Do you like to pray outside? Don’t prayers of awe and wonder come when you’re a little closer to the Creator’s creation? Even in New York City there are prayerful places in the great out-of-doors.
The weather was hot and sticky last week, par for the course for a New York July. On balmy summer evenings we like to eat outside and watch the sun set over the Hudson – mind you, it sets between two high-rise apartment buildings.
The other evening I caught myself humming that old hymn, “Shall We Gather at the River?” a prayer of praise for another river, a celestial one “that flows by the throne of God.” Maybe I’d go sing that down by the Hudson in the morning, before it got too hot.
I’ve sung the hymn for years, but didn’t know much about it. I assumed it had come from Appalachia or maybe from the musical South, closer to the lyric waters of the Mississippi.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered, thanks to a Google search, that it had been written close by, in Brooklyn, New York, on a July day back in 1864.
The poet and composer Robert Lowry (1826-1899) was minister at the Hanson Place Baptist Church in Brooklyn that summer. “The weather was oppressively hot,” he wrote, “and I was lying on a lounge in a state of physical exhaustion.”
Then his imagination took flight and he thought of the cooling waters of the heavenly river, mentioned in Revelation 22:1, “clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God.” He wondered why the hymn writers said so much of the river of death and not of this river of life.
So often our words of prayer come as questions, and this prayer-like hymn opens with a question, “Shall we gather at the river?” The answer? Yes, and again, yes, every time we sing the refrain. God is the great giver of yes in our prayers.
The next morning I jogged down to the river – the Hudson – and found a spot close to the lapping waters. Clouds covered the sky and rain looked imminent, but it was warm and I was dripping with sweat. Sweltering conditions like when the song was first written.
But singing transported me elsewhere, the words and the music. Yes, we’ll all gather at the river, the beautiful, the beautiful river, gather with the saints at the river that flows by the throne of God. The perfect prayer for a balmy summer day.
I jogged back to our apartment, took a shower and headed to the office, my head and heart full of God’s yeses. The song was in my head all day. Sing along with me. Just two verses. It won’t take long and it’ll give you just the right perspective on your day.
