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Where Can I Turn for Peace is one of my most favorite hymns. It became even more so after I read an article about five years ago about the history of the hymn. I pulled the article from the online archives of the LDS Church News. The article is dated Saturday, December 29, 2001, pg z05:
Search for inner peace is universal
By Emma Lou Thayne
Church News contributor
That spring of 1970 had not been a happy time. The oldest of our five daughters was at 19 struggling with what we'd never heard of — manic depression/bi-polar disease, bulimia and anorexia.
The beautiful girl who had grown up enjoying school, friends, boyfriends, swimming and waterskiing, had become obsessed with dieting, and when the boy she sent on a mission didn't write, she fell into a depression unlike anything we could comprehend. Then, away at college, she became manic and had to come home to be hospitalized. When could she return to herself? To her promising life? In and out of hospitals, through baffling efforts at continuing school, as she fought for her very life, through misery and desperation, she and I never lost touch. I have said that a mother is about as happy as her least happy child. Even with other parts of our lives going well, for our family the three years of her healing were the bleakest time I had ever known.
In the midst of this time came June conference, when our Laurel committee of the Young Women's Mutual Improvement Association general board planned a program for thousands of MIA teachers from across the country. Joleen Meredith had written music to my lyrics for other songs, but on the Saturday morning before the conference we needed a finale. Why not a hymn? I promised to call back and went to my desk in the storage room in the basement among the clothes lines, sleeping bags and Christmas decorations.
Sitting at my makeshift desk I asked on paper what I had implored — how many times? — "Where can I turn for peace? Where is my solace? When with a wounded heart, anger or malice, I draw myself apart, searching my soul?" Three verses of a poem found their way to the page, voicing my anguish and providing the answer I carried in my heart. "He answers privately, reaches my reaching, in my Gethsemane, Savior and friend."
I called Joleen. She had a history of genetic depression in her family, so she understood every word I'd written. She sat at her piano, and as I read a line, she composed a line. By noon we had our hymn that would disappear after that program only to resurface in the new 1985 hymn book. (Hymns 1985, No. 129.)
We had sought professional help for Becky and found it in a superb doctor and a newly found medical miracle, a simple salt, lithium, that corrected her chemical imbalance. She would need it for the rest of her life except when she was pregnant with her three sons. But it was love from her future husband and the peace expressed in the hymn that provided the ultimate healing for Becky.
The search for inner peace is universal. Who of us does not face grieving, loss, anger, illness, hopelessness? The aching knows no boundaries, age, station or language. Once my doctor brother, Homer Warner, on a medical mission with his wife, Kay, called me from an island off of Africa to say, "Hello, Lou. I'm homesick for you. We just heard your hymn sung by a wonderful black chorus in Portuguese!"
I still cannot hear the hymn without gratitude and hope behind my tears. A few weeks ago, when I was speaking at a Relief Society gathering in the Lion House [in Salt Lake City], I felt as if I were hearing it for the first time as 25 little violinists played Joleen's music right in the midst of their Christmas carols. And most profound of all, at the memorial in the Salt Lake Tabernacle following Sept. 11, as war clouds gathered, the hymn encompassed for me both the private and the universal as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir pled for the peace that passes understanding, the peace which He, only One, can offer. That He answers I can testify even more fervently today than 31 years ago when the hymn so inconspicuously began its life.
Emma Lou Thayne, a poet and writer, is a former member of the Young Women's Mutual Improvement Association general board and of the Deseret News board of directors.
Well, I guess you can see why this hymn is one of my favorites...
Where Can I Turn for Peace?, no. 129
1. Where can I turn for peace?
Where is my solace
When other sources cease to make me whole?
When with a wounded heart, anger, or malice,
I draw myself apart,
Searching my soul?
2. Where, when my aching grows,
Where, when I languish,
Where, in my need to know, where can I run?
Where is the quiet hand to calm my anguish?
Who, who can understand?
He, only One.
3. He answers privately,Text: Emma Lou Thayne, b. 1924. © 1973 IRI
Reaches my reaching
In my Gethsemane, Savior and Friend.
Gentle the peace he finds for my beseeching.
Constant he is and kind,
Love without end.
Music: Joleen G. Meredith, b. 1935. © 1973 IRI
John 14:27; John 16:33
Hebrews 4:14–16
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