Chasing Charles Wesley

Tim Bascom

In John Wesley’s London home, which now serves as a Methodist museum, an eighteenth-century engraving hangs on a hallway wall, the sort of “print” that was mass-produced back when National Geographic didn’t exist and people liked to decorate their homes with exotic educational scenes. A cluster of American Indians sit in a glade, listening with rapt attention to a dynamic minister. The preacher wears a swallow-tailed black suit, knee-high breeches, and a trademark clerical collar with two ribbons laid down like open scissors on his chest. According to the caption, he is Charles Wesley, the great hymn writer and co-founder of Methodism.
Charles has a Bible in one hand, and with the other he is imploring in an ageless fashion. He is reaching out just as we might imagine Luther reaching out in the fifteenth century, and just as Billy Graham did in the twentieth. And the Indians, with their long faces and hawk-like noses, watch keenly. Their feathers shoot upright, hard as knife blades, but they seem impressed. Apparently, Charles Wesley is a confident and very convincing man.
This is how I am invited to picture the long-dead minister as I stand in London, having ferreted out this side-street museum. The etching on the wall is not that different from the way I have sometimes imagined him. However, I happen to know that the etching is inaccurate. When Charles Wesley went to the American colonies in 1736, though he hoped to be a missionary to the Indians, there is no evidence that he had more than passing contact. He mainly served as a chaplain in Frederica and as a secretary to Governor Oglethorpe. And if he ever addressed a group of Indians, he must have struggled mightily, since he had little time to master an Indian language. In fact, even the date on the caption is wrong—1745. Charles had been back in England for seven years by then, having left Georgia after two years of complete failure.
As I stand there in front of that black-and-white image, I am reminded that—like a photographic print left too long in its chemical bath—the authentic Wesley can be very hard to capture. The picture confirms an ongoing problem. The more I try to envision the real Charles Wesley, the more I run up against deep religious assumptions, many of them my own.

For me, Christianity came with the genes. My great-great-grandfather on my father’s side was a Congregational minister in the frontier town of Chicago, arriving there when only 300 people lived in one-story shacks along the shore of Lake Michigan. His son became a Congregational minister and served in the barely settled plains of North Dakota. Then came my grandfather, who sidestepped this “apostolic succession” to become a doctor. However, his sister stepped back into the gap, becoming a missionary in China; and when my father came of age, though he followed Granddad into medicine, he decided, like his aunt, to serve as a missionary. He took the family to Ethiopia.
On my mother’s side, the influences were nearly as strong. She had a grandfather who was a minister, and her mother was a mystic who insisted that, during a deep depression, she had seen Jesus standing at the foot of her bed. Before marrying my father, Mom had contemplated going to seminary so that she could become a Director of Religious Education.
Because of this impeccable Protestant pedigree, my parents could envision a life committed to religious service. It was a tradition. And because I was born into that tradition, I was destined to end up surrounded by driven, high-octane Christians. In Ethiopia, I was mentored by a whole cadre of adopted missionary aunts and uncles who acted as clan-elders. These missionary folk lived on the premise that we should always do what Jesus would do. Raised around them, I took my salvation as virtually a given. By four, I had mastered the Christian fundamentals enough to pray my own conversion prayer. At seven, when I went to the mission boarding school, I memorized Bible verses daily, expected to recite them before breakfast. By the time I was twelve, my father had taken me on a father-son trip and taught me the personal practice of Bible study and prayer. And by the time I graduated from college, I had a stack of devotional notebooks over two feet high, full of biblical analysis and rumination and deep yearning.
As part of my childhood, I also sang hymns. Although I did not know who Charles Wesley was, I could have quoted him by the time I went to boarding school in second grade. One of the most popular Wesley hymns at Bingham Academy in Addis Ababa was the Christmas carol “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” As the holidays approached, I lunged into the lyrics of that carol, anticipating my release from boarding school and my return to our home in the grassy foothills of southern Ethiopia:

Hark! the herald angels sing
“Glory to the newborn king;
Peace on earth and mercy mild
God and sinners reconciled!” (United Methodist Hymal, 240)

