'But come ye back' is home's refrain

It's hard to fathom a bagpiper who can't pipe "Amazing Grace." It's harder still to imagine an accordion player who doesn't know a polka. But it's impossible to conceive of an Irish tenor who can't sing "Danny Boy," the favorite song of President Gordon B. Hinckley.

Why it's President Hinckley's favorite, I don't know. Perhaps it has to do with a personal moment or relationship. I think I do know, however, why the song strikes such a chord with so many people.

People return to "Danny Boy" because, as a current slogan has it, "It's about family."

Author John Steinbeck once said the best stories are about families coming apart or families coming together. And "Danny Boy" is a song about both. "You must go," the song begins, then adds "but come ye back."

Young Dan is apparently a soldier heading off to war, where the pipes are calling him. He's apparently Irish Catholic, since his father asks him to say an "Ave." One tradition claims Danny was the old man's only remaining son, that he had already lost several sons on the battlefield. Whatever the situation, the scene in the song plays out in most families in most cultures at one time or another: A child leaves home and goes into the dangerous world.

Sometimes the child will leave home to go to school or on a church mission. Sometimes a child leaves to get married. Sometimes they leave out of rebellion or out of shame. But the refrain at home is always the same, "Come ye back."

For "Danny Boy" is more than a song about a young boy leaving home. Only four lines are about leaving. Twelve lines are about his return. Like the parable of the Prodigal Son, the song is about about "homecoming" and the wholeness that homecoming brings.

On that level, in fact, the song mirrors all our lives. In one way or another, at some point we all get to be "Danny Boy."

I'm thinking here of a young writer — a budding newspaper columnist — who left his loved ones because, to his mind, at home "all the flowers were dying." He thought he had the answers. He was a brash little columnist. And he knocked about for several years, trying to find something to fill the empty space his leaving created. When children are raised with faith, they sometimes search for something to replace that faith. They never find it. This cocky columnist felt that emptiness inside and went looking for an explanation for it. A psychologist told him he was suffering from "separation anxiety." The feelings would pass, he was told. He simply had to tough it out.

But the feelings never passed.