On Friday next, we celebrate the Feast of Christmas. Of all the festive days of the year, we might say that Christmas is the brightest and the most gladsome. It’s a time for joy and happiness. We have learned to love virtually everything about it, its music, its lights, the giving and receiving of gifts, the companionship of friends and the warmth of home and family life.
Yes we have come a long way from the celebration of the first Christmas. Except for the Angels singing in the countryside, there was little music to be heard. The child Jesus was not born into a welcoming society. There was no red carpet or welcoming committee to greet him. There wasn’t even an open door through which he might enter and take shelter. There simply was NO ROOM.
The joy and happiness which we experience during this time of year has definitely been forged in the crucible of hardship and sufferings but we seldom reflect on this side of the story as we join in the festivities of the Season. And what about some of our Christmas Music. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, named after his mother’s brother Henry Wadsworth, was the second of eight children and is one of America’s greatest poets. As a young man he was known to be very studious. Having graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825, he decided to travel to Europe to study French, Spanish, and Italian. While in Spain, he learned that his favorite sister, Elizabeth, had died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty.
Having returned from Europe, he married a childhood friend by the name of Mary Storer Potter in 1831. By 1834 Longfellow is seen as one of the country’s most respected scholars. Everything seemed to be going his way. He was offered and had accepted a professorship at Harvard, yet in November 1835, his world would fall apart with the tragic death of his wife at the age of twenty-two. Deeply saddened by her death he writes,”One thought occupies me night and day…She is dead…She is dead! All day I am weary and sad.”
In an effort to deal with his loss he poured himself into his work of teaching and writing. He began to date Frances Appleton, whom he married in 1843. Together they had six children. The good life seemed to have returned. Publishing such classics as the Song of Hiawatha and Evangeline. Both fame and fortune had found him but it was not to last.
In 1861 Frances was to die tragically in a fire and Longfellow nearly lost his own life trying to save her. He was burned so much over his own body; he could not even attend her funeral. Divested by her death he worried he would go insane and begged not to be sent to an asylum and noted he was “inwardly bleeding to death”. But before he could regain himself that same year the Civil War broke out tearing the nation apart. Longfellow hated war.
His son Charles hopped aboard a train to join President Lincoln’s Army. Wounded in battle, he was taken to Washington where his father joined him. As Longfellow tended his son’s injuries, he saw many other wounded soldiers and visited with families who had lost loved ones and asked the question, “Where is Peace?” Picking up his pen on December 25th, he gives vent to his feelings in the plaintive carol that we have come to know as “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day”.
In the beginning of the carol the poet, out of his own suffering, feels like dropping his head in despair but then he hears the Christmas bells and their triumphant pealing stirs his faith and reminds him that
‘God is not dead, nor doth He sleep!
The wrong shall fail;
The right prevails.
With peace on earth, good will to men!’
Yes today like Christmas itself, we enjoy the carol but behind it is a life of suffering of both a family and a nation.
Rev. Msgr. Hugh Marren