Amazing Grace

Amazing Grace…

In the last few days, I have heard Amazing Grace sung 3 times. First, by Nurse Lori Marie Key at the Memorial Service honoring America’s 400,000 victims of COVID-19, their families and those who have cared for them. Then a recording of Barack Obama singing it at Mother Emanuel Church where nine church members were killed by a young white supremacist. And again, by Garth Brooks on Inauguration Day 2021, when a real American President and Vice President took their oaths of office. I have played (guitar) and sung that comforting hymn for most of my life without ever knowing who wrote it or why.

Then last night, I was reading essays by Alex Haley – one of my literary heroes. He shared the story of Amazing Grace*:

The hymn was written by a man named John Newton who was born in England in 1725. Having lost his mother to tuberculosis at the age of seven, he became a troubled and difficult child. His father who had remarried, sent him off to a boarding school where he was beaten for his troubling behaviors. His father next apprenticed him as a sailor, then a merchant, then a plantation worker. After several unfortunate experiences, he ended up as a merchant marine on a slave ship, and then spent 4 years as a Captain of slave ships, buying and selling Africans from Guinea.

It was after he had a stroke and could no longer work as a ship’s Captain that he returned to the religious teachings of his mother – he began to study Latin, Mathematics and the Bible. In 1764, Newton became a Clergyman and ministered to the poor in a small village. There, he began to write hymns that reflected his spiritual awakening. When he was appointed to a distinguished church in London, he used his own experiences as a young man who hated God, hated himself and earned his living buying and selling other human beings, to teach his flock about right and wrong. He became an influential church leader and his sermons against the institution of slavery eventually caused a young parishioner, William Wilberforce, to introduce a bill to abolish the Slave trade on British ships. The bill passed in Parliament the year that Newton died, 1807.

Alex Haley learned of Rev. John Newton through his research on Slavery – but when he found one of Newton’s most famous hymns, he realized it was Amazing Grace, a hymn he, like me and maybe you, too, had sung all his life.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now I’m found,
Was blind, but now I see.

So,  Amazing Grace  that we should have chosen for our 46th President, Joe Biden and for our new Vice President Kamala Harris!

Amazing Grace, that yesterday’s Inauguration events were beautiful and flawless and safe, in spite of the insurrection we endured on January 6th!

Amazing Grace, that our National Youth Poet Laureate presented such a powerful poem and did it so dynamically and gracefully!

Amazing Grace, that President Biden gave an Inaugural Address that was a call to Truth, to Unity, a call for true patriots to fight courageously and with common sense to defeat COVID-19 and to face our other crises with resolve and faith in our democracy.

Amazing Grace, that America, as a whole, did not embrace darkness in 2020 – and is still moving toward the Light!

*Readers’ Digest Association, Inc; Alex Haley: the man who traced America’s roots, “The Amazing Grace of John Newton; Readers’ Digest, 2007