I relished this exultant song, unlike certain other hymns that we were required to sing at “Loyal Ambassadors for Christ”—our Sunday chapel services at Bingham Academy. With Wesley’s Christmas carol, I didn’t feel the weary undertow of sadness that swept through me as I sang “Trust and obey, for there’s no other way to be happy in Jesus” (467). Nor did I feel the forced bravado of “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war” (575)—a song that grade-schoolers had to pound out every Sunday as we filed into the LAC chapel dressed like puritan conscripts in black stovepipe pants and choke-collar bowties.
Though I had no idea (and wouldn’t have cared) that the lyrics of Wesley’s carol were set to Mendelssohn’s music, I liked the bright energy of the tune. The words and notes came out of my mouth perfectly matched:

Joyful all ye nations rise,
Join the triumph of the skies;
With the angelic host proclaim,
Christ is born in Bethlehem!

After I sang Wesley’s carol, I felt as if I’d cleared the old air out of my lungs and breathed in new air that was clean and cool and crisp.

It’s an odd thing, comparing one’s own spiritual experience to that of an eighteenth-century English clergyman, particularly one as famous as Charles Wesley. It’s an eccentric leap—the sort of behavior one might expect from an overly enthusiastic member of the Society for Creative Anachronism. It raises the question of ego, too. Who do you think you are, I ask myself. However, I’m too obsessed to stop my pursuit. I sense that Wesley can help me understand the life I have known. So I keep building my own bridge back through time, a tenuous catwalk of facts and guesses.
I discover that Charles Wesley’s great-grandfather on his father’s side, like mine, was a minister, a clergyman in the Church of England. So was his grandfather, and his father. As for Charles’ mother, Susanna, her grandfather had been a clergyman, and she was such a devout person that she would sometimes lift her apron over her head to create a kind of portable “prayer closet.”
Although only ten of Susanna’s nineteen children survived childhood, she maintained a determined faith, a particularly English and eighteenth-century faith, full of rationalizing authority. Raising children for her was a pragmatic endeavor:

I insist upon conquering the will of children betimes, because this is the only strong and rational foundation of a religious education. . . . [T]hen a child is capable of being governed by the reason and piety of its parents, till its own understanding comes to maturity, and the principles of religion have taken root in the mind. (qtd. in Gill, 27)

This, then, was the manner in which Charles was raised after he was born in 1708. Like his siblings, he was firmly disciplined in hopes that the “principles of religion” would take root in his mind. Reason and obedience reigned supreme until he was old enough to go to Westminster School in London and then to Oxford, where he kicked up his heels briefly, then settled down to studying religion and becoming ordained like virtually all the men of his clan, including his older brother John, the main founder of the Methodist church.
In other words, Charles’ Christianity could not be described as a choice so much as a habit. He was another link in an unbroken chain, the inheritor of a well-forged religious tradition. Whatever salvation he could experience would have to be salvation from what he already knew, which puts a whole new spin on his use of the term “sin” or “nature’s night”:

Long my imprisoned soul lay
Fast bound in sin and nature’s night.
Thine eye diffused a ray of light;
My chains fell off, my heart was free.
I rose, went forth, and followed thee. (363)

What chains had fallen off? From what was his heart set free? Hadn’t he always been living out the life of a committed, practicing Christian?

