Sacred Music Sunday: They, the Builders of the Nation

Today, the state of Utah celebrates Pioneer Day, the day that Mormon pioneers reached the Salt Lake valley. I’ve never really been interested in Pioneer Day; I grew up in California, and the Saints reached California a year earlier.

When I was a teenager, whenever pioneer stories came up, people at church would be clear that even people whose ancestors hadn’t crossed the plains still had pioneer ancestry because someone in their family was the first person to join the church.

As I was thinking about what song to choose for today, I wanted to avoid the cliche of Come, Come Ye Saints. I flipped through the pioneer section of the hymnal, fell upon They, the Builders of the Nation, and I got to thinking about my great-great grandfather, Michael Gragen. He lived in Ireland during the Great Hunger. I don’t know much about him, just that he was a teenager and left to flee starvation and ended up in Vermont, where many subsequent generations of my family grew up. He wasn’t famous. He was a farmer, not a politician. But he built this nation just as surely as those more well-known.

And you don’t have to cross a continent or an ocean, fleeing persecution or famine, to build your community. You don’t have to have children. Wherever we each are, we can, in our own sphere of influence, build where we stand. And even if we never go anywhere, never become famous, never have descendants, someone someday will be able to sing about us the refrain “Blessed, honored pioneer.”