We Saw Thee Not – Anne Richter

She was an English poet in the 19^th Century, who someone might have labeled a ‘doubting Thomas’, if most of the lines from a poem she wrote were considered. Was the glass half-empty for Anne Rigby Richter? Did she experience lots of gaps in her faith as she thought about herself and God, about all the Biblical episodes she did not observe yet was taught from childhood? Did she fret because she had not seen Jesus ascend (see reproduction here of Garofalo’s Ascension of Christ)? She didn’t avoid the questions as she wrote a poem “We Saw Thee Not” (otherwise known as “We Have Not Seen Thy Footsteps Tread”), and then saw it recast as a hymn some 17 years later.

Anne Richter’s foundation for the Christian faith she expressed in poetry is not difficult to uncover. She was one daughter of the late 18^th-early 19^th Century Rigby family, whose patriarch was a minister in England’s Anglican Church. Anne’s father, Robert Rigby, was vicar of a church for some 30 years, and Anne also married W.H. Richter, a rector in the church, so one can presume she was fully indoctrinated in the basics of her faith when she sat down to craft her poem in 1834. Nevertheless, she chose to enumerate in detail all the events that she had not seen nor heard in its eight stanzas. Perhaps it was her way of saying her faith wasn’t blind to gaps that have always troubled the human race. We want to see or hear or touch for ourselves – we’re tactile. As one so closely associated with men of authority in the church of her experience, maybe she sensed, or was perhaps even confronted directly, with the doubts of the community about her. She had an answer - believe anyway. That answer undoubtedly was drawn from the schooling she’d received, but had she also come through some of her own challenges with a stronger faith?  No specific circumstance is known, but she must have thought her own experience or feelings resonated with others, and could therefore be shared more widely. In 1851, six years before she died, her poem was translated into a five-verse hymn by John H. Gurney.  

Doubt what you cannot sense with your human body. Believe only that which can be sensed. Those are generally the strongest criteria for evidence in a U.S. court of law. Seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, or tasting – where would we be without them? What if I didn’t have one of those senses? Or two? How about all of them? That’s exactly the predicament that I, as a 21^st Century believer, have when I relate to God, the transcendent one. I’m handicapped, or am I? I can no more sense Anne Richter than I can God. Yet, I have her poem, and her ‘sense’ of this common dilemma we share. Don’t get stuck on sensory input, she says. I’ll have plenty one day in a place I cannot yet see, but only imagine today.

Check out the following links to read about the composer and the song:

http://homeschoolblogger.com/hymnstudies/760965/

http://www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/r/i/c/richter_ar.htm

http://www.hymntime.com/tch/htm/w/e/s/wesawthn.htm

http://www.hymnary.org/person/Richter_AR1