Let the sea resound!

A series inspired by sights in Kauai.
Beautiful and restless, mysterious and marvelous, the ocean never fails to fascinate. One of many in Kauai, this is “Anini Beach” on Kauai’s east coast. Each beach has its personality—some better for surfboards, body-surfing, swimming, or snorkeling. A few are tame enough for children. At this point in my life, I’m as likely to learn to surfboard as I am to drop out of a plane with a parachute. But I can sit on a beach and gaze a long time at waves breaking, thinking of the God who created this world with its massive bodies of water.

At times I recall hymns that mention oceans, like “Wide, Wide as the Ocean,” which I learned in Sunday school. Its author was C. Austin Miles (1868-1946), who gave up a career as a pharmacist to write hymns and help publish them. Some twenty may be still recognized by hymn-lovers, including “Dwelling in Beulah Land, “I Have a Friend,” “A New Name in Glory,” “Win Them One by One,” and the well-known “In the Garden” (it begins, “I come to the Garden Alone”).  “Wide, wide as the Ocean” begins:

Wide, wide as the ocean, high as the Heaven above;
Deep, deep as the deepest sea is my Savior’s love.
I, though so unworthy, still am a child of His care;
For His Word teaches me that His love reaches me everywhere.

Another well-known song referencing the ocean is “The Love of God,” by Frederick Lehman. He was a pastor in the Midwest, but financial problems led him to southern California where he worked in a citrus packing plant. One day in 1917, a song formed in his mind as he worked. During breaks, he sat on a wood crate and wrote down words. That evening at an old piano, he came up with a tune to the two verses he’d written. But hymns of his era always had three verses. Before long, he thought of lines he’d heard in a recent sermon. As he’d heard the story, they were found on the wall of an insane asylum by an unknown inmate. But it’s now known that a Jewish poet in Germany penned them in the 11^th century. Thus, the “borrowed” words that conclude Lehman’s hymn:

Could we with ink the ocean fill, and were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk on earth a quill, and every man a scribe by trade.
To write the love of God above, would drain the oceans dry,
Not could the scroll contain the whole tho stretched from sky to sky.
 

And we can’t improve on psalms:

Let the sea resound, and everything in it. (Psalm 96:11, 98:7)