At boarding school in Ethiopia, when I was only eight years old, my older brother showed up in my dorm room one Sunday afternoon carrying his trombone. He and three middle-school boys had obtained permission to perform on their brass instruments during our usual rest hour, and to lead a kind of mini-revival. They blasted their way through several hymns—good rousing gospel songs like Fanny Crosby’s “To God Be the Glory.” Then they took turns telling us their testimonies.
At the end of this impromptu service, the older boys invited us to become Christians, telling us that we must turn away from our sins and ask Jesus into our hearts. I was proud of my brother, who had willingly come over to care for my soul. I didn’t go forward to the clothing dresser that served as our altar, not because I refused but because I had already prayed for salvation when I was four. I was already determined to be a good Christian.
As a dutiful missionary child, I had always worked hard at being a Christian. I prayed. I studied the Bible. I memorized several hundred verses. And when I reached junior high a few years later, I went (of my own volition) to a weeklong Youth for Christ Camp. We were on furlough in Kansas when I traveled by bus to this camp in Missouri. I did everything I was supposed to do: singing with gusto around the campfire, being outraged by the crude breast-milk jokes of a boy who lolled on a girl’s lap, keeping my assigned devotional time each morning. And when the last day arrived, I wanted just as much as everyone else to reach a spiritual climax.
The minister had us write our sins on slips of paper. Then he invited us to come to the front, one at a time, and to nail these notes to a large splintery cross. People were crying as they went forward, but I wasn’t, which made me wonder if something had gone wrong inside me. If I couldn’t feel my own sinfulness, then maybe I wasn’t really saved. Maybe, back when I was four, I hadn’t said the conversion prayer quite right. So I tried again: “Lord, I know I have sinned, and I know You died to save me. Please, if you haven’t already done it, come into my heart.”
I said this backup prayer very nervously. Then I panicked because I thought that perhaps I had made an even worse mistake. Maybe true Christians didn’t pray for salvation more than once. Maybe this was the true mortal sin: to doubt my own conversion. Had I just doomed myself to hell?

The Anglicans of Charles Wesley’s childhood were trying very hard to understand Christianity on a rational level, just as I was trying to understand it, in my own way, as an overly trained missionary youth. A century earlier, Cromwell and his Puritan followers had battled their way into power, imposing a strict Protestant government. With the downfall of that radical political experiment, a whiplash reaction occurred. The restored King legislated an Act of Uniformity in 1662, which forced all Anglican clergy to follow the Book of Common Prayer in worship. He wanted to flush out any remaining zealots—those “unreasonable” clergy who might reject the Book of Common Prayer as too Catholic. When “Nonconformists” refused to sign the new Act, they lost their pastorates. Charles Wesley’s grandfather was one of these abolished ministers, and even though eighty years passed before Charles went to Oxford, he found the faculty still trying to avoid “enthusiasm.” Oxford clergy, true Church of England clergy, should be above religious excess. They should be balanced, decorous, reasonable.
It was because of this emphasis on restraint that Wesleyan preachers would be later lampooned, depicted as lunatic fanatics by the likes of Tobias Smollett (in his novel about the Wesleyan convert Humphry Clinker) or by the artist William Hogarth (in his popular engraved caricatures). In one of Hogarth’s best-known engravings, a corpulent Methodist minister, with a harlequin robe peeking out from under his gown, is shown shouting his views on the biblical text “I speak as a fool” (II Corinthians 11:23). Next to him is a “Scale of Vociferation” that begins at “Natural Tone” and rises to “Bull Roar.” Down at the base of the pulpit an enlarged heart perches on a book of “Wesley’s Sermons,” and a kind of emotional thermometer rises out of it. The measuring points are labeled from “Suicide” to “Convulsive Fits” and “Madness” (Burke, 252).
Paradoxically, the Wesleys themselves, both Charles and his brother John, were quite logical, even pragmatic, in their approach to religion, especially in their early Oxford years. While they were still at Oxford studying divinity, Charles brought together what amounted to a prototype for their Wesleyan “societies.” He gathered a group of students who dubbed themselves the “Holy Club,” meeting for devotional study and good works, doing it so methodically that they were ridiculed by classmates as “Methodists.” These young men not only studied the Bible and prayed together, but kept a running tally of their sins and good works. They donated money to orphans and visited prisons in order to rack up more points. Their Christian principles were measured and quantified. They were, legally speaking, beyond reproach. In later years Charles would defend the Holy Club by pointing out that they were simply subscribing to the posted Statutes of the University (Gill 36).
The problem was not in Charles’s method, but in his zeal. Everything in moderation, his elders counseled. To faculty and peers, he seemed to be trying too hard. How bitter, then, when his efforts refused to yield the desired results. In 1736, when he agreed to go with his brother John to serve as a newly ordained minister in the American colony of Georgia, he felt plagued by doubts. On board the ship to America, he was confronted by his own spiritual weakness after a storm split the mainsail and waves heaved over the deck. While the other English settlers screamed in panic, a group of Moravians launched into German hymns, singing calmly against the howling wind and the creaking of the wooden craft. Charles felt great admiration for these foreigners. But he did not feel any of their assurance. After the ship put down anchor on the coast of Georgia, he wrote an anguished letter to friends in England:

