A Philly priest’s soon-to-be-famous Christmas song was played on this week in Philly history

One of America’s great Christmas songs grew out of procrastination.

Two friends — a rector and his organist at the Church of the Holy Trinity on Rittenhouse Square — found the inspiration in the run-up to the Christmas celebration in 1868.

The result of their delayed creativity was “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” composed and heard in a Philadelphia church.

It was a song that spread across the world, and put the 19th-century church on the map.

Three years before, in 1865, the church’s vicar visited the Holy Land.

So moved by what he saw on that trip, the Rev. Phillips Brooks put pen to paper.

The result was a poem:

O little town of Bethlehem,

How still we see thee lie.

Above thy deep and dreamless sleep

The silent stars go by.

In totality, as a piece of music, the song is not exactly upbeat.

The lyrics reflect on the darkness found after midnight. Cries of misery reverberating through dark streets under cover of ink-black skies.

But there’s also everlasting light.

Three years later in 1868, Brooks asked the church’s organist, Lewis Redner, a real estate agent who played the organ for four churches, to set music to those lyrics Brooks penned.

It was to be part of a song that would play during the Christmas holiday in 1868.

And then Brooks waited.

To his congregation, Brooks was an inspiring preacher. In the throes of the American Civil War, he would ride on a wagon to the battlefields around Gettysburg to perform last rites on dying soldiers and offer words of comfort to wounded soldiers — Union and Confederate.

Days turned to weeks, and Brooks was still waiting for the completed song.

But as the holiday approached, the procrastination had reached a fever pitch.

Two days before the Christmas service, on a Friday, Brooks nervously asked about the song.

“Have you ground out the music yet?”

“No,” Redner said.

But he assured Brooks: “I’ll have it by Sunday”

On Saturday night, Redner wrote in his diary that his brain was in knots over the tune, according to The Inquirer.

Once asleep, he woke with a start.

He wrote that he heard an angel whispering in his ear.

Redner then scribbled down the tune.

And before the Sunday service he layered on the harmony.