Eternal Father, Strong to Save

William Whiting (1860)

Our Word of the Week, harbor, naturally suggests the sea, and that brings to mind this mighty hymn about the sea, “Eternal Father, Strong to Save.” The first time we featured it on Word and Song, we were just getting started, and Hurricane Fiona was about to slam into us in Nova Scotia, so all I did was to post the hymn with the link below. She was a bit scary, Fiona was. I drove through a terrific rainstorm at night to batten down the hatches at our cottage, because we’d gotten word that just our small island was going to get hit with the brunt of it. There there was no electric power, everything was shut down, the rain pelted so bad I could hardly see the sides of the road.

The rest of the family were staying at the house of our dear friend Elizabeth, thirty miles away. We don’t often get the most powerful storms up there, because by then they’ve usually made landfall along the coast of the United States, and they’re also likely to have spent some of their force as they go north toward colder waters. But still, the people there, living so close to the sea, know it as a power, and that’s why they used to celebrate the onset of the deep sea fishing season by getting all the villages together to pray, as the priest came and offered a blessing on the ships.

Our Hymn of the Week was written in 1860, at a time when the power of the sail was just beginning to give way to steam, but still, the sea was not ever to be taken lightly. After all, the ship that could not be sunk, the Titanic, was going to sink to the bottom of the sea when an iceberg breached her hull and caused water to flow from one supposedly sealed-off compartment to another, and that happened in 1912, a half-century after William Whiting wrote our hymn. It’s been adopted as the unofficial hymn of the Royal Navy and the United States Naval Academy. But the power of the sea strikes the human heart as sublime. The Hebrews, who were not a seafaring people, looked upon those waters as a terrible chaos, so that when God creates, in the Book of Job, he does so by setting boundaries: “Here let your proud waves be stayed.” And that in fact is the theme of Whiting’s first stanza.

Then in the second stanza, we turn to the Sea of Galilee, that large freshwater lake in the north of Israel, actually the lowest freshwater lake in the world. It is prone to violent storms, and such a storm struck the little fishing boat when Jesus and some of the disciples were on the lake one night, and Jesus, as if all were as still and calm as the first morning in the Garden of Eden, was sleeping. But his friends woke him up, crying out that they were all going to die. And Jesus rebuked the wind and the waves, and they fell still; and if the disciples were in awe of the storm, they were struck with greater awe now. “Who is this,” they said, “whom even the wind and the waves obey?” Where do you go from here?

Whiting has invoked the Father, then the Son, and in the third stanza he invokes the Holy Spirit, that Spirit we hear of in the first words of Scripture: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth; and the earth was waste and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and the spirit of God was stirring upon the waters.” Augustine was in the mainstream of ancient interpretation when he said that “waters” was a poetic image for the ever-fluctuating chaos of matter without form, created by God, from which He would form the entirety of the physical universe.

I guess we’re all “at sea” sometimes, aren’t we? Just one stiff gale away from shipwreck, we feel, but whether we are battered by the waves or we sail calmly into a safe haven, whether it is our time this night, or we live for another day, we are in God’s hands, and not a sparrow falls to the earth without His will. “Why are you troubled, you of little faith?” said Jesus to his companions on the boat.

Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm doth bind the restless wave,
Who bidd'st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep:
O hear us when we cry to thee
For those in peril on the sea.

O Savior, whose almighty word
The winds and waves submissive heard,
Who walkedst on the foaming deep,
And calm amid its rage didst sleep:
O hear us when we cry to thee
For those in peril on the sea.

O sacred Spirit, who didst brood
Upon the chaos dark and rude,
Who bad'st its angry tumult cease,
And gavest light and life and peace:
O hear us when we cry to thee
For those in peril on the sea.

O Trinity of love and power,
Our brethren shield in danger's hour;
From rock and tempest, fire and foe,
Protect them wheresoe'er they go:
And ever let there rise to thee
Glad hymns of praise from land and sea.