To Love Someone More Dearly -- Maude Louise Ray and F.(or S.)H. Pickup

They wanted to say what motivated their lives, their work, their energy.  One was a poet and the other probably a minister, though little else is known of either of the composers who wanted to share their thoughts about what moved them to faith in the early 20^th Century. “To Love Someone More Dearly” may be the only hymn associated with either Maude Louise Ray or Stanley Howard Pickup, but they nevertheless were in touch with the same train of thought. Did they know one another? Work was evidently important, and especially what Christian labor should encompass, a theme relevant not only in their era but for us a century later.  How should we think of our life’s energy, versus what a scientist name Joule invented centuries ago – a crude but useful machine (see it here) – to measure energy?

Maude Ray, according to limited information, was a 23 year-old New Yorker, while Stanley Pickup was a 36-year old Canadian when each of them composed verses a decade apart in the early 1900s. Maude had begun her work, soon after graduating from college in Poughkeepsie, as an editor for a magazine in 1901-02 that became known as Christian Work, so it seems more than just coincidental that her poem’s two stanzas a year later addressed what she understood was her ‘task’. Was this part of her editorial frame of mind as she helped steer the magazine’s content? Less is known of Pickup (including how his name might have morphed into F.H. , versus S.H.), but he was possibly a Methodist minister from Ontario. His third verse came in 1913, indicating he was aware of Ray’s work relatively soon after her initial two verses. Perhaps Ontario’s proximity to New York, separated by a mere few hundred miles, helped spur his awareness of her efforts, too. While they must have appreciated each other’s perspective, there are differences in what they chose to express. She focused on what her work should be terrestrially, while he looked vertically, to the culmination of earthly work. Maude said love, serve, and guide others here, and devote oneself to godliness and purity; those were things on which to meditate and in which to rest, to really be content. Stanley must have surmised that yes, Maude was correct, and just imagine knowing the reward of such a life! It must have been a message Pickup promoted often in his position.

How does a 23-year old New Yorker and a 36-year old Canadian come to these conclusions? It’s as if they had already seen what a wizened, gray-haired believer could reflect on after many more decades of experience. Maybe, in fact, that’s what was ‘at work’ – the life-examples of one or more others nearby showing them what practically a life ‘at work’ should resemble, as decades upon decades accumulate. It makes you wonder, does work ever really stop here? God ‘worked’ right from the beginning (see Genesis 1 and 2) – in fact, ‘work’ is in the Bible more than 500 times. Another preacher said we should enjoy work (Ecclesiastes 3:22), and yet another said essentially the same centuries later (Colossians 3:23). Think Maude and Stanley learned from those guys, too? Can you and I?