The early 1860s were devestating for American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
On July 10, 1861, his wife – the beautiful and highly intelligent Frances Elizabeth Longfellow – died horrifically. While using dripping wax to seal an envelope holding curls cut from her seven year old daughter’s recent haircut, some of the burning wax fell onto Frances’s dress. Her muslin dress quickly caught flame. She fled from the room she was in with her youngest children to spare them any danger from the fire. Rushing into her husband’s nearby study, the flames had already spread over most of her dress. Longfellow grabbed a throw rug and tried to put out the flames. When that failed, in utter desperation, Longfellow threw himself onto her, trying to smother the flames with his own body.
He put out the flames.
He failed to save her life.
Suffering from gruesome burns all over her body, Fanny Longfellow died the very next day.
She was buried on July 13, on what would have been their 18th wedding anniversary. Henry could not be there. His own burns were so severe and pain so crippling that he could not attend. His grief broke him so completely that he feared it would drive him insane and he begged his friends to not have him committed to an asylum. He never fully recovered. Eighteen years later he was still writing poetry about how much he loved and missed her.
Two years after her death, on March 10, 1863, his firstborn son Charles “Charley” Longfellow left home and secretly joined the US Army to fight as a soldier during the American Civil War.
The letter Charley left for his father read:
Dear Papa
You know for how long a time I have been wanting to go to the war I have tried hard to resist the temptation of going without your leave but I cannot any longer, I feel it to be my first duty to do what I can for my country and I would willingly lay down my life for it if it would be of any good God Bless you all.
Yours affectionately
Charley.
For Henry this was a double blow. He and his wife were Unitarians (when it was still a Christian movement) and their devotion to Christ had led them to be pacifists. They believed that Christ’s commandments to love your enemies and to do good to those who hate you prevented you from being able to kill others, even your enemies. Not only was his son then joining in a war where he might be killed, a horrid possibility for a man who had already lost his beloved, but he might also violate the dearest tenets of Christianity by killing others.
In the war, Charley was luckier than most. At the Battle of Chancellorsville, he had baggage duty, thereby avoiding combat in one most shocking and bloody defeats the Union Army ever suffered. Thanks to getting cripplingly sick, Charley managed to avoid the mass slaughter of the Battle of Gettysburg. During a battle in the Mine Run Campaign, Charley was severely injured on November 27, 1863 when a .58 or .69 caliber Minié ball slammed into his left shoulder, nicked his spine, and exploded out his right shoulder blade. This was lucky because if the bullet had lodged inside of him the surgery to remove it was as often as deadly (or deadlier) than actually getting shot and if it had hit one of his limbs the doctors likely would have just amputated the entire limb.
On December 1st, Henry received a telegram saying that his son had been shot and suffered a severe injury to the face. He rushed to the hospital where his son was and stayed with Charley until he could take Charley home. Doctors told Henry that Charley would take at least six months to recover and that he may be paralyzed permanantly.
It was December 25th, 1863, sitting in the same study that he had failed to save his wife in with his possibly paralyzed for life son in a room nearby, surrounded by all the wickedness and crushing weight of mortality, burdened by the fears, heartaches, and loneliness that life can thrust upon you, that Henry wrote one of his greatest poems, Christmas Bells, known to many as the hymn I Heard The Bells on Christmas Day. Both the poem and the hymn face head on the despair that we experience as we live in a world where pain and heartache are all too common, where it seems the righteous suffer while the wicked prosper, where evil people rule through blood and horror, and where our Adversary commands the nations. To all this darkness, all this pain, all this suffering – to all this Hell, Henry gives us the solution:
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said;
“For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”
The solution -“peace on earth, good-will to men”- is no mere proto-hippie wish for humans to merely stop being violent ad start being nice to each other. It is no politically empty pandering made by politicians looking to boost their polling numbers as they plan for the next big war. It is no generic use of a feel good word. In using this phrase, Henry is calling upon us to remember the words of the song of the angels the night that Christ was born:
“Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace, goodwill toward men!”
The peace born that holy Christmas night so long ago in the village of Bethlehem is the only possible source of peace in this life for yourself and for the world. The only solution to war, violence, hate, slaughter, sin, and death, is the way of He who is the Prince of Peace – the Lord Jesus Christ. It is only by believing and living the Gospel of Jesus Christ that we will have true peace in this world, in the here and now, and in the world to come. Nothing else will ever create peace, either in your personal life or in the world around you. All other worldly philosophies will only spread discord, ensure violence, manufacture poverty, and magnify suffering.
Peace is on Earth in the form of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. As we share it and spread it throughout the world, as we love Him and keep His commandments, than the Wrong shall fail, the Right prevail through peaceful means – the preaching of the Gospel and the conversion of our enemies into our friends. Crime will cease, murder will cease, war will cease, hate will cease, poverty will cease, suffering will cease, and in the end even death will die, through Jesus the Christ. Henry Longfellow knew this truth. We can see in Christmas Bells that he knew it. It is why he invoked the Annunciation to the Shepherds from Luke 2. It is only through He who is Peace personified that we will have peace established. It is my deepest hope and fervent prayer that we will either begin today or continue traveling down the Path of Peace, the covenant path that leads us to Jesus Christ and through Him to Zion and real, everlasting peace.
Let this Christmas Day not only be the day that we celebrate the birth of the Son of God, but the day that we embrace Him, that we love Him, that we follow Him, that we obey Him, that we manifest Him through our thoughts, words, and actions to remake the world, to transform Babylon into Zion.
Let us spread Peace.
In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.