Leaning on the Everlasting Arms -- Elisha Albright Hoffman and Anthony J. Showalter

How long to do suppose hugging between humans (like what’s in this picture) has been around? Forever, right? And yet we don’t seem to get tired of it. In fact we need it, like medicine or daily bread. Babies are said to be underdeveloped if they don’t get this treatment, in fact. So, when Anthony Showalter received a couple of letters one day in 1887 that reached out in heart-brokenness, he responded, even though the fellows whom he sought to embrace were not within arm’s reach. “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” was what he and his collaborator Elisha Hoffman composed to salve the hurt of not just two broken hearts, but countless others who might hear of their remedy for this condition. There’s not only a mortal quality to this therapy, but also a divine one that carries the ultimate cure.

Showalter was a 29-year old music teacher from Georgia, who happened to be in Alabama, and sought out his 48-year old friend Hoffman in Pennsylvania, with help from inspired words Moses spoke in a wilderness thousands of miles and years from 1887. Two former students had lost their wives in death, and somehow they each knew to whom they could go for solace – their former music teacher, Mr. Showalter. He didn’t disappoint them, offering sympathy in letters, referring to Moses’ words about God’s ‘everlasting arms’ to his people as he prepared to leave them in his own death (Deuteronomy 33:27). But, he didn’t stop there, feeling moved that a hymn worth remembering was hidden inside this episode. So, when he wrote his friend Elisha with the words to the chorus and what motivated them, his cohort responded with three verses. Anthony soon had the music written to match the words Moses, Elisha Hoffman, and he had authored. An amazing thing had happened, even though it took fatal blows to generate the product. Moses’ words came as he thought about his own passing, and they echoed centuries forward as A.J. Showalter confronted the same issue. Did the dual nature of his former students’ loss accentuate the experience for Showalter? Perhaps he felt overwhelmed by his young friends’ despair, an engine that propelled him to Moses’ episode and a people preparing to move on without him. The potion the two 19^th Century men and their forefather Moses prescribe for this death struggle we all face, probably numerous times in an average lifetime, never loses its potency. Their words in “Leaning…” say that it grows stronger, in fact.  

This story tells us something about the nature of us, passed on from a God in whose likeness we’ve been constructed.  That the hymn has survived into the 21^st Century shows the three who gave us the words (Moses, Showalter, and Hoffman) knew what power lay in the words, necessary for humankind to endure its final tragedy. How did Showalter know to go find these biblical words? It must be that he’d discovered he couldn’t escape inevitable death, even if he himself hadn’t yet reached 30 years of age. Instead, embracing is the answer. This includes other people, and Him, too.

Information on the song was also obtained from the books  Amazing Grace – 366 Inspiring Hymn Stories for Daily Devotions, by Kenneth W. Osbeck, 1990, Kregel Publications; The Complete Book of Hymns – Inspiring Stories About 600 Hymns and Praise Songs, by William J. and Ardythe Petersen, 2006, Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.; and Then Sings My Soul – 150 of the World’s Greatest Hymn Stories, Robert J. Morgan, Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2003.

See following site also. http://www.hymntime.com/tch/htm/l/e/a/leanarms.htm

Sing and Be Happy – Emory S. Peck

He probably had lived in northern Georgia. He might have been a native Georgian, or spent much of his life there. But, we know not much more than that, or do we? Emory S. Peck told us something pretty important about himself when he composed “Sing and Be Happy” in 1940, if you can peer inside the words he wrote, think about what message he had, and ponder a few other details of his surroundings. He was a 47-year old believer, and knew of a recipe for relief from a difficult time, judging by what he says in the three verses he jotted for us to examine. Maybe he himself stayed in the shadows so that his message might attract more light.  Maybe that’s what we ought to do, too.

He’s anonymous, but Emory S. Peck does have a biography that someone knows, and a must have said some things in “Sing and Be Happy” that resonated with others. His grave is in a cemetery called Alta Vista, outside of Gainesville, Georgia.  It’s a small town, or technically a small city (population 33,000-plus), the seat of Hall County, and nicknamed the “poultry capital of the world”. There’s several notable people who are from Gainesville, but Peck isn’t listed among them. Maybe it’s a mirror of his less-than prolific musical output, which one source indicates was just three songs. Or, perhaps Emory hailed from somewhere else in Georgia, and then made his home in Gainesville at some later point. Or, maybe he was just a happily-ordinary Christian, with this upbeat tune in his toolkit, which he could haul out to dispense advice to others having a bad day. He must have crossed paths with others, or felt this way himself – depressed and burdened (verse 1); tired, grief- or pain-stricken, feeling that life was unfair (verse 2); or feeling forgotten (verse 3). Emory’s solution was consistent. Trust that there’s a brighter end of the road, a goal that will not vanish, one about which we can sing. Focus on that, Peck advises.

This fellow Emory Peck was a 40-something, living in a world with lots of anxieties in 1940. Most historians will quickly surmise that maybe Peck, as perhaps many other Americans experienced in that era, were worried that war (World War II) was on the horizon. Did Emory have sons he thought might be compelled to wear a uniform and a helmet in the near future? His age suggests he had been a young man in his 20s—draft-age--during the first world war. Was Peck a Roosevelt democrat, enamored with FDR’s theme song (“Happy Days Are Here Again”), who decided that he could echo that theme in his Christian walk? Maybe he’d been outta work in the decade of the 1930s, and thought his president’s jocular suggestion was a good one that was beginning to bear fruit as the new decade dawned. It doesn’t have to be a year or a even just a day in the midst of an economic storm, or a looming cloud of global conflict on the horizon to dim one’s outlook. But, hearing these words from a guy who must have had many pressing issues to think about during a time I can only imagine makes me think again about how to respond. None of these concerns were invisible to Emory. He just knew how to see thorough them.    

May 2020 UPDATE: Some of Emory’s descendants have commented on the story, and have provided a few more details of his life. (See the comments posted below.) They relate that he was the composer for other pieces that were published after World War I; apparently, he did indeed serve in the Great War, as a band director and medic. (How must that experience have colored his outlook on life? …it was an especially horrific war, as many historians have noted.) He lived in the Gainesville area, and taught music at Brenau University. He sounds like a gentle soul, who enjoyed being with a great-nephew to listen to Atlanta Braves baseball on the radio, perhaps as they enjoyed fruit from his orchard. Thanks for sharing, Terry Cash and Sandi Simpson!  

http://www.therestorationmovement.com/_states/georgia/peck.htm (This site indicates he is buried in north Georgia. So, was he a Georgia native, or lived a significant portion of his life there?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gainesville,_Georgia (may be composer’s hometown)

http://www.hymnary.org/person/Peck_ES1 (site shows three songs attributed to composer)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Days_Are_Here_Again

 

A little bit more information is here: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/42743412