One Word of Truth
One word of truth outweighs the whole world,
And so I wave it like a banner unfurled.
Grant to me, Lord, to be a sword,
Held in the hand of the highest.
Enchanted sword! In your grip!
Please, Lord, do not let me slip.
One word of truth outweighs the whole world,
And so I wield it like a hammer that’s hurled.
Grant to me, Lord, to be a sword,
Held in the hand of the highest.
Enchanted sword! In your clasp!
Please, don’t drop me from your grasp.
One word of truth outweighs the whole world!
Comment:
I wrote this song in honor of one of my inspirations, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He was a dissident who struggled against the injustice and (ironically) dehumanizing power of the Soviet Union, a regime steeped in humanism.
Beginning as a communist, he was imprisoned in the Gulag after writing something derogatory about Josef Stalin in a letter.
Dr. Albert Mohler writes of Solzhenitsyn:
He served eight years in the system, and those years of political, physical, and spiritual oppression became the foundation for Solzhenitsyn’s great literary and historical achievement.
A term spent in one of the most brutal prisons became the basis for his short novel. A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Solzhenitsyn revealed not only the physical deprivation and spiritual degradation that marked the camps, but the coldly calculated methods by which the Soviet authorities sought to break the spirits of the prisoners.
Solzhenitsyn was released from the gulag system the very day of Stalin’s death. He then became a teacher and used his time to write the books that would change the world. Some of these works had actually been written in prison, though Solzhenitsyn was forced to memorize his composed passages until he could write them down only after his release from the gulags.
This song draws on some of his quotes.
He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970. In his acceptance speech he cited that Russian proverb:
“One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.”
The image of the sword I took from his quote about what he saw as his life’s work in the service of God and humanity:
Maybe this will inspire you to read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Dr. Bill Maynard