Stories Behind the Best-Loved Songs of Christmas by Ace Collins Page B

decades after it was embraced as a World War II holiday prayer, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” stirs new emotions. Most of those who returned home for Christmas after the war have left this world for the next. Yet because of the contributions and sacrifices of the men and women who served our country during those dark days, they will always be home for Christmas in our hearts, memories, and dreams.

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I T C AME U PON THE M IDNIGHT C LEAR
    I n 1849, a Unitarian minister from Wayland, Massachusetts, was writing a Christmas Eve message for his congregation. As Dr. Edmund Sears worked on his sermon, he was a troubled man. Though it would be another decade before a civil war tore the United States apart, the debate over slavery, compounded by the poverty he saw in his own community, had all but broken the man’s spirit. He desperately searched for words to inspire his congregation, but he was having a problem lifting even his own spirit above the depressing scenes that surrounded him.
    Sears, then thirty-nine years old, had been educated at Union College in Schenectady, New York, and at Harvard Divinity School. Though the Unitarian church was known for not exposing the divinity of Christ, Sears preached the divine nature of Jesus in his weekly sermons. He believed that Jesus was the Son of God and had died on the cross for man’s sins. He also believed that every Christian should be involved in reaching out to the lost, helpless, and poor.
    In his community Sears was a force of caring in a world that seemed to concern itself little with the traumas of the hungry or the sick. His burden for the helpless forced him to reach out each day to those Christ called “the least of these.” Yet as he worked on writing an uplifting Christmas message, it was the poverty and the hopelessness of the people he touched in the slums that sickened his heart and blocked his progress. He must have wondered how he could write about the Light of the world when the world seemed so very dark.
    As Sears struggled, he thumbed through his well-worn Bible. In the second chapter of Luke, the minister was touched by the eighth and ninth verses: “And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.” After considering the miraculous nature of that long-ago moment, Sears picked up his pen and jotted down a five-verse poem he called “It Came upon the Midnight Clear.” He then retrieved from his files another Christmas poem he had written a decade before: “Calm on the list’ning ear of night comes heaven’s melodious strains.” Beginning his message with his older Christmas poem, he quickly wrote a short sermon and decided to end his Christmas service with the inspired words of his newest poem.
    Today Sears’s poem turned carol is considered joyful and uplifting. Yet when first delivered, its audience probably saw it as more a charge or challenge than the story of a miraculous birth in a faraway land. While the minister wanted his congregation to celebrate Christmas, he also wanted them to reach out to the poor, to address the nation’s social ills, and to consider what they could do as individuals to best reflect the spirit of Christ in their daily lives. In other words, he wanted to seepeople look to heaven and understand how God needed them to serve man in his name. Nowhere was this message more obvious than in the poem’s second verse, one that has been discarded and all but forgotten.
Yet with the woes of sin and strife The world hath suffered long;
    Beneath the angel-strain have rolled Two thousand years of wrong;
    And man, at war with man, hears not The love song which they bring:
    O hush the noise, ye men of strife, And hear the angels sing!
    Not only was the beauty and wonder of the Christmas story woven into a lyrical fabric that was rich and meaningful, but Sears also managed to