faith! - Bill Canaday
Early each morning since the pandemic shutdown, Bill Canaday has risen early and walked his neighborhood. By 7 a.m. he is on one of his porches whistling hymns, a practice he has found sustains him in the midst of so much uncertainty.
That may be because, for Bill, 63, hymns resonate deep in his soul. The child of a Methodist minister, he vividly remembers his mother rocking him to sleep as she sang hymns from the Methodist hymnal. His connections go back another generation as well, where a grandmother mysteriously found a five dollar bill that allowed her to purchase music lessons. Those lessons ultimately led to her playing the organ at the tiny country church in Dorchester, S.C., that her family helped found.
“The point is that music has been genetically engrained in me over the years, and the hymns I am whistling are the very hymns my grandmother was playing in that country church … a connectedness in this time of disconnect,” Bill said during a recent telephone interview.
His choice of whistling is steeped in his inherent optimism.
“Whistling by its very nature is a happy thing,” Bill said. “It’s hard to whistle and be sad at the same time, so it seemed to be a kind of fit, a way to silently read all the verses while whistling through. And the musician in me can add little flourishes.”
Bill spends no less than 30 minutes each morning whistling his way through the hymns of his upbringing and his adulthood. Some days an hour and a half have flown by; some days, only 30 minutes. But all told, he has probably been through his two Methodist hymnals twice and his Episcopal hymnal once.
“This morning I probably went through 30 or 40 hymns. In the Episcopal hymnal you could spend an hour on ‘Hail Thee Festival Day.’ You could whistle that about 60 times,” he said, chuckling about the many different versions of the great Easter hymn.
“The way the hymns move through the seasons of the church year provide a comfort in a time of so much uncertainty,” Bill said.
“To go through the church year… to go through Lent – it feels like we are in an extended Lenten season – and to go through Ordinary Time (the long season after Pentecost that extends to Advent). Even though it’s extraordinary time right now in so many ways, it’s really ordinary time. Life just moving along.”
Bill also loves the way the hymns evoke the great biblical struggles, and times when austerity was commonplace.
“Maybe the music filters itself and gives you some insights into where you are,” he said. “Strength for endurance . . . We have really lived pretty cushioned lives and so therefore anything like this, we’re not prepared physically, emotionally, spiritually.”
For our forebears, life was much more austere. There were daily routines and chores and the rare, special occasion such as Camp Meeting or Easter or Christmas. Most days were filled with hard work and worry.
Of his ancestors, Bill recalls them as “country folk who were scraping by,” but their connection to their church sustained them.
“That little Zion Methodist Church where we have had various family reunions in the past – that was community. It was absolutely community,” Bill said. And with each note whistled, Bill finds he is able to reconnect to that history and sustain himself through these difficult days that came so unexpectedly. He misses the children at Logan Elementary School for whom he retired from his day job at SLED so that he could be at the school each day to work with them.
“I have never felt as retired as I do now,” he said. So he fills his days with walks, with whistling, with reading.
“I am a voracious reader,” he said.
He is currently reading a book he found in his father’s library about the founder of Spartanburg Methodist College, a school David Camak was determined to breathe into life for the children of mill workers in the age of textile magnates.
Camak’s struggles, like the struggles in the hymns he whistles “give me a sense of continuity. We are part of the endless line,” Bill said. “Those who came before us had their own sets of challenges. Why should we be different? “
Bill Canaday is the son of a United Methodist minister and a longtime member of St. Martin's. Before the pandemic, you might find him practicing on the organ in the church. Today, you 're likely to find him whistling on his porch in Earlewood.
