“Your
love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples”. (John
13:35)
He
got it straight from the bible, and he wanted the same theme to be true in the
place and time that he lived. That’s what Peter Scholtes thought in the mid-1960s,
as he was organizing a diverse gathering based upon the theme that “They’ll
Know We Are Christians”, something that a God-Man said that a writer remembered
years after the words were first spoken. He was on Chicago’s South Side in a
church basement where he was directing a choir, but that doesn’t mean he was
insulated from what was going on about himself and the people to whom he
ministered. It was a turbulent time in urban America, meaning Civil Rights – the
reach for them by some, while others fought to preserve the status quo -- was
very much on the minds of citizens. So, Peter wondered about unity in a
cultural and a spiritual context, and he had the perfect model when he
considered what to pen in four poetic verses.
Peter
Scholtes must have had a special place in his heart for the places along the
western shore of Lake Michigan in northeastern Illinois since his childhood, a
condition that mingled with the practice of his faith in a Catholic church where
he served as a priest in the 1960s. He was raised in Evanston, 12 miles north
of mid-town Chicago, so it was no surprise that after attending two nearby seminaries
for his undergraduate degree (he subsequently acquired a graduate degree at
Boston University) Peter would land in Chicago someday. And, his heart was in
trying to help the people of this area link arms in the midst of strife, not
throw punches at one another. ‘We’, Peter wrote over twenty times in ‘They’ll
Know…’ (it’s often also known as “We Are One in the Spirit”), as he borrowed
the words spoken by Jesus. Peter knew that a blight was upon the inner-cities
of the country, as black people sought access to the same rights as others
about them. Violence, despite Martin Luther King’s admonitions, was just a lit
match away in the tinderbox of race relations in Chicago and elsewhere. So,
when Peter considered how to coax interracial harmony among different churches
and peoples in some upcoming events, he knew what needed to be underscored. It
was so apparent, that Peter reportedly composed the four verses of ‘They’ll
Know…’ in a single day. For Peter, ‘We’ was linked to the ‘Spirit’ and the ‘Lord’
(v.1); ‘walk(ing) with each other’, ‘hand in hand’, in order to jointly ‘spread
the news’ (v.2); and ‘work(ing)’ together (v.3). With the words of verses one
through three in mind, all people could blend their voices to revere Him in the
Trinity (v.4). A Christian community could really only draw others if love and
unity in Him were the foundation. Peter probably heard the phrase ‘Make love,
not war’ in his time, as antiwar protesters marched in opposition to a conflict
on the opposite side of the globe that nevertheless involved many Chicagoans. Peter’s
recipe for a love potion was never more needed.
People
of the 1960s might tell us that few other periods in American history strained
the generational and ethnic divides like that period. There were others -- the Civil
War, the Great Depression, and certainly both World Wars – that threatened and
broke down social mores, as some said at the time ‘America is coming apart at
the seams’. A rent garment is not easy to reassemble. It has a gash in it that
may only be repaired with an ugly patch, perhaps, reminding those who look that
the original piece of clothing is irretrievable. A split people are harder yet
to unify. That’s what Peter Scholtes saw coming –maybe events were already threatening
to crush the community he loved. Peter proposed an alternative, and with the
song he crafted so effortlessly, he indicated that Love is an action, not an
emotion. What do you make of that? Hey, wasn’t there was another guy who loved
through action, once?
See this
link for brief capsule of the song story: https://hymnary.org/person/Scholtes_P
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