In 1855, a famous man of letters, the Danish author and poet, Hans Christian Anderson wrote of the solace and comfort that faith provides even, or especially, amidst the worst of circumstance. His tale is short in length, but long in meaning. It is entitled In the Uttermost Parts of the Sea.
SOME large ships were sent up towards the North Pole, for the purpose of discovering the boundaries of land and sea, and of testing how far men could penetrate into those unknown regions.
A year and a day had elapsed. Amidst mist and ice had they, with great difficulty, steered farther and farther. The winter had now begun; the sun had set, one long night would continue during many, many weeks. One unbroken plain of ice spread around them; the ships were all fast moored to it. The snow lay about in heaps and had even shaped itself into cubiform houses, some as big as our barrows, some only just large enough for two or three men to find shelter within. Darkness they could not complain of, for the Northern Lights–Nature’s Fireworks–now red, now blue, flashed unceasingly, and the snow glistened so brightly.
At times when it was brightest came troops of natives, strange-looking figures, clad in hairy skins, and with sledges made out of hard fragments of ice. They brought skins to exchange, which the sailors were only too glad to use as warm carpets inside their snow houses, and as beds whereon they could rest under their snowy tents, while outside prevailed an intensity of cold such as we never experience during our severest winters. But the sailors remembered that at home it was still autumn, and they thought of the warm sunbeams and the leaves still clinging to the trees in varied glories of crimson and gold. Their watches told them it was evening and time for rest, and in one of the snow houses two sailors had already lain down to sleep. The youngest of these two had with him his best home treasure, the Bible that his grandmother had given him at parting. Every night it lay under his pillow. He had known its contents from childhood, and every day he read a portion; and often as he lay in his couch, he recalled to mind those holy words of comfort: “If I should take the wings of the morning, and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there should Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand hold me.”
These sublime words of faith were on his lips as he closed his eyes, when sleep came to him, and dreams with sleep–busy, swift-winged dreams, proving that though the body may be at rest, the soul must ever be awake. First he seemed to hear the melodies of songs dear to him in his home. A mild summer breeze seemed to breathe upon him, and a light shone upon his couch, as though the snowy dome above him had become transparent. He lifted his head and behold! The dazzling white light was not the white of a snow wall; it came from the large wings of an angel with eyes beaming with love. The angel’s form seemed spring from the pages of the Bible, as from the pitcher of a lily blossom. He extended his arms and lo! The narrow walls of the snow hut sank back like a mist melting before the daylight. Once again the green meadows and autumn-tinted woods of the sailor’s home lay around him, bathed in quiet sunshine. The stork’s nest was empty, but the apples still clung to the wild apple tree. The blackbird whistled in the little green cage that hung in the lowly window of his childhood’s home. The blackbird whistled the tune he had taught him, and the old grandmother wound chickweed about the bars of the cage, as her grandson had been wont to do. The smith’s pretty young daughter stood drawing water from the well, and as she nodded to the grandmother, the latter beckoned to her, and held up a letter to show her, a letter that had come that morning from the cold northern lands, from the North Pole itself, where the old woman’s grandson now was–safe under God’s protecting hand. And the two women, old and young, laughed and wept by turns–and he the while, the young sailor whose body was sleeping amid ice and snow, his spirit roaming in the world of dreams, under the angel’s wings, saw and heard it all, and laughed and wept with them. And from the letter these words were read aloud, “Even in the uttermost parts of the sea, His right hand shall hold me fast”; and a sweet solemn music was wafted round him, and the angel drooped his wings. Like a soft protecting veil they fell closer over the sleeper.
The dream was ended; all was darkness in the little snow hut, but the Bible lay under the sailor’s head, faith and hope abode in his heart. God was with him, and his home was with him, “even in the uttermost parts of the sea.”
When an agnostic once observed President Abraham Lincoln reading the Bible and scorned him for it, his response was “Take all that you can of this book upon reason, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier man.”
For most of my adult life I have thought of myself as a fairly practical and rational thinker. With that in mind, I confess that on more than a few occasions I have engaged in debates with myself about this “faith” that I profess, believe and frequently write about. In assuaging such doubt, I have looked to the myriad of great minds that embraced both the belief that the possession of faith is integral to attaining fulfillment and that it inevitably leads one to embrace as both real and necessary the existence of a supreme, lordly and loving God–Copernicus, Sir Francis Bacon, Galileo, Sir Isaac Newton, Einstein, Jefferson, Washington, Gandhi, and Muhammad to name just a few.
The author, C. S. Lewis is another of my admired scholarly sources and he produced a myriad of written statements regarding faith. One that I am particularly fond of. Lewis wrote:
“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of – throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”
“Now, faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” (Hebrews 11:1, NIV)
Have an Awe-full Weekend!
William J. “Bill” Bacqué