While I’m not sure how you would define your mental psyche as we depart 2020 and head into the uncharted waters of 2021; notwithstanding, I think it’s pretty safe to say 2020 has been a year most of us would not want to relive.
American columnist William Vaughan, who wrote a syndicated column for the Kansas City Star from 1946 until his death in 1977, concluded on the eve of New Year’s Day, “An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.”
I guess I’m with those who eagerly await ushering 2020 out the door; any door.
While New Year’s resolutions usually coincide with the famous ball-lowering ceremony in Times Square, not a lot seems to change in the transition from one year to the next.
While revelers began celebrating New Year’s Eve in Times Square as early as 1904, it wasn’t until three years later in 1907 that the New Year’s Eve Ball made its maiden descent from the flagpole atop One Times Square …unnervingly symbolic, for many us, to the perfunctory descent in our own ability to hold to our often lofty New Year’s declarations.
Having conceded this, allow me to focus on a New Year’s Morning, nearly two hundred and fifty years ago (1773). It was during a sermon delivered by Englishman John Newton in the Parish Church of St Peter and St Paul, located in the small market town in the Borough of Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire, England. It was on this inaugural day that ushered in a new year that the world first heard the compelling musical stanzas to what would become one of humanity’s best-know hymns, “Amazing Grace.”
Originally penned as a poem in 1772 by Newton, at the age of forty-seven, “Amazing Grace” describes the joy and peace of a soul uplifted from despair to salvation through the gift of grace.
Newton’s deliberate words are a vivid autobiographical commentary on a man who was spared from both physical and spiritual destruction. It relates the transformative tale of a defiant man who manages again and again to escape danger, disease, abuse, and death, only to revert to “struggles between sin and conscience.”
“In spite of the powerful message of ‘Amazing Grace,’ Newton’s religious beliefs initially lacked conviction,” writes English music journalist, biographer, and poet, Steve Turner, in his book titled, Amazing Grace: The Story of America’s Most Beloved Song (New York: HarperCollins, 2002). “Raised far afield of the prevailing Anglican traditions, Newton’s youth was marked by religious confusion and, as he later confirmed, ‘a lack of moral self-control and discipline.’ No matter how many times he was rescued, Newton relapsed into his old habits, continuing to defy his religious destiny and attempting to dissuade others from their beliefs.
“Of all of the sins to which he later confessed, his habit of chipping away at the faith of others remained heaviest on his heart,” exposes Turner.
“Newton’s life, rife with the ‘dangers, toils and snares’ of which his text hints, repeatedly brought him face-to-face with the notion that he had been miraculously spared,” concludes Turner.
Newton had gone to sea at a young age and worked on slave ships in the slave trade for several years. In 1745, he himself became a slave of Princess Peye, a woman of the Sherbro people, one of the most dominant ethnic groups in what is now known as Sierra Leone, a country in West Africa, on the Atlantic Ocean. Rescued and returned to sea, Newton became Captain of several slave ships until on a clear Monday morning, April 8, 1748, when he would walk ashore a changed man.
Newton’s faith conversion compelled him to renounce his former trade. To walk away and never look back. Conversely, Newton became a prominent supporter of the movement to end the practice of slavery.
The son of a merchant ship captain would eventually be ordained as a clergyman in the Church of England and serve as a parish priest for two decades.
On that New Year’s Morning in 1773, Newton leaned forward from the stately wooden pulpit and delivered these words to his parishioners, “My text …I would accommodate to our own use as a proper subject for our meditations on the entrance of a new year. They lead us to a consideration of past mercies and future hopes and intimate the frame of mind which becomes us when we contemplate what the Lord has done for us.”
Close to death at various times and blind to reality at others, Newton would most assuredly would not have written “Amazing Grace” if not for his tumultuous past. And many of us would then be without the depth of his words that so aptly describe our own relationship with Christ and our reliance on God’s grace in our lives:
‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear The hour I first believed.’
The lyrics carry a deeply rooted meaning, much more than a transgressor’s mere gratitude. “Amazing Grace” is a hymn about redemption, sought for by a former slaver.
Former Cook County Commissioner Garry Gamble is writing this ongoing column about the various ways government works, as well as other topics. At times the column is editorial in nature.
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