It is difficult to imagine the grandeur and expansive love of God.  And yet “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy” attempts to aid us in our imagination.  The hymn tune, St. Helena by Calvin Hampton makes all of the difference.

All of the fantastic ministers of music that I've worked with tell me, “Whitney, St. Helena is not an easy tune to learn.”  One friend highlights to me how the hymn’s structure is different from what we’re accustomed to.  There are three different voices in the accompaniment which make it hard to lead from the organ bench.  But once you know the tune, the words are unforgettable.  This has been my experience. 

The introduction of the music shows us that the hymn has begun before we sing the words.  As with God’s work in the world, God moves first; we join in with our part.  The first beat of the stanza measure is a rest, so that we can inhale.  Like the waves hitting the sand, the tune ebbs and flows.  “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea; there’s a kindness in his justice, which is more than liberty.”

The poetry of this hymn reminds us that God is beyond the parameter of words; the constraints of even the most generous of definitions, an essential spiritual discovery for any devoted disciple.  It seems to me that the greatest challenge of a life of faith is allowing one’s vision of God to expand and change as God so leads.  I’m nervous that I might get God wrong.  As my exhaled concern is voiced, my inhale assures me that I probably am getting God wrong to some degree.  Who can conceive of the eternality of God?

At one particularly low point in my life, when I couldn’t make sense of God in the world, I was liberated by kindness through Douglas John Hall’s words in his book The Cross in Our Context: Jesus and the Suffering World: 

Imagine that we, ordinary human beings who are hardly able intelligently and faithfully to describe our own spouses, our own children, our own close friends, and who invariably in fact misrepresent them, weaving graven images around them — we are asked to comprehend and communicate knowledge of this person, whom in fact we find indispensable to our very existence and in whom we believe the very ultimate Truth of all existence is revealed– concealedly revealed, revealedly concealed!  Clearly, as Jesus said to his disciples upon the departure of the one who came to him by night asking for eternal life, ‘for mortals it is impossible’ (Mark 10:27). (1) 

Jesus, the Word made flesh, gives us something tangible to hold on to.  He is an example to follow in this journey of humanity.  And yet we, like the disciples who knew him, frequently misunderstand him in the limitations of our own understanding.

Thus, the metaphor of “like the wideness of the sea” moves beyond unfathomable breadth and depth to convey the meaning of infinity, eternality, and un-graspability…if that’s even a word.  Who can contain the ocean?  Or describe it sufficiently? We are a mystery unto ourselves, held within the mystery of God.

My ability to grow in understanding that I’m free to be confused, and that there is Good News to proclaim even while in the midst of suffering, began to grow in earnest during 2020.  As if in the ocean, life felt like swells of water and driving wind. The storm clouds began to gather over the ocean waters, heated by the unrelenting suffering brought on by COVID and violence.  After hearing each news story I tried to catch my breath.  But the next waves came more quickly and were bigger than I expected, threat after threat, death upon death upon death.  It was as if I was treading water fervently to try to keep my head above the next surprise, catching my breath just in case the wave crested over me.  In this Sea of Life which had delighted and fascinated me for so long, I now felt vulnerable and afraid.   I could see it would be impossible to survive.   I could feel how easily I could drown.  “Go deeper,” the water called.  “Go down where it’s quieter and you are held.  I will teach you how to breathe in the depths you thought would suffocate you.  I will teach you how to see in the darkness.”  I stopped treading water and I began to fall into my confusion and grief.  Could this be where mercy would be found?

“There is welcome for the sinner, and more graces for the good; there is mercy with the Savior; there is healing in his blood.”  

I went to my bookshelf in hopes that the spiritual teachers I found there could give me some guidance.  Jesus suffered on the cross.  “We preach Christ crucified” the Apostle Paul writes in his First Letter to the Corinthians, “a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:23-24)  As I read Hall’s book, I began to look for this suffering/death/resurrection pattern in our context.  Where did I find myself?  In my confusion and pain, I looked for saints who had gone this way before.  Hall writes, “As Bonhoeffer stated the matter with his usual clarity, in the sentence ‘God is love’ the emphasis is upon the first word.  Love as usually conceived, does not define God; God defines love.” (2)  Generally speaking, we have a lack of familiarity with God’s presence in all things, even the suffering. In white America’s version of Christianity, more often than not, God’s presence is looked for only in the completion: the answered prayer, the resolved conflict, the balanced budget.  Many are unpracticed, preacher and lay person alike, in discovering God in the journey of a difficult life.

The hymn gently guides us into the truth that God is present even in our sorrow and confusion.  

“There is no place where earth’s sorrows are more felt than up in heaven; there is no place where earth’s failings have such kindly judgment given….”  

