Jerusalem, My Happy Home

Appalachian Tune

Yesterday, in our Word of the Week, which was home, I reminisced a little about the town in Pennsylvania where I grew up, a bittersweet experience for me. In case you’re wondering, the town is Archbald, right in the heart of the old anthracite coal mining district. Already by the time I was a boy, many of the things that characterized the town at its most bustling had gone. First among them was the famous Gravity Railroad. I didn’t know anything about it then, except that every town in the valley seemed to have a Gravity Street. The principle of the railroad was simple and ingenious. It worked by gravity to go down hills, but when the cars heaped with coal were going down hill, they hitched them up to an enormous rotary chain, so that the force going down would pull empty cars to the top of the hill in the other direction. I think they even had tours back in the 1890’s. Then there was a place called Stump Field. I had heard boys use the name to refer to the oldest and most thickly settled part of town. But only lately have I learned that a long time ago, there was a regular neighborhood up on the overlooking mountain a mile or so away, with even a post office. Then that particular mine ran out, and the only thing that’s left, if you can find them, are house foundations in the middle of the woods. Why did they call it Stump Field? Apparently the name harked back to something even older, which was gone by the time the miners got there in the 1870’s. The local Indians used to hold some kind of ceremony there, for which they cut down the oaks, maples, hemlocks, and birches in the field, leaving the stumps. We are now many generations away from the memory. In time, even the name will have vanished.

So then, I’m not just saying that I miss the beautiful or homely things that used to be in my town, but aren’t anymore, like the small grocery store, run by an Italian family, where I picked up my newspapers to deliver when I was a paperboy, and where I’d sometimes get a small carton of orange juice when I got thirsty on a hot summer day. Sure, there are a lot of things like that — the barber shop where I heard the town’s gossip, not that I understood much of it, or the small pharmacy where I’d buy copies of Peanuts comic books, or the abandoned train trestle behind the ball field, that made it possible for you to cut twenty minutes off a walk across town. I mean even the huge heaps of coal-dust, two or three hundred feet high, that marred the town’s landscape. They were friendly to me because they were familiar; and now their place knows them no more.

That’s why it’s long seemed to me that when you really love your home, you’ll also feel a yearning for a home that does not fall away, a place that cannot fade. And people try to build up substitutes for it, but all of these are like the pyramids of Egypt, not places, not homes, but gigantic tombs, with the sands of the desert swirling about.

Only in God is there no shadow of change, and therefore only in him can the human heart find its true life, its eternal home, so that we can say with the psalmist, “I rejoiced when I heard them say, Let us go up to the house of the Lord.” That will be no temple or city built with human hands, but the new Jerusalem, the heavenly City of Peace. There is the true home, and the everlasting bread of heaven, possessing all sweetness within it.

Our Hymn of the Week, “Jerusalem, My Happy Home,” is a lovely song of hope and longing for that place so near to those who seek it. We don’t know the author’s name, but we do know he was an Englishman in the time of Queen Elizabeth I, in the late 1500’s, and he had in mind the famous words of Saint Augustine, at the beginning of the Confessions: “Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless until it rests in Thee.” There are more than two dozen stanzas in the original, so you could sing it in a long procession as you entered the church, and in fact our audio selection today was for the dedication of a church. Most hymnals print five or six stanzas. I’ve included the author’s original second stanza, which you won’t find in most hymnals, because it is so fine, and it strikes the note of sweetness that we hear and feel so powerfully in the poem.

The melody is the sweet and lilting “Land of Rest”, an American folk tune you can find in The Sacred Harp (1844), set to a text very similar to this one. There it was printed in “shape notes.” Those are notes are marked with various shapes depending on what they are in the key of the song (do, re, mi, and so forth). That meant that you could know where you were in the melody, no matter what note you actually started with, and you didn’t really have to be able to read music to get it. Shape note singing was quite popular in Appalachia, and you can guess how important music was for ordinary people when you consider that the people all learned to sing in three-part harmony, with the melody carried by the middle part, the tenors and altos, while the sopranos and the boys sang a descant, and the basses were down in the foundation. Today’s rendition, which I find utterly beautiful and movingly simple, is in a harmony we’re more familiar with, as the sopranos carry the melody.

Jerusalem, my happy home,
When shall I come to thee?
When shall my sorrows have an end?
Thy joys when shall I see?

*O happy harbor of the Saints!
O sweet and pleasant soil!
In thee no sorrow may be found,
No grief, no care, no toil.

Thy saints are crowned with glory great;
They see God face to face;
They triumph still, they still rejoice:
Most happy is their case.

Our Lady sings Magnificat
With tune surpassing sweet;
And all the virgins bear their part,
Sitting about her feet.

There Magdalen hath left her moan,
And cheerfully doth sing
With blessed saints, whose harmony
In every street doth ring.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
God grant that I may see
Thine endless joy, and of the same
Partaker ever be!