Psalm 133; Revelation 21:1-6
[Note: This sermon draws heavily from Melinda Ponder’s book, Katherine Lee Bates: From Sea to Shining Sea, published in Chicago by Windy City Publishers in 2017. Page numbers in brackets refer to Ponder’s book.]
“But if Christ came to the world nearly 2000 years ago to teach us to love each other, why is the world so wrong today?” [p. 78]
So speaks Rose, the young protagonist in Rose and Thorn, a novel written by Katherine Lee Bates in 1889, four years before she composed the poem that would ultimately become our beloved hymn America the Beautiful.
She wrote the novel during months of quarantine, after being exposed to smallpox. It is a coming-of-age story with a twist. The privileged Rose awakens to the suffering of poor people around her; she discovers her rejected, disabled brother; she challenges her uncle’s greed and selfishness. Rose and Thorn won a contest put on by the Congregational Society in Boston, our predecessors in the UCC, and was published for an audience of Christian Endeavor youth groups.
I’ve never read Rose and Thorn, nor did I know Katherine Lee Bates had written a novel until recently. In December, I was part of a Local Author’s Day at the Framingham Public Library, where I met Melinda Ponder, a professor at Pine Manor College. Ponder recently published a biography of Katherine Lee Bates, after years of studying her journals in the archives of Wellesley College, where Bates had been a student and a professor. Ponder’s research puts America the Beautiful in the broader context of the life of a courageous, ground-breaking woman who traveled our nation and our world during a time of tremendous change. As I read about her life, the words of her most famous poem took on new layers of meaning. America the Beautiful is a prayer for our country, rooted not in blind patriotism but in determination to face our flaws and to create a more just and compassionate nation and world.
I’ve told the story of the genesis of America the Beautiful many times–how Katherine Lee Bates wrote it after a train ride across our country, which culminated in a trip to the summit of Pike’s Peak. It’s a great story of a poet inspired by stunning beauty; now I realize there is so much more to the story.
Katherine Lee Bates was an admirer of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and especially loved his poem, The Song of Hiawatha, which she understood to be a celebration of Native American legends. When she stood at the summit of Pike’s Peak, admiring the purple mountain majesties, she found herself reciting a section of Longfellow’s poem. In the poem, Manitou, the Creator whose abode is on the mountain, calls the nations together and castigates them:
I am weary of your quarrels,
Weary of your wars and bloodshed,
Weary of your prayers for vengeance,
Of your wranglings and dissensions….
All your strength is in your union,
All your danger is in discord;
Therefore be at peace henceforth,
And as brothers live together. [p. 135]
“O beautiful,” Katherine Lee Bates wrote in the first draft of her poem, “for halcyon skies, for amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties above the enameled plain.” [p. 142] Her words evoke not only the wonder of our glorious creation, but the power of our Creator calling us out of our discord and into harmony.
Bates’ journey across our nation was not solely for vacation. She came to Colorado Springs, home of Pike’s Peak, to teach at Colorado College’s Summer Institute. Far from her familiar New England, she gained fresh perspective on the challenges facing the nation. Western towns were among the first to experience the effects of a financial depression, as the federal government’s decision to abandon silver left miners without work and mining towns in shambles. Powerful Eastern interests bought up the land around the railroads. Laborers protesting unfair practices were crushed. Desperation led to wild-west-type train robberies. In response, in her original 1893 poem, Bates prayed, “America! America! God shed his grace on thee, ‘til selfish gain no longer stain the banner of the free.” [p. 143]
Bates’ cross-country journey took her twice to Chicago, where she visited the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. She was inspired by the sparkling fountains, human-made ponds and lagoons, and by the glorious buildings–gleaming like alabaster. She was impressed by the Woman’s Building, the first ever exhibit of the achievements of women at a World’s Fair. She was awed by the seemingly miraculous electric lights. The fair seemed, to her, an expression of our human potential to work together to make possible what had seemed impossible.
