Eternal Father, strong to save

THERE’S one hymn which has been inextricably linked to the seafaring tradition of our island nation for 150 years.

Eternal Father, strong to save was written by Anglican clergyman William Whiting (1825–1878) in 1860. He was the Master of Winchester College Choristers’ School, and wrote it for a student who was about to sail for America. Since then it’s become known and loved all over the English-speaking world. It speaks powerfully to Royal and Merchant Navy congregations, churches in fishing and cargo ports, and everywhere that folk make their living from the sea – beautiful, but dangerous and unpredictable.

The hymn has a Trinitarian structure and it’s soaked in biblical imagery. Each verse takes an aspect of the world of one of the Persons of the Godhead, and links it to the real experience of God’s people in this life. So the first addresses the Eternal Father, whose command ‘bound the restless wave’. It’s a reference to Job 38: 8-11, where God is reminding Job of his power over nature: he said to the sea, ‘Thus far you may come but no farther; here your surging waves must halt’.

The second is a reference to two stories of the power of Christ over the deep water. In Matthew 8:23-27 there is the story of Jesus stilling the storm on Lake Galilee – ‘He rebuked the wind and the sea, and there was a great calm’ – the waters ‘hushed their raging at thy word’. In John 6: 16-21 Jesus comes to the disciples across the water, walking on the ‘foaming deep’.

The third verse addresses the Spirit, and takes us back to Genesis 1:2, where the pre-Creation is imagined a vast waste of water, the ‘chaos dark and rude’ over which the Spirit brooded. The ‘angry tumult’ ceased at the word of God, who spoke and brought light and order through the Spirit’s creative power.

The Hebrews were not a seafaring race. In the Bible, the sea stands for what’s dangerous, chaotic and treacherous. It’s linked to pagan conceptions of their deities, and it’s a symbol of the darkness and disorder to which God is opposed. In Revelation 21:1, John’s vision of the new, perfect creation is that ‘there was no longer any sea’. But God is stronger even than this powerful evil; he limits it, Christ calms it, the Spirit tames it.

Whiting was a good biblical scholar and understood this well. So his hymn is not just for seafarers; it’s for all of us, because all of us are at sea, voyaging on life’s way, buffeted by storms and tempests and hoping for a safe landfall. The last verse sums this up perfectly: it’s a prayer to the ‘Trinity of love and power’ to protect us all ‘from rock and tempest, fire and foe’ – so in a variation to the refrain, ‘And evermore shall rise to Thee/ Glad hymns of praise from land and sea.’

The hymn has attracted other verses over the years, to reflect changing times. Mary Hamilton wrote verses beginning ‘Lord, guard and guide the men who fly/ Through the great spaces in the sky’ in 1915; the science fiction master Robert Heinlein wrote one in 1947 as part of his short story Ordeal in Space.

The hymn is sung to Melita, by JB Dykes. He named it after the island where St Paul was shipwrecked, now known as Malta.

The Revd Mark Woods.

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