God has brought an unhappy unthankful wretch hither, thro’ a thousand dangers, to renew his complaints, and loath[e] the life which has been preserved by a series of miracles. . . . In vain have I fled from myself to America; I still groan under the intolerable weight of inherent misery! (qtd. in Tyson, 61-2)

Disconsolate, despairing Charles even echoed Milton’s Satan in that letter to England: “Go where I will, I carry my Hell about me” (qtd. in Tyson, 62). When I first recognized Wesley’s allusions to Paradise Lost nearly three centuries after he wrote them, I felt a powerful sense of identification. I was immediately reminded of my own response to Milton’s epic, during college. I had underlined numerous passages from Satan’s lament, writing in my journal, “Which way I fly is Hell: myself am hell” (IV, 75).

In my own case, after graduating from a mission school in Kenya, I had chosen a kind of modern-day American parallel to the Oxford divinity school—Wheaton College, an evangelical “Christian college” that prides itself on the motto “Excellence for His Kingdom.” I, too, worked methodically at my faith, as if building a ladder toward heaven. I, too, felt dismayed by my doubt and weakness, two gnawing moles at work inside me. And, like Wesley, I kept trying to succeed anyway.
Yet another parallel emerges: my freshman year, I got involved in a prison ministry, just as Charles Wesley had done in the 1730s with his Holy Club. It wasn’t Newgate Prison where Wesley prayed with felons before they were carted to the gallows; however, the teen inmates at Valley View Correctional Center truly were lawbreakers, many of whom had participated in rape, theft, even murder.
Our group of Wheaton students would take skits to these hard-core delinquents, trying to illustrate key Christian doctrines. Then we would lead a worship service in the cafeteria. As self-appointed evangelists, we prayed before each visit, naming the particular guys we were trying to “reach.” I prayed as diligently as the others, but I was astonished when one of the prisoners finally responded to my concern about his soul. He was a tough skinny kid named Adrian, from a gang on the south side of Chicago. He stammered as he asked me how to do this thing—how to talk to God so God would slide inside him and care for him. Then, as he prayed, he began to weep stringy tears that trickled off his nose and chin.
I felt triumphant. I got into the van excited. I told the others how Adrian had broken down, giving evidence that he was truly repentant. They were full of congratulations, and I felt even prouder. At last I could explain Christianity so convincingly that I could “win” a person to Christ. So why did I feel hollow after we had settled back into silence? Why did I feel strangely alone as I sat on the back bench watching the yellow street lights emerge and disappear?
In the months that followed, I became even more disoriented. It was as if I had drifted too far from shore to remember where it lay. I was not sure what to do with the fact that most of the prisoners at Valley View had been raised in violent Chicago neighborhoods, joining gangs for their own safety. In many cases, their parents had served time before them, so it seemed almost natural for them to turn to crime. If it wasn’t for my own “protected” upbringing, couldn’t I have robbed a convenience store, or gotten hooked on drugs, or stabbed an enemy? Couldn’t I have turned away from Christianity? What motivated me as a Christian? Sheer habit?
No amount of effort brought peace. I maintained my devotional life as strictly as ever, reading in the Bible and writing and praying, often for more than an hour. I volunteered at Valley View. I governed my behavior carefully, especially when I was with my girlfriend and felt the possibility of being compromised. I confessed my sins to a close friend. I studied everything with serious intent. I was a “thinking Christian” trying to make sense of the faith, and I wanted, more than anything, to succeed spiritually. Ironically, though, I never felt satisfied. In fact, I would often become jealous of those who did better than me, whether it was the volunteers who had been elected to lead our prison ministry or the guys who outplayed me on the basketball court.
It embarrassed me—this secret envy—reminding me constantly that I was not truly succeeding. At night I would jog away from the campus. I ran for miles, sometimes ending on the darkened practice-field where the Wheaton football team ran their drills. I smashed into the three-man tackling sled, pushing it back. I smashed into it over and over, shoving it across the black grass until my shoulders were bruised and my thighs ached. Then I lay down on the field and yelled at the stars. They seemed impossibly far away.

