Today’s song is ‘I Saw the Light. This is a country gospel song that was written by Hank Williams. Hank Williams was inspired to write the song by a remark his mother made while returning from a concert, as they arrived in Montgomery, Alabama. He recorded the song during his first session for ‘MGM Records’, and released in September 1948. The song is set to the tune of the traditional Scottish folk tune ‘Bonnie Charlie’, also commonly known as ‘Will Ye No Come Back Again?". Williams' version did not enjoy major success during its initial release, but eventually, it became one of his most popular songs and he used it as the closing number for his live shows. It was soon covered by other acts and has become a country gospel standard.
In September 1946, Hank Williams auditioned for Nashville's ‘Grand Ole Opry’ but was rejected. After the failure of his audition, Williams and his wife Audrey tried to interest the recently formed music publishing firm ‘Acuff-Rose Music’. Williams and his wife approached Fred Rose, who signed him to a six-song contract, and leveraged a deal with ‘Sterling Records’. In December 1946, Williams had his first recording session. The songs ‘Never Again’ and ‘Honky Tonkin’ became successful and earned Williams the attention of ‘MGM Records’. His first MGM session took place on April 21, 1947. The first song he recorded was ‘Move It on Over’ and the second was ‘I Saw the Light’.
‘I Saw the Light’ wasn’t a commercial success upon its release but has since become his most recognized hymn and one of his most popular songs. The song became a standard for both the country music and gospel music genres. The song has been covered by several artists of the two genres and beyond. ‘All Music’ described it as being one of Williams' "finest songs concerning his strong religious conviction”. It was ranked first in ‘Country Music Television’s 20 Greatest Songs of Faith’ in 2005. The biopic of Hank Williams in 2015 was named after the song.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
There is usually a point in every Christian’s life when they doubt the existence of a God, along with time in the lives of some disbelievers when something convinces them that God truly exists. I am no exception. As a young boy, my mother taught me always to question that which does not sit easily with one’s conscience and always accept the goodness of any person above any badness they might possess.
Anyone who is acquainted with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Religion and Church practices will know that any serving Roman Catholic priest in the land will never knowingly offer ‘Holy Communion’ (the receipt of consecrated bread and wine) to any church attender whom they know to be non-Catholic. They do offer non-Catholic attendees to their church a blessing instead of communion bread and wine.
When I was a boy growing up in the 1940s, many of the Roman Catholic parish priests came from Ireland and had a reputation for being the strictest priests in the world. I can personally recall seeing a walking stick outside a house wall once in Heckmondwike and showed my mother it. Mum recognised it as being the walking stick of the parish priest who was making a house call to the owner of the property, against whose wall the walking stick had been left leaned up. When I asked why the priest had left his walking stick outside the house, where it could be easily stolen, my mother replied, “It won’t be stolen, Billy. That’s the parish priest’s walking stick and he leaves it outside so that anyone who sees it there knows not to interrupt his visit!”
During later years after I’d become an established author, I used this incident as the major storyline of one of my published novels, ‘The Priest’s Calling Card’. This book is published in e-book format or hard copy from Amazon(with all profit from sales going to charitable causes in perpetuity) or it can be freely read from my website by accessing: http://www.fordefables.co.uk/the-priests-calling-card.html
A year or so after the ‘walking stick incident’, I attended Sunday Mass at Heckmondwike Catholic Church. The parish priest officiating the service was the very same strict Irish priest I previously referred to. These were the days when the only time the parish priest retired from his church duties was on the day he died. Consequently, the old Irish parish priest in Heckmondwike at the time was in his mid-80s, and he intended to reach his hundredth birthday if possible.
Nobody except a few elderly ‘catholic masochists’ ever went to confession in Heckmondwike as opposed to the Catholic Church in Cleckheaton, as the prayer penances the strict Irish priest doled out tended to be thirty ‘Hail Mary’s’ and ten ‘Our Fathers’ and twelve ‘Glory Be’s to the Father’, instead of the customary three of each that most priests gave the penitent.
I was 8 years old at the time and was a very inquisitive child. I learned through the Sunday sermon which the old Irish priest gave that morning, that only Roman Catholics could receive the Blessed Eucharist (holy communion) in a Roman Catholic Church. According to the old priest, this was because ‘only Roman Catholics belonged to the true faith’. None of the priest’s sermon sounded fair to me and I questioned the validity of the truth of what he’d spoken. It certainly didn’t sound very Christian to my young mind.
So, when Mass was over, I hung back so that I could have a private discussion with the parish priest after the congregation had left the church. Please note that what I did was something which was not done at the time, especially if the issue being discussed with the priest was a matter of contention. A child might ask the parish priest a question, but under no circumstance was it considered permissible for either child or adult to question any assertion made by the priest!
When my turn arrived to shake hands with the priest, I politely asked if he would answer me a question which he had raised in his sermon that morning, and which puzzled me. I then asked, “If the communion bread that we receive at church, Father, is the body of Christ (we didn’t receive wine as well in 1950), then surely ‘nobody’ has the right to refuse it to anyone who asks for it, whether they are Roman Catholic or Protestant? Surely nobody should deny Christ to another, even a Catholic priest?” (This was my question asked in more childlike words suitable of an 8-year-olds).
