Are We Truly Free and Brave?

​Among the many things changed by Covid has been my involvement in a choral group that included many music teachers from surrounding communities. We rehearsed weekly in one of the high schools. Last spring as we prepared for our concert the school closed the building to outside personnel like us. Within a week school closed period. In the beginning we had hopes of rescheduling our concert for maybe June. Then September or October. My music still hangs in a bag on a hook ready to grab as I go out the door to rehearsal.

This song is not from last spring’s planned program. It is from an earlier concert, but the text by American abolitionist, James Russel Lowell (1819-1891), has stuck with me. In recent days its meaning seems all the more powerful.

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It was set to music by Ernst Bacon in his Five Hymns IV Freedom.

Men whose boast it is that ye 
Come of fathers brave and free,
If there breathe on earth a slave, 
Are you truly free and brave?
If ye do not feel the chain,
When it works a brother’s pain,
Are you not base slaves indeed,
Slaves unworthy to be free?

They are slave who fear to speak 
for the fallen and the weak;
They are slave who will not choose 
hatred, scoffing, and abuse,
Rather than in silence shrink
From the truth they needs must think;
They are slave who dare not be 
In the right with two or three.

If there breathe on earth a slave,
Are ye truly free and brave?

Pray for this land of the free and home of the brave, that we would truly be what we claim to value.