Although Charles had tried to do the right thing by coming as a missionary to the American colonies, he did not find his spiritual center in Georgia. After only a few months, his congregation began to complain that he was too demanding. A vengeful parishioner told Governor Oglethorpe that Charles was urging people to desert the colony. Later, this rogue would admit that Charles had only been “forcing the people to prayers” (Tyson 70-1). However, the damage had been done. After others complained, Oglethorpe turned Charles out of his house. Forced to sleep on the ground in another man’s hut, Charles developed a high fever and might have died if John had not traveled back to the stockade to defend him.
Defeated, the two brothers returned to England. Charles was chronically ill and depressed. As he tried to make sense of his personal failure, he spent time with a group of poor Moravian Christians much like the ones he had met on board the ship to Georgia. In particular, he spoke with their group leader, a man named Peter Bohler. Confined to bed, Charles explained to Bohler why he still felt guaranteed of his own salvation: “Because I have used my best endeavours to serve God.” But Bohler shook his head, causing Wesley to wonder, “Would he rob me of my endeavors? I have nothing else to trust to” (qtd. in Tyson, 93).
The fever increased. Charles was bled three times and given a series of medications. The doctor thought he might die. But as he lay in bed fighting this undiagnosed disease, he went right on discussing the Christian faith with Bohler and other visitors, including his brother John. His journal became full of references to singing. He sang even when he didn’t feel like it. April 25th: “We sang, and fell into a dispute whether conversion was gradual or instantaneous.” May 13th: “I forced [John] (as he had often forced me) to sing a hymn to Christ, and almost thought [Christ] would come while we were singing. . . .” And then on Pentecost Day, May 21st, 1738: “At nine my brother and some friends came, and sang an hymn to the Holy Ghost. My comfort and hope were hereby increased” (qtd in Tyson, 94-8).
How strange and yet familiar, this frailty and reaching! In my sophomore year at Wheaton College, as I became vulnerable from visiting Valley View Correctional Center, I started looking outside of my usual religious box. I went for several months to an all-Black Baptist church in the poorest part of western Chicago. Then I attended a Pentecostal church, glancing out of the corner of my eyes as people threw their hands in the air and began to pray. They all rose to a collective ecstasy, weeping and sighing and suddenly shouting out “Hallelujah! Yes, Lord, yes”; and I wondered what was wrong with me. Why couldn’t I feel anything? Why was I so spiritually frigid?
I was reminded by these Pentecostal services of the first time I had heard someone claim to speak in tongues. It happened back when I was in junior high and we were on an extended leave from Ethiopia, living in the town of Troy, Kansas. We attended the First Baptist Church, and one evening a young man from that church told my parents about his “gift.” I knew that Baptists like us didn’t go in for this sort of stuff—too emotional, too flashy, too much like TV. But the way Byron described it, there was none of the usual element of performance. He was just walking across his father’s pasture in the dark on a cold winter night when the stars were sharp-white and the air stung his lungs. Then suddenly he found himself spilling over with alien words like a river bursting through a dam.
Did God really intervene so dramatically? I watched my parents for signs of doubt or disapproval, but secretly I wanted this speaking-in-tongues stuff to be real. . . . And I still wanted it to be real a decade later as I stood next to all those dramatic Pentecostal worshipers in Wheaton, Illinois. In fact, I hoped that I myself could speak in tongues. Christianity had always been cerebral and full of predictable work. I wanted it to become experiential, immediate, emotional. I wanted supernatural confirmation. I lifted my hands and murmured a few awkward phrases. I kept repeating the phrase “Thank you, Lord.”