The parish priest was so angry with my question that I thought he might have a heart attack. The veins in his neck gorged and swelled with anger and threatened to burst. Looking at me like the devil incarnate stood beneath his rather large waistline. he said, “I’ll have a word with your Headmaster on Monday, Boy!” I attended ‘St Patrick’s Roman Catholic School’ in Heckmondwike and the parish priest visited the school every Monday to check with the form teacher which children had attended Sunday Mass and who hadn’t, and why? Apart from the register of attendance every Monday morning, every child in all Catholic schools across the land was also required to give a response to the catholic register of church attendance the day previously. I cannot remember if the teacher physically punished me or just publicly shamed me in some other manner for having dared to question the priest’s authority, but I never forgot his angry face on the day I questioned him within the earshot of others.
About two years after this run-in with the priest, I joined the Cleckheaton Cubs. The evening meeting always concluded with the cubs saying the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ at the end of the weekly session. For the uninitiated, I need to point out that there are two versions of ‘The Lord’s Prayer’; the Roman Catholic one and the Protestant one. While both versions start the same, and all the rest of the prayer remains the same in content, each has different endings. When I previously informed my class teacher of this weekly dilemma and asked her what Roman Catholic cubs should do when they attend a cub group run by Protestants, she advised, “Just stop at the end of the Lord’s Prayer at the same point you stop at school and in church!”
I eventually concluded that to follow the teacher’s advice would simply be making me stand out from the remainder of the cubs who were 95 percent Protestant in the religious denomination. So, instead of keeping quiet for the tail end of the prayer, I would deliberately recite the ‘forbidden’ Protestant part of the prayer we Catholics did not say then. Whereas the Catholic version would end with the words ‘and lead us not into temptation, Amen’, the Protestants would end the Lord's Prayer by saying, ‘and lead us not into temptation, for thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever, Amen.
Even as a child of 8 years old, I was a rebel, whether it was against Church or State!
I recall when I lived in Canada for two years between 1963 and 1965, whenever I couldn’t get to a Roman Catholic Church service on a Sunday, I would attend the nearest religious assembly that was available. It never bothered me if it was Roman Catholic, Protestant, Seventh Day Adventists, Baptist, Gospel or Salvation Army. While I considered myself as being extremely ‘liberal and open-minded in thought and deed at the time, I was probably still unconsciously rebelling against the old strict Irish priest in my heart of hearts.
Although my early life witnessed me breaking the criminal law through petty thefts, vandalism, and breach of the peace offences (fighting in public), after my 16th year of life, the goodness of one man, against whom I stole from his shop, effectively changed the path I would walk thereafter.
I stole from Mr Northrop’s grocer’s shop and he witnessed my theft in the act. He came to my parent’s house one week later, but instead of telling my parents, or informing the police about my theft, he offered me a Saturday morning job serving in his shop. Mr. Northrop was the person who effectively changed me from thief to thief-taker; from poacher to gamekeeper, and he was the person who was most responsible for me becoming a Probation Officer at the age of thirty years of age. Being a Probation Officer essentially enabled me to walk in the shoes of another and my own past provided me with the means of better understanding the defender who now wore them.
From the age of thirty onwards I have seen a bit more of the light every passing year, but at no time previously has it shone so bright than since I developed a terminal blood cancer three months after I married my lovely wife, Sheila, in 2012. Knowing Sheila, loving her and living with her daily has brought me closer to my God than I have ever been before. Only with Sheila, a person so good in purpose, gentle, kind and compassionate in practice, have I come to know the blessed trinity of love that is possible between a man and a woman. Only since I have loved Sheila, have I experienced the physical, the emotional and the spiritual bond that can exist between a man and his wife.
I care not whether any other person in the world considers me foolish or gullible in believing in God. All I need to do today to know that God exists in my life is to look around at all the love that surrounds me, or to look outside my window and marvel at the wonders of Nature, or to see the birth of a child or an animal and know the presence of daily miracles in this wonderful world of ours.
Whenever I need to remember what I was and what I became, I think upon my mother’s words. My mother used to say, “Billy, the apple never falls far from the tree that gave it life, and I gave birth to you”. I believed that my mother had always been a good person at heart, and if she was, then, as her eldest child, so was I. And whenever I start to question, if a person with my murky past can truly change for the better, and be forgiven for past wrongs committed against others, I recall the conversion of St. Paul, who in his early life, did far greater harm and inflicted more hurt to others than I ever could in three lifetimes.
Despite not being one of the ‘Twelve Apostles’, the Greek (Saul of Tarsus) who is today more commonly known as Saint Paul, is the embodiment that no person is beyond eternal salvation. St Paul is today considered one of the most important figures of the ‘Apostolic Age’. Not only did he established several Christian communities in Asia Minor and Europe, but he took advantage of his status as both Jew and a Roman citizen to minister to both Jewish and Roman audiences.
According to the New Testament book: ‘Acts of The Apostles’ Paul initially persecuted some of the early disciples of Jesus in the area of Jerusalem prior to his conversion. While travelling the road from Jerusalem to Damascus to arrest these Christians, the resurrected Jesus appeared to him ‘in a great light’. He was struck blind but after three days his sight was restored, and Paul began to preach that Jesus of Nazareth is the Jewish Messiah and the Son of God. Saint Paul reminds me of every sinner turned saint.
All my life I have seen right glimpses of what is and what could be, and it is only during the past eight years since my marriage to Sheila that I have truly ‘seen the light’. It is impossible to stand in the centre of love and not feel the warmth of its touch or emanate love to others in return. It is impossible to be surrounded daily by the love and the inherent goodness of others and not ‘see the light’.
Love and peace Bill xxx