Many years before Andrae Crouch had his hit version of "To God Be the Glory," a blind young woman named Fanny Crosby wrote about something she never saw consciously until she reached Heaven to see it.
Consider the beautiful videos in the video ... Ms. Crosby did not ever see the kinds of metaphors for "glory" that we think of after she was just SIX WEEKS OLD, when a series of incidents in infancy cost her her eyesight.
Imagine never seeing the glory of a sunrise, a sunset, the light of the sun or the moon through the trees, on the water, through the clouds, over a field of flowers ... or imagine having an unconscious memory of what glory looks like, and applying it to both a spiritual reality and a cherished future.
This is the brightness of joy that one hears in "To God be the Glory" ... the glory of God, Who would take those blind and lost in sin and cover them in His grace and love through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ through His death for sins on the cross and His resurrection.
Tied up in the promises of Christianity is the promise that one day, the believer will see God, face to face ... and upon all that, Ms. Crosby seems to have placed all that unconscious memory of what it would be to see all those things most of us take for granted ... the glory of full, beautiful light, but from the face of her Savior, as she wrote in her third verse:
- Great things He hath taught us, great things He hath done,
And great our rejoicing through Jesus the Son;
But purer, and higher, and greater will be
Our wonder, our transport, when Jesus we see.
Ms. Crosby wrote that in 1875, and William H. Doane applied the bright key of A flat and a joyful, uplifting melody ... I have kept all that brightness in mind in my piano arrangement of his music. Enjoy!