Common Love of Good

Ring out false pride in place and blood,

The civic slander and the spite;

Ring in the love of truth and right,

Ring in the common love of good.

–Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92)

This verse is taken from the poem “Ring Out, Wild Bells” written in 1850 as a memoriam to Tennyson’s sister’s fiancé.

The poem is rather long and many of the verses have been taken out and applied to whatever agenda the reader wants to put them to.

Blue ridge blue collar girl uses it as a call for us all to know love and light.

Ring Out The Old, Ring In The New Hymn Lyrics website calls it a Christian Hymn of praise and worship worthy of all Christian denominations.

More Liberty, Less Government uses it to compare policies of Obama, Bush, Gore and the New York Times.

Whether you choose to extract portions of the poem to be used as your personal guide, or ignore it altogether, the poem touches a great number of people in variety of ways.

The poem characterizes the conflict between the Christian faith and the beginnings of the scientific revolution. When we look back on Tennyson’s time, it is easy to imagine that religion played a much stronger role in people’s lives than it does today. This perception may be colored by the seemingly large number of loud voices coming from atheist today and I would not be surprised to learn that there were an equal percentage of atheists in his day.

Many of us today feel we have been betrayed by formal religious institutions. We may remain tenuously connected to our local congregation and retain our belief in the larger religion, but the edge we find ourselves on is strange territory. Sometimes we find ourselves teetering away from belief and practice.

As we go through life we experience change which brings up questions challenging authority, it is the price some say benefit of freedom. We must constantly discover what is right for the individual. Those questions need to be addressed and sometimes they may cause you to leave the faith you grew up with in order to discover God all over again.

This poem acknowledges the darkness that we sometimes find in our lives and what we need to focus on in order to come through that darkness. It challenges all mankind to look beyond the individual and believe in the common good found in all of us.

I hope we can all find goodness in all others, regardless of differences in religious belief or lack thereof. I hope we can all overcome differences of race and ethnicity, and try to understand that each one of us wants peace on this mortal plane. You don’t have to actively help anyone else find that peace but if we can find peace within ourselves and practice it in our relations with others, it cannot help but grow into the wider world.