Could I learn to breathe underwater?  That would solve all of my problems.  I could be released from fighting to stay atop of life, where the power of it all threatened to drown me.  Instead, I could rest in the boundaryless depth of the ocean, where I felt weightless and it was quiet.  The darkness would hold me rather than overcome me.  I would need no sense of direction, because God would be holding me on all sides.  This is what I wanted.  I wanted to be alive and held within God’s infiniteness.

“I once saw God’s mercy as patient, benevolent tolerance, a kind of grudging forgiveness, but now mercy has become for me God’s very self-understanding.  Mercy is a way to describe the mystery of forgiveness.  More than a description of something God does now and then, it is who God is,” Richard Rohr writes in his daily meditation. (3)  When suffering becomes too big to make any sense, (How did this happen?  Could it have been avoided?  Should I have done something differently?  If I had only…) the sense of life breaks apart and God reveals God’s self to us anew.  Yet this very occasion can make one wonder if who they knew God to be was a falsehood or illusion from the outset.  

“There is plentiful redemption in the blood which has been shed; there is joy for all the members in the sorrows of the head.”

We need forgiveness for strutting through life in confidence that we know who God is, clinging to our definitions more than clinging to the One who is a mystery.  It is impossible for us to fully know and thus fully describe who God is.  Paradoxically, the consolation is in our confusion.  Christian mystics can teach us that God is not bound by our ability to understand.  As James Finley has taught in “Turning to the Mystics”: “like Merton says, ‘To understand spiritually is to know you’re infinitely understood.’ And you don’t need to understand yourself, but God does infinitely understand you…”. (4) This was the Good News that I needed in 2020 when everything was confusing, including God.  In another episode of the same podcast, Finley says, “And another big thing…, which is the cross, is that when love touches suffering, the suffering turns love into mercy. And God’s oceanic mercy on us in our brokenness is infinitely more real than our brokenness, no matter how broken we might be. And so we’re really trying to melt into the infinite mercy of God, which is experiential salvation.” (5)

“For the love of God is broader than the measure of the mind; and the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind.”  

God’s love is impossible for me to comprehend.

Richard Rohr’s book Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps, reminds me of how much I rely on comprehension for direction. Rohr writes in his introduction,

We are all spiritually powerless, however, and not just those physically addicted to a substance, which is why I address this book to everyone.  Alcoholics just have their powerlessness visible for all to see.  The rest of us disguise it in different ways, and overcompensate for our more hidden and subtle addictions and attachments, especially our addiction to our way of thinking. (6) 

In my existential crisis, I wanted to lash out at God in my confusion and pain, yet I was too weary from my sorrow.  It is Love which understands our predicament; which holds us and sustains us.  And this is grace.  James Finley writes in his book The Healing Path: A Memoir and an Invitation, “These realizations would have left me in despair were it not for my heart knowledge, born of faith, that the darkness of this world has no refuge from the presence of God, which protects us from nothing, even as it inexplicably sustains us amid the trials and tribulations of this world.” (7)  We are buoyed and held, even in that which can overwhelm and drown us.  

I only recently came to learn that I’d grown up singing this hymn as a United Methodist (UM).  In the UM Hymnal (#121) the hymn tune is Wellesley and there is no middle stanza.  I then noticed that the lyrics of Hymn 469 (in the Episcopal Hymnal 1982) have “alt.” next to them.  Consider the contrast between the two final stanzas.

“If our love were but more simple, we should rest upon God’s word; and our lives would be illumined by the presence of our Lord.” (United Methodist Hymnal)

“If our love were but more faithful, we should take him at his word.  And our lives would be thanksgiving for the goodness of the Lord.” (The Hymnal 1982, according to the use of the Episcopal Church, alternative lyrics)

L. Callid Keefe-Perry in Sense of the Possible: An Introduction to Theology and Imagination reminds us that “Because imagination is such a key part of the human experience, Christian people should think about what practices we encourage and participate in.”  Singing hymns requires participation. I’m singing this hymn in order to increase its familiarity.  And as my contribution to this hymn ends with “goodness of the Lord,” the music continues.  The music continues.

1. Douglas John Hall, The Cross in Our Context: Jesus and the Suffering World (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003) 119.

2. Hall,The Cross in Our Context: Jesus and the Suffering World,  78.

3. “Receiving God’s Mercy,” Daily Meditations, The Center for Action and Contemplation, September 13, 2024,  https://cac.org/daily-meditations/receiving-gods-mercy/

4. James Finley, host, Turning to the Mystics, Season 10, Episode 6,  “Dialogue 2: East Coker,” The Center for Action and Contemplation, October 7, 2024, p9 https://cac.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/TTTM_Transcript_1005_TSE_Dialogue2.pdf 

5. Finley, “Dialogue 2: East Coker,” 9.

6. Richard Rohr, Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps (Cincinnati: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2011) xxvii.

7. James Finley, The Healing Path: A Memoir and an Invitation (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2023) 81.