Tomorrow is the 4th of July. One of my favorite songs often sung during this period of reflection on America is the hymn “O Beautiful for Spacious Skies”. I love how it invokes the landscape of our country, taking us out of our narrow spaces to something much bigger, something with possibilities.
As I thought about this song, I decided to look up some information about its author, Katherine Lee Bates. The National Park Service provided me with some information. She was born in Falmouth, MA in 1859. She died in Wellesley, MA in 1929. One of her earliest accomplishments was a poem focused on Mrs. Santa Claus, increasing the popularity of that iconic image. She was a gifted writer, a professor of English literature at Wellesley College, and the founder of a Settlement House in Massachusetts modeled after Jane Addams’ Hull House in Chicago. She became involved in the global peace movement after World War I and advocated for the formation of the United Nations. She and her loving companion, Katherine Coman, lived together until Coman’s death from breast cancer in 1915. In spite of the strictures of the time, it appears they managed to live as full and productive and authentic lives as was possible.
The song “O Beautiful for Spacious Skies” was written after a trip to Colorado in 1893. The expansive landscape as seen from Pikes Peak (by wagons and mules) served as inspiration. When she returned to her hotel, she wrote her first draft of her famous hymn.
In 1993 Miriam Therese Winter wrote the version of that song we find in our hymnals. Stanzas 2, 3, 4 are altered to give an even more expansive look at our country’s landscape. It is a look that would include the immigrants who have come to settle in this place and the indigenous peoples who called this place home before Jamestown or Plymouth Rock. The new stanzas also look beyond the Northern Hemisphere to Central and South America, connected continents that share a history of both peace and violence. The new version concludes “Americas! Americas! God grant that we may be a hemisphere where people here all live in harmony.”
We will sing the older version of this patriotic song on Sunday, July 7. Not because we are narrowing in on only our nation and our concerns to the exclusion of others, but because with the stress we have in this country right now, I think we need to affirm the goodness that has and is and will unite us as we move forward with the vision of “a more perfect union”.
Rev. Clara
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