Reclothe us in our rightful mind.

(first posted on August 27, 2013)

Hymn: “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind” – John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)

Common Tunes: REST (sometimes called ELTON), and REPTON

Ever feel like you’re losing your mind? Yeah, me too – more often than I’d like to admit. So when I get to this hymn-line in a service, under my breath I whisper an “A-men!”… let it be so, Lord Jesus!

Do you realize how many great authors go by three names? This fact actually came up in a final JEOPARDY! this week: “Born in what's now Maine in 1807, he's honored with a bust in a special section of Westminster Abbey."  Carlita and I both knew it was an American poet (Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey, duh!), but when we started quickly listing the three-named authors, we were thrown into a longer list than we had anticipated. Of course, she got it: William Wadsworth Longfellow. Not one of the three auditioned contestants got it, I might add! I guessed John Greenleaf Whittier… totally unknowing that he, too, was born in 1807!

Whittier wrote this great hymn text; it will come up more than once in the hymn-lines because it is laden with pithy short phrases that hold up on their own – like this one.

We as wayward, foolish people stand stripped of our faculties – and our nakedness-of-mind makes us uncomfortable, embarrassed, ashamed. When I was growing up, I often heard people around me say of someone else in the community, “She ain’t right.” As derisive and politically incorrect as it was, what they meant was the she wasn’t in her rightful mind.

This hymn-line follows the opening sentence of the first stanza: “Dear Lord and Father of mankind, forgive our foolish ways.” [Pardon the sexism, but it WAS the Nineteenth Century!] Some more recent hymnals restate it as “Dear Lord and Father of us all…” Either way, we plead forgiveness and ask to be set aright in our thinking.

In scripture, the Levites are commanded to put on linen garments, penitents were instructed to put on sack-cloth with ashes, and we are all commanded to put on the whole armor of God. In this hymn-line, we are asking for God to put on us once again the covering of right-thinking as it relates to him and to one another.

When Adam and Eve came to their sense of sin, the first thing they realized was their nakedness. You and I may need to come to our senses and ask that we be reclothed and launched back onto our pilgrimage with rightful minds. We might find that it’s our mindlessness (I would never use the word “stupidity”)  that has caused us to sin in the first place.

Listen to a simple congregational singing of the first two stanzas

PS – I can’t decide if I want to be a famous respected author and revert to Ronald George Huff, or be a rich and famous author like J. K. Rowling and stick with my initials. Perhaps I should work on being a valid author first! :)