She was also horrified by the Wild West show of Buffalo Bill Cody, dramatizing and celebrating white Americans brutally murdering Native Americans. And she was deeply troubled by the contrast she saw between the fairgrounds and the poverty she saw surrounding it. She wrote a poem describing how, all around the “circle of glistening domes” were “hunger-smitten homes.” [p. 155]
So when we sing, “Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears,” we are not singing about the glories of the Chicago World’s Fair or of any existing human achievement that is built on the suffering of the vulnerable. The words of that final verse lay out a challenge–that we learn to work together beyond our differences, so that our human creations are true reflections of our Creator’s valuing of each person.
Katherine Lee Bates wasn’t happy with her poem, although two years later she sent it off for publication in the Congregationalist newspaper. She went back to teaching and research. By the time she revised it again, her own experience and world events had given her still more perspectives to bring to her poem.
Bates published a scholarly book on American literature, the product of years of work. It was praised by many but also received some very odd critiques, which ultimately reflected racism hidden behind sexism. She was criticized for being a woman trying to do a man’s work. There was a movement at the time to discourage Anglo-Saxon women from higher education; they needed, the theory went, to have lots of babies in order to keep their race ascendant. At the same time Bates heard these criticisms, she also found herself in the midst of debates about whether Wellesley should be admitting Black students.
As she prepared for a sabbatical in Spain, she paid particular attention to a growing anti-Spanish bias in the newspapers and a movement for the United States to expand into territories controlled by Spain. Soon after the Spanish-American war broke out, Bates traveled by ship to England, where she waited, studying Spanish, until the peace treaty was signed. When she finally arrived in Spain, she became the first American woman correspondent to report from the vanquished country. She wrote a series called “Letters from Spain” for the New York Times. In her columns, she told the stories of ordinary Spanish citizens, many of whom had lost loved one because of what they–and she–saw as American aggression.
Upon her return to the states, she read reports of continued bloodshed, torture and concentration camps in the US-occupied Philippines; in response, she began to write powerful anti-war poetry, under the pseudonym James Lincoln. In one poem, she imagines a soldier looking out over his enemies, who are praying. The soldier reflects:
What if right makes might,
Not might makes right,
And God, the All or the Nought
Is less extinct than we thought. [p. 195]
In 1904, troubled by the racism and glorification of war that she saw, Katherine Lee Bates revised her famous poem. She changed “halcyon,” which means peaceful, to “spacious” skies, acknowledging the reality that our nation was not peaceful, proclaiming that there is–or should be–enough space for everyone. Recognizing how readily a pioneering spirit can become aggressive expansionism, she added to the second verse: “confirm thy soul in self-control; thy liberty in law.” [p. 210-211]
Most importantly, she added the lines that end the first and fourth verses: “And crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.” If she were writing today, perhaps she would have chosen a different word than brotherhood. Her intent, though, is clear: all the goodness of our nation–the beauty of our land, the resourcefulness and courage of the people–is meaningless unless it is crowned with a recognition that we are all kin, responsible to and for each other.
Twenty-four years later, in 1928, Katherine Lee Bates urged a new, wider interpretation of her song. The occasion was a celebration of her hymn at Mechanics Hall in Boston. A chorus of girls from twenty different nationalities sang America the Beautiful. After the moving performance, she got up to speak. She challenged the growing isolationist movement in the nation, calling the audience to sing the last line, “from sea to shining sea,” thinking of the words as “applying from the Pacific to the Atlantic, around the other way, and all the states in between, and that will include all the nations and all the people from sea to shining sea.” [p. 281]
On this Memorial Day weekend, 114 years after Katherine Lee Bates published her revised poem, we pause today to remember all those who died in the service of our country. This beloved hymn calls us to honor their death by how we face the challenges of our time, challenges that echo the ones Bates saw in her time. As we stand in awe at the top of a mountain, do we hear a Holy voice calling us beyond our quarrels and bloodshed and greed toward peace and kinship? In a time when racist ideologies have been given new expression, how do we live out that prayer that our nation’s good be crowned with a recognition that we are all God’s beloved children? In a time of cynicism, can we reclaim the vision that we can work together, with God’s help, to create not gleaming cities but communities of respect, compassion, and opportunity? Will we remember to envision “from sea to shining sea” in both directions, to encompass a prayer for our whole world?
May our spacious skies inspire us to make room for all God’s beloved.
May our yearning for freedom lead us to work for the freedom of a stranger.
May we love mercy more than life.
May our good be crowned with commitment to all God’s beloved as our kin. Amen.