That Pentecost day in 1738 when Charles was visited by John and felt comforted by singing a hymn to the Holy Ghost, a maid came into his sick-room and saw him grimacing in bed. Spontaneously, she uttered a command: “In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, arise and believe, and thou shalt be healed of all thy infirmities.” This statement worked an amazing transformation. Charles wasn’t instantly cured; however, the uncanny appropriateness of her utterance seemed like a sign that God was not only aware of him, but cared. He felt God had addressed him directly, and not because of anything he had accomplished. He let go of his straining efforts. He let go even of his anxiety. Overcome by well-being, he wrote in his journal, “I saw that by faith I stood; by the continual support of faith” (qtd. in Tyson, 99).
Charles wrote a number of hymns soon after to celebrate this “awakening.” He would go on to write over 6,000 hymns in all—the equivalent of two or three a week—but perhaps the best-known is the “conversion hymn” he wrote exactly a year later to commemorate his encounter with God’s grace. That hymn has held its place on the first page of Methodist hymnbooks for over two centuries:

O for a thousand tongues to sing
My dear redeemer’s praise!
The glories of my God and King,
The triumphs of His grace. (57)

What a metamorphosis. From physical ruin and despair to grand praise, from Milton’s hell to the psalmist’s heaven.
After I learned about the struggle that Charles had gone through to arrive at this state of fulfillment, it only endeared him to me. I liked this man more than the resolute, always-in-charge figure I had anticipated—the sort of commandeering leader depicted in that eighteenth-century engraving in the hallway of the John Wesley museum in London. Now as I listened to the words of “O for a Thousand Tongues,” I could hear behind them the sick and humble Charles who lay in a soiled bed, exhausted, on Pentecost Day, 1738:

Jesus, the name that charms our fears,
That bids our sorrows cease;
’Tis music in the sinner’s ears,
’Tis life, and health, and peace!

For Charles, Christ had literally become “life, and health, and peace.” He could identify with those who were sick or suffering, so he wrote them right into his hymn:

Hear Him, ye deaf; His praise, ye dumb,
Your loosen’d tongues employ;
Ye blind, behold your Saviour come;
And leap, ye lame, for joy.

Whenever I sing this hymn, even to this day, it touches a kind of ache in my soul. I have always wanted such assurance. I have wanted to feel so secure in God that nothing else mattered—that I could say “All is well and all shall be well.” Charles had found that security in spite of his sensible, rule-bound efforts. In fact, he had found it because he finally let go of those sensible efforts—those attempts to justify himself before God. One of the deleted stanzas from the original manuscript (it had eighteen stanzas altogether), describes the result of this “release”:
Sudden expired the legal strife;
’Twas then I ceased to grieve;
My second, real, living life
I then began to live. (Tyson, 108)

Here was something truly worth singing about, if indeed it was possible: the end of all the internal “legal strife,” the end of trying, trying, trying to get it right.

