Tuesday, April 11, 2023

It is the 11th of April 2023 Welcome to the Christian History Almanac brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org, I’m Dan van Voorhis.

I know that there is often a certain trepidation when it comes to poetry- it seems some who have taught and explained it have obscured it behind difficult-to-understand rhyming schemes and meter. While these are important parts of a poem- think of poets as the folk musicians and stars of their day. Before there was Simon and Garfunkel or Bob Dylan we had troubadours who put lyrics to music. Still, in a world where it was hard to reproduce music outside of a lute, piano, or music hall, the poem could serve the function that music does for many of us today.

And so, if you will, listen to today’s story not as if from a buttoned up and starched poet from 18th century England- but rather as something like a Dylan, or Larry Norman or Keith Green- a kind of troubled artist whose language shed light on the depths of grace for fallen humanity.

He was born Christopher Smart on this the 11th of April in 1722  in Kent. He was the youngest of 3- his father was a landowner but was initially set for holy orders. We know his father translated a Rosicrucian tract (think Freemasons), and his family included a Puritan divine, a headmaster at Durham, and a famous 16th-century English Catholic preacher. So- he was born into a family of disparate religious and Christian beliefs. He wasn’t initially that interested in the life of faith (at least based on what we have of his writings). He was a student of the Classics and went to Pembroke Hall in Cambridge- in 1742, he won the Craven scholarship and graduated the following year.

He wrote to the famous poet Alexander Pope with a translation of one of Pope’s own poems into Latin. He would be awarded a fellowship at Pembroke, and it seemed that his life as a comfortable poet working out of the college was settled.

But he was noted for his extravagance and wild behavior. He began to spend more time in London, wrote for periodicals that may have been seen as beneath his scholarly pedigree, and in 1749 left Cambridge for good. He kept his fellowship salary until he was married. He married Anna Maria Carnan- though secretly, as he was initially unsure how her father, the publisher John Newberry, would react. The 1750s saw the publication of some of his first religious poems- a number of poems on the Supreme Being- which earned him the prestigious Seatonian award.

But the 1750s also saw his largesse increase- always willing to give to others and then, in return, ask for loans from his father-in-law. To provide for his family, now with two daughters, he wrote copy and edited magazines- ultimately signing a contract to write for a monthly magazine entitled the Universal Visiter. The stress of it all and his debts led to him being admitted to St. Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics in 1756. The following years saw tragedy as his wife left him, and his diagnosis went from curable to incurable.

But it was in the hospital that he would write his most intimate and religious poetry- from the Hymn to the Supreme Being, on Recovery from a Dangerous Fit of Illness to “A Song for David” and a new translation of the Psalms and a collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs for the Fasts and Festivals of the Church of England.” His “Jubilate Agno”- only discovered in the last century was a kind of journal and notebook for his poems. He would later be praised by the likes of Dante Rossetti and other Romantics (William Butler Yeats considered him the first to react to a cold, rational world with the kind of Poetry that would be regarded as Romantic).

He would be visited by friends in the asylum, one noting, “How great a pity so clever, so ingenious a man should be reduced to such shocking circumstances.” And "He is extremely grave, and has still great wildness in his manner, looks and voice--'tis impossible to see him and think of his works, without feeling the utmost pity and concern for him.”

His later work would exemplify the strongest of this theological belief in the necessity of the grace of God- but even then, he remained troubled. He would be let out of the asylum only to have his debts catch up with him- he was sent to a debtor's prison where he would compose his final work, “Hymns for the Amusement of Children.” Christopher Smart died in prison in 1771- His nephew would write, “I trust he is now at peace; it was not his portion here.” Born on the 11th of April in 1722, he was 49 years old.

The last word for today comes from Christopher Smart- from his “We Sing of God, The Mighty Source.”

We sing of God, the mighty source

of all things; the stupendous force

on which all strength depends;

from whose right arm, beneath whose eyes,

all period, power, and enterprise

commences, reigns, and ends.

Glorious, most glorious, is the crown

of him that brought salvation down

by meekness, Mary's son;

seers that stupendous truth believed,

and now the matchless deed's achieved,

determined, dared, and done.

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 11th of April 2023, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org. 

The show is produced by a man close enough to Canada to appreciate National Poutine Day today- he is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man too far south to appreciate cheese curds and too far west to pour gravy over everything. I’m Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.