2nd Day Christmas Past Story

On the 2nd Day of Christmas Past: 
Question: What special meaning can we find in “O Little Town of Bethlehem”?  

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 “O Little Town of Bethlehem”

When Phillips Brooks, a rising young preacher, was asked to give the funeral address for President Abraham Lincoln in 1865, he must have been daunted by the task, and sure that his eloquent eulogy would be the most famous lines he would ever pen. He would have been wrong. Shortly afterward, exhausted from years of war and longing for rest, he took a sabbatical from preaching to visit the Holy Land, hoping to find peace.

There, as he visited still-insignificant Bethlehem and looked out at the landscape at night, the lines for a poem jumped to his mind: ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie. Above thy deep and dreamless sleep, a silent star goes by.’

“After an early dinner, we took our horses and rode to Bethlehem,” so he wrote home in Christmas week of 1865. “It was only about two hours when we came to the town, situated on an eastern ridge of a range of hills, surrounded by its terraced gardens. It is a good-looking town, better built than any other we have seen in Palestine. . . . Before dark, we rode out of town to the field where they say the shepherds saw the star. It is a fenced piece of ground with a cave in it… Somewhere in those fields we rode through the shepherds must have been. . . . As we passed, the shepherds were still “keeping watch over their flocks or leading them home to fold.”

Several years later, he came back to the poem and completed it. His organist, Lewis Redner, added the music. “As Christmas of 1868 approached, Mr. Brooks told me that he had written a simple little carol for the Christmas Sunday-school service, and he asked me to write the tune to it. The simple music was written in great haste and under great pressure. We were to practice it on the following Sunday. Mr. Brooks came to me on Friday, and said, ‘Redner, have you ground out that music yet to “O Little Town of Bethlehem”?’ I replied, ‘No,’ but that he should have it by Sunday. On the Saturday night previous my brain was all confused about the tune. I thought more about my Sunday-school lesson than I did about the music. But I was roused from sleep late in the night hearing an angel-strain whispering in my ear, and seizing a piece of music paper I jotted down the treble of the tune as we now have it, and on Sunday morning before going to church I filled in the harmony. Neither Mr. Brooks nor I ever thought the carol or the music to it would live beyond that Christmas of 1868.” It was first performed by the children’s choir in his church, and very quickly, the verse was included in hymnals as a seasonal favorite.

But one child, who wasn’t yet born, would find special meaning in Brooks’s song. Helen Keller, the famous educator who was born blind and deaf, met Brooks years later. He was the one who explained the gospel to her for the first time.

Through her teacher and translator, Anne Sullivan, she told Brooks, “I’ve always known there was a God, but until now I’ve never known his name.”

The carol’s third verse, though written years before Brooks had met Keller, captures perfectly the joy of salvation arriving to a deaf and blind child whose ears could not hear his coming, but whose heart had long recognized his presence:

How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given!

So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of His heaven. 

No ear may hear His coming, but in this world of sin, 

Where meek souls will receive him still, the dear Christ enters in.

Taken from internet on 11/30/21:

https://www.hymnsandcarolsofchristmas.com/Hymns_and_Carols/Notes_On_Carols/o_little_town_of_bethlehem.htm

https://www.crosswalk.com/special-coverage/christmas-and-advent/beloved-christmas-carols-and-the-true-stories-behind-them.html