Bill Henderson clearly remembers his “hymn” epiphany. During the February 1990 blizzard on New York’s Long Island, he found himself in a little Presbyterian church near his winter home, a reluctant chaperone for his wife and daughter.

And there, after long decades of angry rejection of the religion of his childhood, he found himself joining the singing with a handful of other hardy souls, “missing words, mashing notes, but confessing everything to each other in our unadorned voices, as the snow swirled around us,” he writes.

“I don’t remember what hymn it was, but suddenly I was gasping for breath, overwhelmed by recognition. In our singing was the love I sought. I was back in the church of my father and mother. The forgotten hymn has brought me full circle.”

That experience of reconnecting with his spirituality through the congregational singing of inspirational hymns was the impetus for his new book, “Simple Gifts,” subtitled “Great Hymns: One Man’s Search for Grace” (Free Press, New York, 2006).

The book is partly a journey to discover the origins and meaning of such powerful hymns as the Shaker classic “Simple Gifts,” for which the book is named, and partly a memoir that follows Henderson’s bumpy trajectory from Philadelphia choir boy with perfect church attendance to 65-year-old cancer survivor, small press publisher, three-season resident of Maine and year-round philosopher.

“Hymns move me incredibly, and I had to understand why,” Henderson said in a phone interview from his East Hampton, N.Y., home. “The classic hymns go to a source in us beyond our control. Why?”

Henderson is a familiar figure in the Sedgwick area, where his building of a homely, three-story tower near his Christy Hill Road cabin led to the 2000 book, “Tower: Faith, Vertigo, and Amateur Construction,” a description of the whimsical project and how it helped him weather a storm of life crises. In the summer, he also is proprietor of “the world’s smallest bookstore,” a 12-by-14-foot cubbyhole perched at the rear of Sedgwick Antiques on Route 172.

Many of the offerings in the little bookstore are from his own Pushcart Press, which he founded in 1972 after working as an editor at Doubleday. The small, independent press is known for its Pushcart Prize series, an annual anthology of fiction, essays and poetry from small presses and literary magazines. Henderson and his wife, Genie, regularly share tips on reading, writing and getting published as contributors of a “Radio Pushcart” segment to a monthly show on WERU-FM, the nonprofit community radio station based in East Orland.

In “Simple Gifts,” the author continues the unflinching confessional tone of his earlier memoirs, “Tower,” “Her Father” and “His Son,” sharing probably more than the reader wants to know about his hopes and fears, his panic attacks, his past heavy drinking and self-destructive lifestyle, his father’s rigid Christianity, his marital ups and downs, and his outsider’s view of life in Maine as heaven on earth.

But Henderson’s genuine fascination with hymns – and his “search for grace” – will resonate with many baby boomers who rebelled big-time against the church and now find themselves in middle age longing for inner peace as they look in the mirror and see their parents.

The hymns he chose to spotlight fall into three categories, “Songs of Simplicity,” “Songs of Wonder” and “Songs of Love,” and he holds a special reverence for what he calls “world hymns.” Henderson defines them as hymns “that are like hugs, they appeal to all, beyond narrow theology. You don’t have to be brought up in the church to love and be profoundly moved by these hymns.”

In the book, he writes, “Our hymns carry all of us to those ‘Thin Places’ described by the Irish, elevated states of consciousness where almost all barriers between mortals and gods vanish.”

Henderson offers a capsule history of sacred singing, including Martin Luther’s insistence that the entire congregation participate in music, not just priests and ministers. We learn of John Wesley’s many 18th century compositions – including “Christ The Lord is Risen Today” and “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” – and “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name,” the “number one Protestant hymn of all time,” written in 1779 by a young English minister, Edward Perronet. The book introduces us to the blind Frances “Fanny” Crosby, who composed more than 8,000 hymns by the time of her death in 1915.

Among the most transcendent of the world hymns is “Simple Gifts” itself: “Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free ….”

Henderson tells the story of this Shaker “quick dance” whose 72 words were said to have been received as a gift from the spirit world. He writes about Ann Lee, the charismatic founder of the popular Shaker movement, about the Shaker philosophy of childlike simplicity of spirit and everyday living, about the sole remaining Shaker colony at Sabbathday Lake in Maine.

“If I have any ideas about God worth sharing, it’s that God is simple and plain, and we are the complicated sinners and morons,” Henderson said. “If we just shut up and be silent, God comes to us.”

Although he doubts he “ever would have made a good Shaker,” Henderson is a professed technophobe, writing his manuscripts in longhand and typing them on an Olivetti manual typewriter, and using no power tools in his construction projects. In 1996, Pushcart Press published “Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club: Pulling the Plug on the Electronic Revolution,” a compilation of letters, essays and testimonials from such authors as Russell Baker and Doris Grumbach about the soul-sapping evils of modern electronic “conveniences.”

The “Songs of Wonder” category includes “Amazing Grace” – “I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see” – written to a tune of unknown origin in 1772 by British slave-trafficker John Newton, whose transformation during a storm at sea into “a healer and lover of all people” is related in the book.

“From the stone edifices of the wealthy to the wooden worship boxes of the poor, to people of all ages, races, and nations, this hymn about the wonder of grace has inspired and encouraged,” Henderson writes. “It is a hymn of universal hope, a narrative of confidence that somehow through grace we will all make it ‘home.'”

In “Songs of Love,” Henderson introduces us to the relatively unknown “Make Me A Channel of Your Peace” – “Grant that I may never seek, So much to be consoled as to console; To be understood as to understand; To be loved as to love with all my soul.”

The lovely words, attributed to St. Francis, convey the message “losing is finding,” and they strike a powerful chord in Henderson. “In relying on stuff and self as the center of the world, you grasp only at death,” he writes. “In each other we discover images of God. … In honoring each other, we glimpse heaven right now.”

Many other classic hymns are described, analyzed and celebrated in “Simple Gifts,” including “He Lives!” “Christ Arose,” “Be Thou My Vision,” “How Great Thou Art,” “Just As I Am Without One Plea,” “There is a Balm in Gilead,” “Abide With Me,” “Precious Lord Take My Hand,” and “In the Garden,” which Henderson calls “the most sensual hymn in the hymnal.” He also has praise for a “contemporary secular hymn,” John Lennon’s immensely popular “Imagine.”

He worries that the old hymns will be forgotten when the older generation is gone. “Religion is a big money deal these days in this country. There are all these pop hymns that have no substance. There’s a whole lot of spin,” Henderson said. “I hope that people, especially kids, know about these great old hymns and how they can be life-altering, certainly life-affirming.”

Henderson was diagnosed with breast cancer during the writing of this book and underwent a successful radical mastectomy, an experience he describes with typical candor as “one of the great spiritual moments of my life. I’m doing OK. We got it early, but it was very unnerving,” he said.

“This book helped me focus on what was important in my life. I realized that I had to live this book, like the Shakers. I wrote it, so I had to walk the walk.”