Dear Lord and Father of Mankind

John Greenleaf Whittier (1872)

I’ve been to the pleasant city in southern California named for the author of our hymn this week, John Greenleaf Whittier. An odd place to be named for the man whose most famous poem is called “Snow-Bound”! Palms, lemons, oranges, pomegranates, cactus trees — and a record low temperature of 29 degrees.

But they didn’t name the city on a whim. For the first big group of settlers on that land were Quakers, planning to establish their own community, and naming it in honor of Whittier, an American poet much beloved by ordinary people, a peace-loving Quaker who nevertheless was a regular firebrand when it came to the matter of slavery, which he wished to eradicate. For he believed in the brotherhood of all mankind. So the Quakers planted their orange groves, and they built a big Meeting House, and a school that still exists today, Whittier College. “Be you, dream big,” reads the school’s web page. John Greenleaf Whittier was not a pretentious man, but gosh, you’d think they could do a little better than that, even for public relations.

I’m very fond of this hymn, sung to a sweet and stately melody called Repton, composed by Sir Charles Parry specifically for it. Whittier begs the Lord of mankind, who is also our Father, to “forgive our foolish ways,” and he does so with confidence, because the Lord is “dear,” close to us, if we will but draw close to him. We do so not because we want to feel better about ourselves, but because we want to grow in the service of others, and in the contemplative praise of God.

That is the import of all the stanzas. Whittier imagines the time when Jesus walked the shores of the Sea of Galilee and called the disciples to follow him. We hear no words, we see no dramatic scene. It is childlike, and yet deeply interior. Something happens; and they rise and go. Jesus himself, as Whittier pictures it, would go to the high hills to be with the Father, in silent prayer, and in silent receiving of the Father’s reply, his silence, like our prayers when we have no words to express them, “interpreted by love,” by the Holy Spirit.

It’s a world of noise we inhabit now, so much so that we hardly understand silence as other than the temporary and rather unsettling absence of sound. But that is not what Whittier prays for. And the final stanza shows it. For the prophet Elijah, on the mountain of Horeb, sought the presence of God, but it was not in the earthquake, the whirlwind, or the fire. It was in that gentle rustling sound, the whisper of a breeze, or as the old translation has it, the “still small voice.” And in that voice we may hear the words of the dear Jesus Himself, who tells us frankly that in the world we will know trouble, “but be not afraid, for I have overcome the world.”

1 Dear Lord and Father of mankind,
forgive our foolish ways;
reclothe us in our rightful mind,
in purer lives thy service find,
in deeper reverence, praise,
in deeper reverence, praise.

2 In simple trust like theirs who heard
beside the Syrian sea
the gracious calling of the Lord,
let us, like them, without a word
rise up and follow thee,
rise up and follow thee.

3 O Sabbath rest by Galilee,
O calm of hills above,
where Jesus knelt to share with thee
the silence of eternity,
interpreted by love,
interpreted by love!

4 Drop thy still dews of quietness,
till all our strivings cease;
take from our souls the strain and stress,
and let our ordered lives confess
the beauty of thy peace,
the beauty of thy peace.

5 Breathe through the heats of our desire
thy coolness and thy balm;
let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small voice of calm,
O still, small voice of calm!