From The London Guardian-
On 10 February 1908, a gang cornered a 38-year-old Indian lawyer in Johannesburg. It beat him so badly that he was unable to speak through the cuts and welts on his face. Friends took him to the house of Joseph Doke, a Baptist minister, where he signalled for a pen and paper. He wrote down three requests. The first was about his struggle for Indian rights in South Africa. The second urged the attorney general to release his attackers without charge. And the third asked Doke's daughter, Olive, to sing his favourite hymn before he rested his bruised body. She was brought before him and began to trill:
Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on,
The night is dark and I am far from home,
Lead Thou me on;
Keep Thou my feet, I do not ask to see
The distant scene – one step enough for me.
John Henry Newman was indeed far from home when he composed those words. The young Anglican priest was coming to the end of a holiday from hell in Italy. The journey home involved a sea crossing from Palermo to Marseilles. During the three-week wait for a boat his servant found him sitting, ill and in tears, on his bed. Newman told him he ached to be back in England. When the boat finally left it ran into difficulty in the treacherous Strait of Bonifacio, between Corsica and Sardinia. Newman wrote the hymn while stranded there for a week.
More here-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/may/18/newman-gandhi-catholic
No comments:
Post a Comment