The Bond of Love – Otis Skillings

This 36-year old music professional’s message wasn’t too complicated, though what he proposed would have required his hearers to exercise some imagination. Otis Skillings and those with whom he gathered to sing must have felt “The Bond of Love” on many occasions by 1971. And Otis had a particular theory, undoubtedly confirmed by what he and the others sensed repeatedly, about how the unity they all sought arose when they got together. What is the source of any group’s mutual love? We could hypothesize that an object, an experience, or maybe a person would fasten people to one another. What if the glue was a person who wasn’t present, someone that none of the people had ever physically touched, seen, or met? Otis’ words indicate that is exactly what took place. What glue (perhaps like what is shown here) would you choose if you wanted to keep something stuck together?

Otis Skillings was a talented professional who employed a variety of methods in the music world to promote the worship in which he was involved for several decades in the American Midwest (perhaps in Ohio, where he was born, and in Illinois where he finally died at the age of 69 in 2004).  He was responsible for at least two musicals called Life and Love – doesn’t get much more basic than that, does it? He reportedly composed, arranged, conducted, and performed, while also conducting clinics, so he was involved in a wide variety of ways to take the music wherever the Spirit moved him. Though only a handful of songs are attributed to Skillings, his work reached secularly powerful people, apparently including residents of the White House in Washington. So, Otis was very capable. Yet, he must have realized that what drew the music out of himself, and what synergy affected any group he guided in worship was due to another person. God, though not bodily present, inhabits the believer, and it was apparently no different for Otis and the crowd with whom he associated in the early 1970s. He wrote of Him in ‘The Bond …’, indicating there was something special going on because His Spirit had linked with people (v.1). And, Otis wanted this God-effect to inform the general public, too (v.2). They would take note that a unified body was present, a goal that Otis evidently thought had intrinsic value.

What good would it do for people outside of a group to know there’s a unified body? Was 1971 much different than what we still see today? Is division more common, or is unity? If you can answer these questions and still feel confident and upbeat about the world about you, then that’s a place I want to move into and inhabit! But, if you’re like me, it’s so obvious that discord prevails and that unity is difficult to reach and still more so to maintain. Perhaps Otis thought the same way, prompting his words about love and harmony, a remedy for the ills of his time. How about for all time?      

Brief biography of the composer: http://www.lillenas.com/nphweb/html/lmol/contributor.jsp?contrib=2025

Very brief facts on the composer: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/s/k/i/skillings_o.htm