. It is counterintuitive to do, and yet it resonates with me for the song to say that “[We thank thee] For all the blessings life has brought” as well as “For all its sorrowing hours have taught”. “For all we mourn”, we are grateful. We are grateful to have loved enough to feel loss, to have hoped enough to be disappointed, and most of all to have a Savior who is our balm in Gilead against the sting of such pains.

These are, as Holmes says, “brief, bright moments” that a weekend like this one will bring. And “they are fading fast”. Mortality is a blink, and sometimes you can feel that. But happy holiday memories and reunions and gatherings are “the stars that gild” our years. The aliveness, the connection, the joy, and the love that we can feel at these times are “the twilight ray from holier spheres”. I love that reference to the heavenly homesickness we are wont to feel when the world shows us whispers of some beauty we somehow know, though don’t remember seeing.

C.S. Lewis said that beauty, memories from our own past, “they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” And perhaps Oliver Wendall Holmes Sr. would add, “the twilight ray from holier spheres.”

I know that not every Thanksgiving is a little piece of heaven. It can be hectic and stressful, and not everyone gets along perfectly, but it is a time to revisit gratitude as a means for finding peace when you don’t feel peaceful. Let this song and the prayer it represents help you in that effort. Linger a few minutes longer, ask one more question, look someone in the eye for one more breath, and you may start to see this day and the voices in it as the echoes of heaven they could be if you remember to listen for them.

In honor of Thanksgiving, we are offering our “It is Well With My Soul” Gratitude Journal at the lowest price it has ever been. They are $10 each, but also have a bulk discount on any purchase of 5 or more that takes another $2 off a piece. You will be hard pressed to find anything this meaningful at that price point to give to your neighbors, youth group, family, or friends, jump on this price before the sale ends by CLICKING HERE.