During my last year of college, while questioning everything I had once believed, I made a life-altering journey, a modern-day equivalent to the journey Charles Wesley undertook when he sailed to Georgia. I traveled to the Philippines on an internship that would involve living in a Manila slum with a family of squatters.
I went to the Philippines as a hollow replica of myself, still Christian on the surface, but spiritually vacant. In the slum of Tatalon I slept in a plywood-and-tin shack on the greasy shoulder of a river that was black with oil and industrial waste and raw sewage. My landlord had cordoned off a tiny room for my privacy. When I lay on my cot—under a stifling mosquito net—I could touch all four walls. I heard my landlady hacking in the dark, unaware that she had tuberculosis. And I woke to the excruciating cries of their oldest son, three-year-old Tom, who was forever infecting his mosquito bites by scratching at them with fingers contaminated by fishing for bottlecaps in the sewage ditches.
Each morning, Tom would beat at the plywood floor with his heels and smack his head with the heel of his hand, wailing. I felt acutely aware that his life was even more difficult than my own. It brought me out of myself and, at the same time, it made me aware of a general level of pain that went with being human. “Talagang mahirap,” was how people put it in Tagalog. “Too difficult!”
I look back and realize that I had, during all my missionary childhood and early adulthood, sought after an elusive spirituality that would be “triumphant.” If only I were more obedient, if only I did more to follow Jesus, then I would finally feel justified, secure, strong, at peace.
In Tatalon, though, I released my grip on that old, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps theology. I began to examine the scriptures in a new light, and I glimpsed the fabric of a spirituality I had overlooked or never been taught, a spirituality that embraced failing and suffering rather than dismissing it. Here was Christ giving up His own security for the full experience of human life. Here was Christ going to the cross, renouncing the very power that could lift Him above pain, agreeing to taste the most bitter human failure: death. And here was a Holy Spirit who understood what it felt like to lack peace, a Spirit that interceded for humanity with “groans that words cannot express” (Romans 8:26).
In the slums of the Philippines, I saw what Paul meant when he said that the whole earth was groaning. My landlady, with her tubercular cough, was groaning. Tom, maddened by his itching sores, was groaning. I was groaning too. I had become weak with amoebic dysentery, not realizing that I had been carrying a parasitic infestation for over a month. I woke with so little energy that I could hardly pull on my pants. But one of the comforts I found, while living in the middle of all this pain, was a set of cassettes I had made on the last night before flying out of America: a recording of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. And through those tapes I started to tap into the same stream that Charles Wesley had tapped into three centuries earlier.
At the time, I had very little knowledge about the Baroque movement in eighteenth-century music. I did not know how it had evolved in Germany and Italy, or how it had flowed out from there, reaching England and shaping the grand oratorios of Handel, that other great German composer who was a peer of Bach and who became famous in the court of England under King George I. Charles Wesley had actually met Handel. Handel had written for him the exultant tune “Gopsal” as a setting for his hymn “Rejoice, the Lord Is King!” If you sing it, you can hear the grand embellished style of the Baroque period, so much like an operatic aria in its repeated phrases: “Lift up your heart, lift up your voice! Rejoice, again I say, rejoice!” (715). Sing it, and you might recognize a family resemblance—in a revved-up, let-loose way—to the rippling precision of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.
And so, as I lay in my little closet in the slums of Manila listening to Bach’s concertos on headphones, I was being subconsciously linked to the era when Wesley started to experience God’s grace as his muse. I was being linked to those brave Moravian settlers singing Bach-like choruses aboard the foundering ship near Georgia, to Handel composing “Gopsal,” to hundreds of Wesleyan societies that met in houses and rock quarries and old factory buildings to make music out of their rousing new faith. The intricate harmonies of Bach’s concertos had to compete with the melodramatic Tagalog voices of a radio romance outside my open window and with the distant farting of diesel engines or the barking of a startled dog, but as I listened, I was traveling back in time unawares. Without realizing it, I was beginning my pursuit of Charles and beginning to find him, too, because I was, in a sense, living out his story.

Charles Wesley disowned his own son for a period of several years because the young man had “broken the rules” by converting to Catholicism. In later years, Charles fell out with his brother because John had ignored ecclesiastical law and had ordained an informal “bishop” to be sent to the Methodist church in the newly independent United States. Charles would live until he was 81, and over the years he would write dozens of noteworthy hymns. But he would also write hymns that gave off a lingering scent of legalism, a rational, works-oriented scent like sun-scorched drapes. Those songs are, of course, the hymns we don’t readily recognize—the ones with lyrics that read like a checklist:

I want a principle within
Of watchful, godly fear,
A sensibility of sin,
A pain to feel it near.
Help me the first approach to feel
Of pride or wrong desire,
To catch the wandering of my will,
And quench the kindling fire. (410)

In such hymns we still hear the very-religious Wesley, the Right Reverend Charles struggling to be a “good Christian.” We see him conscious of his own pharisaical drive toward achievement and pride, but subject to it too. He knows this is not what being Christian is all about. We do too, which is why we are not fully convinced.
And yet . . . what if Charles had not continued to struggle with his logical, good-works piety? What if he had not stayed in conflict with his own inner drivenness? Could he have written his better hymns?
I say no. In some sense, it is because of Charles’ constant religious tension that he was able to express the yearning so fundamental to all spiritual seekers.
The one hymn that most church musicians consider the greatest of Charles’ hymns is, not surprisingly, about wrestling with God. Isaac Watts—thirty years older than Wesley and an important influence on his hymn-writing—said that “Wrestling Jacob” was worth all his own hymns put together (Tyson 198). In that hymn Charles assumes the position of the biblical character Jacob, wrestling in the dark with an unknown assailant who turns out to be God. Most hymnals have kept only four of the fourteen original stanzas, but one of those lost stanzas is worth restoring, if nothing else as a testament to the real Charles Wesley:

