‘Blue Boat Home’: From Beloved Unitarian Universalist Hymn to Skinner House Children’s Book

Though below me, I feel no motion
Standing on these mountains and plains
Far away from the rolling ocean
Still my dry land heart can say …
I’ve been sailing all my life now
Never harbor or port have I known
The wide universe is the ocean I travel
And the earth is my blue boat home

Set to a nineteenth-century Welsh tune, with lyrics by singer-songwriter Peter Mayer, “Blue Boat Home” is one of the most beloved pieces of music in the Unitarian Universalist oeuvre. Indeed, in a 2012 survey by UU World, readers chose “Blue Boat Home” as their favorite UU hymn.

So it’s no surprise that “Blue Boat Home” sailed away from the competition when Skinner House Books asked Canadian artist Sue Todd to select a UU hymn that she would most like to illustrate as a children’s book.

“I went through them all and it stood out, no contest,” says Todd, who lives in Toronto. “It is just a beautiful poem. It’s talking about our relationship to our home, the planet. It has a very subtle, gentle way of reminding us of that connection and to be responsible for it, without hitting you over head. It is so lyrical, it just evoked so much imagery.”

On April 1, after months of collaboration between Mayer and Todd, Blue Boat Home was published by Skinner House as a picture book for children, although audiences of all ages may find themselves equally enthralled. Befitting the song that inspired it, the book is uplifting, mysterious, and gorgeous, featuring illustrations in bold, cheerful colors; stars, fish, and people of all sorts; and a mother and daughter navigating the wonders of the universe with the earth as their blue boat home.

“I’ve never been a book author before, so it feels pretty special to me,” says Mayer, a renowned musician and composer who lives in Stillwater, Minnesota, and regularly plays at UU services and other UU events around the country.

The book is quickly amassing a fanbase. 3x3, a magazine devoted to contemporary illustration, will be honoring Todd’s work on Blue Boat Home with a merit award this year, according to Mary Benard, editorial director of Skinner House Books and UUA Publications, who conceived of and shepherded the project.

In May, Mayer was profiled in Religion News Service, which noted the publication of the new book, and Skinner House is submitting Blue Boat Home to many children’s book awards in the United States and Canada, Benard says.

‘Blue Boat Home’ Hymn Inspires a Children’s Book Illustrator

The genesis of the book project came from Benard and the team at Skinner House Books, a publishing house of the Unitarian Universalist Association, who had worked with Todd before.

“We received so much positive feedback about Sue’s illustrations for a previous children’s book we published, Mira and the Big Story, by Laura Alary, that we wanted to work with her again,” says Benard. 
She sent Todd a copy of Singing the Journey (popularly known as “the teal hymnal”), the 2005 supplement to the UU hymnal Singing the Living Tradition, and asked Todd to select the hymn that most spoke to her as an illustrator.

With Todd’s enthusiastic support for “Blue Boat Home,” Benard reached out to Mayer to propose the book.

“I was thrilled,” says Mayer, who wrote the hymn more than twenty years ago while strumming his guitar to the tune of “Hyfrydol,” a Welsh hymn published in 1844 by Rowland Prichard that has since become a familiar melody for many Christian hymns.

“Blue Boat Home,” Mayer says, grapples with the idea that “we are on a planet in an unimaginably vast universe, and we’re all connected, and we are all one big family of life, and our bodies are made of stardust.” One reason it connects with so many people, he says, is that it’s “an accessible metaphor talking about something very vast and sometimes very overwhelming.”

Not long after composing it, Mayer played the hymn for Jason Shelton, an award-winning musician who at the time was music director of the First UU Church of Nashville, Tennessee. Shelton urged Mayer to submit it for inclusion in what would become Singing the Journey; when that hymnal was published in 2005, Blue Boat Home gained a large UU audience.

Today Mayer is a familiar face at UU congregations around the country, where he regularly plays “Blue Boat Home” and other songs. “Blue Boat Home” is one of two songs by Mayer already available in Sing Out Love, the UUA’s new virtual hymnal—he’s provided eight more to the hymnal, which will be added over the coming months.

But he wrote “Blue Boat Home” as a hymn, not a children’s song, and he never imagined it as a children’s book until Benard reached out to him.

“It’s quite an honor,” Mayer adds.

Working Together to Make ‘Blue Boat Home’ Sing

As a children’s book illustrator, Todd usually works alone from the words of the author without meeting or talking with them. But Benard encouraged Todd and Mayer to collaborate on designing the book, and they met via Zoom and exchanged numerous emails to flesh out their vision.

“‘Blue Boat Home’ is based on a rich and nuanced metaphor with the possibility for multiple interpretations and emphases,” explains Benard, who notes that Larisa Hohenboken, Skinner House’s editor, was also instrumental in the art direction. “We wanted to make sure that Peter would fee l that the illustrations represent his own most deeply felt understanding of the lyrics. Sue has a talent for infusing a surreal element into her work, which we felt worked beautifully for ‘Blue Boat Home,’ but would also need to stay aligned with the song’s core message.”

Says Todd, “It was pleasant because I got to hear Peter’s views of his own story.”

Her initial sketches weren’t quite what Mayer imagined for his lyrics, so she went back to the digital drawing board and came up with a new concept that they both embraced.

“It gets better through collaboration,” Todd adds. “Peter is just such a warm, kind person, open and likable, I enjoyed working with him immensely.”

“I don’t want to take anything away from the lyrics, but I feel like it’s not my book, it’s Sue’s,” says Mayer. “She’s just a genius and [the book] is just so beautiful.”

Of the final product, Benard says, “I love it. The song itself is so beautiful, and I love the way both the lyrics and the illustrations tie together the human community, the natural world on Earth, and the cosmos … Many of the illustrations have so much charming detail that children and adults could notice new things each time they look. It feels like Sue really brought deep creativity and engagement to the book, and one of the most gratifying things about working on an illustrated book is the surprises, things that illustrators do that I never would have thought of.”

The book is dedicated by Mayer and Todd “to our precious planet Earth and all its inhabitants, making our way by the light of the heavens.”