Thought for the Week: Words and meanings
Gordon Steel explores the comfort and tension that words and music can provoke
There are words and music from our (largely Christian) heritage that are deeply ingrained in our souls. They are part of us and we hold them as part of our common legacy. But the march of human thought and our own understanding of ‘faith’ (in its most general sense) lead to inescapable tensions with words that we know from childhood. No doubt these tensions are felt more strongly by some of us than others.
I was reminded of this one Sunday morning when I heard, from another part of the house, sounds of the morning service on BBC Radio 4 and, in particular, ‘Eternal Father strong to save…’ – sung by a congregation in the Western Isles.
Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who biddest the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea!
It was deeply moving – calling back memories of disasters at sea and the sufferings of fishing communities. But the words, which I know by heart, speak of a God ‘Whose arm hath bound the restless wave…’
The trouble is that we have long since left behind the notion of a God who controls the waves. And why did he allow these drownings anyway?
So we are torn. Torn between our compassion for suffering sailors and our need to speak the truth in words that we can use with integrity. We may still pray ‘For those in peril on the sea…’ but not in the hope or expectation that our prayers will still the waves.
There are many other relics of our past that also pull apart our minds and our spirits. Mendelssohn’s Elijah is full of them: ‘O rest in the Lord, wait patiently for him, and he will give thee thy heart’s desires…’; ‘He that shall endure to the end, will be saved…’; ‘He watching over Israel slumbers not nor sleeps…’
Some people dismiss such expressions as irrational, as no doubt will the abrasive Richard Dawkins and other radical atheists. Quakers are not with them for we know that the language of the spirit is poetry and metaphor. We do not expect poetry to make rational sense but it is best if it does not appear to take us back to a theology that is no longer acceptable.
I hope and believe that there are some Quakers who are willing just to live with the tension – experiencing sadness at the loss of spiritually enhancing emotions that are couched in outdated language and have to be left behind. And the prayers, spoken or unspoken, that we use can be: thankfulness for the courage of the sailors and for the food that they bring to us, compassion for their families who have lost loved ones at sea, and an acceptance that this world presents unavoidable dangers to so many people who serve us through their daily work.
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