My strength is gone, my nature dies,
I sink beneath Thy weighty hand,
Faint to revive, and fall to rise;
I fall, and yet by faith I stand,
I stand, and will not let Thee go,
Till I Thy name, Thy nature know. (Tyson, 199)

Here stands Charles Wesley at last, in true focus: an exhausted man, sweating in the dark, his hip out of joint, nearly collapsing to the dirt. This is the Wesley that eluded me at first, a much truer Wesley than the natty preacher pontificating to a group of idealized Indians in that eighteenth-century engraving, and much truer than the buffoon in harlequin robes caricatured by William Hogarth. Here is the real Charles, and I am relieved to find in him some of the elements I struggle with inside myself. I am relieved to recognize in him what I have found to be true as an overly trained Christian. He, too, inherited a religious way-of-being, digesting the form but not the substance. He too struggled all his days to get beyond what he knew or could articulate—to actually experience God rather than just thinking about Him.

There is an old voice in my head, older than my father or grandfather or great-grandfather, all of them very moral men. I think it is the same voice they heard when they were my age. It keeps challenging me to be better, to make something of myself. It is the voice I used to associate with God. Work harder. Be good. Get your act together. Prove yourself.
Often I still operate as if that is God’s voice, more often than I would like to admit. However, I also question that voice, as I think my ancestors must have questioned it and as I imagine Charles Wesley must have questioned it. I’m not convinced, anymore, that God looks at me as someone who needs to get the rules figured out. I’m not sure God is that impressed with logical and rigid attempts to obey. I hope there’s more freedom than that, and grace. And sometimes (usually when I expect it least), I feel I receive a kind of confirmation.
On a wintry afternoon when I have been suffering from an injured back, I go to the local YMCA swimming pool. I am not able to play basketball, which means I cannot compete with the other men as I am accustomed to doing. I feel confined to the water, alone. I am weak and not much good for anything. Useless. That is how I see my situation . . . until, for some reason, I begin to rest on the water, swimming slowly, not pushing myself as I usually do, not trying to get anywhere.
I can feel the water buoying me up, stroking my belly and thighs, wrapping itself around me. I hurt, but I wonder, what does this pain matter? I am alive. In fact, I am set free by being in this pool—set free from my own need to be invulnerable, tough, strong, fast. For a moment, I don’t need to keep up appearances as I might on the basketball court. I am fully aware. Life has much to offer. I am actually a very fortunate man: blessed with an unusually rich past, blessed with a loving wife and children, blessed with future possibilities.
In the shower afterward, I hear a man singing an aria. He is here every Tuesday and Thursday, hidden in the sauna and singing at full fortissimo. Because he cloisters himself, I don’t know what he looks like. I only hear him—his echoing voice bringing to life those old operatic tunes, many of them from the Baroque period, even a few by Bach and Handel. He has a rich baritone tone, and he seems to revel in it, occasionally breaking into a sonorous yodel. I suspect he is conscious that there are naked men out here, walking by the sweaty sauna door, shaking their heads. Yet he yodels. I smile as I pass the fogged door, peering into the cloudy darkness. I can’t see him, but he makes me unaccountably happy. I feel suddenly that I am cared for—that all is well and all shall be well. For a moment, I want to sing too: Rejoice, again I say, rejoice.

 

Works Cited

Burke, Joseph and Colin Caldwell. Hogarth: The Complete Engravings. New York:
Harry N. Abrams, 1972.

Gill, Frederick C. Charles Wesley: The First Methodist. London: Lutterworth Press,
1964.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost (1361-1483). Norton Anthology. Vol 1. Third ed. Ed.
M.H. Abrams et al. New York: W.W. Norton, 1962.

The Holy Bible. New International Version. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Bible
Publishers, 1984.

The United Methodist Hymnal. Nashville: The United Methodist Publishing House,
1989. All quoted hymns are from this source.

Tyson, John R. Charles Wesley: A Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.