This article first appeared in the June 2006 issue
of The American Spectator. Click here to
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“All of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt
in our blood that exists in the ocean and therefore we have salt in
our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. So
when we go back to the sea — whether it is to sail or to watch it
— we are going back from whence we came.
THERE IS A TOUCH OF MYSTICISM about these words which fell from
the lips of that most seafaring of U.S. presidents, John F.
Kennedy. According to his biographer, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., JFK
had gleaned the biological facts about the percentages of salt in
blood and seawater from random reading. With no help from any of
his speechwriters he “converted them into poetry,” claimed
Schlesinger, delivering them during an impromptu address he gave in
Newport, Rhode Island, on the eve of the America’s Cup races of
1962.
On the whole JFK was not one to romanticize the sea. As a Navy
man and yachtsman he had perhaps seen too much of it in all its
moods. A gushing reporter once asked him: “How did you become a war
hero, Mr. President?” “It was involuntary — they sank my boat,”
came the laconic reply. Somewhere in his nautical activities that
ranged from Cape Cod to the South Pacific, Kennedy may have gained
the instinctive understanding, shared by many, that close proximity
to the sea can bring about an experience of personal and spiritual
renewal.
I recently glimpsed something of this experience as a result of
spending two weeks on board a cruise liner that was conveying its
passengers between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans via the Panama
Canal. Mercifully the ship was large enough to allow plenty of
bolt-holes far removed from the relentless routines and razzmatazz
of contemporary cruising. So having located my equivalent of a
crow’s nest, from its seclusion I found it possible to become
thoughtfully engaged in the spirituality of the sea.
A good starting point for my theological travels was the Book of
Genesis (1:2), which declares that “in the beginning darkness
covered the face of the deep.” The Hebrew word for deep is
tehom, which some scholars say is an echo of Tiamat, the
evil dragon, slain by the good Marduk in the Babylonian creation
myth. After the slaying, Tiamat’s corpse was consigned to the
waves, thus making the sea a place of threat, the place where evil
dwells. Whether the linguistic connection is there or not, this
ancient legend, which somehow the people of the Old Testament took
on board and reinvented in the light of God’s continued revelation
to them, reverberates throughout the Old Testament. For God’s
authority over the sea became symbolic of the way the Israelites
talked not only of God’s power but also of His defeat of evil.
God’s prophets often reflected suspicion of occult oceanic
forces. “The wicked are like the tossing sea which cannot rest,”
declared Isaiah (57:20). Various Biblical monsters of the deep like
Rahab, Leviathan, and Jonah’s whale may be seen as different images
of the same primeval force that God’s power either vanquishes or
controls and ultimately bends to his own purposes.
In the New Testament the divine power of Jesus is clearly
exercised around the Sea of Galilee in episodes like the calling of
Peter from his fishing boat, the walking on the water, and the
calming of the storm. “What kind of man is this that even the winds
and the waves obey him?” asked the awed disciples. A 20th-century
American example that reflects some of the same awe and wonder may
be found in the reactions of the 20-year-old (and then Godless) Lt.
Charles Colson USMC. In June 1954 he was on board the USS
Mellette preparing to lead his platoon ashore in what was
expected to be an opposed landing on the beaches of
guerrilla-controlled Guatemala. Gazing up from the deck of his
warship at the luminous night sky of Central America, Colson was
suddenly stirred by the powerful religious impulses that were
eventually to convert him to a life of Christian service: “That
night,” he wrote two decades later in his best-selling memoir
Born Again, “I suddenly became as certain as I had ever
been about anything in my life that out there in that great starlit
beyond was God. I was convinced that He ruled over the universe,
that to Him there were no mysteries, that He somehow kept it all
miraculously in order. In my own fumbling way I prayed, knowing
that He was there.”
Reflections on prayer and spirituality are often encouraged by
the silent splendor of a shipboard environment. The majesty of the
clear night skies, the limitless daytime horizons, and the
magnificent raw power of the rolling billows are sights that dwarf
the highest city skyscrapers, the largest rural ranches, the
tallest terrestrial totem poles. Glimpsing God in the greatness of
his marine world is a far from uncommon experience. The psalmist
caught it when he wrote of “All those that go down to the sea in
ships and occupy their business in great waters. These men see the
works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep” (Psalm
107:23-24).
THINKING ABOUT THOSE WONDERS of the deep while sailing on it
sometimes made me feel uneasy. When I shared my unease with our
excellent cruise ship’s chaplain, the Rev. Nigel Collinson, he
responded with the thought: “Yes, there is something elemental,
disturbing, and menacing about the way the Bible talks about the
sea that corresponds to writers like Iris Murdoch, William Golding,
and Herman Melville.”
The chaplain’s literary allusions were timely because I was
pondering on the choice of a biographical subject for my next book.
One of the themes that ran through my previous biographies of
Richard Nixon and Charles Colson was the moral tension in their
lives. In their worst moments these tensions became struggles
between the forces of goodness and wickedness. Such struggles show
up sooner or later in almost every life. Perhaps there is an
analogy to be drawn here between the changes in our human hearts
and the changing moods of the sea. Both include, as JFK seemed to
be saying in his 1962 Newport speech, the power to renew and
restore.
With such thoughts in mind I ended up choosing John Newton
(1725-1807) as the subject of my next biography. His seafaring
career included being press-ganged into the Royal Navy; deserting
from it; getting flogged on the quarterdeck; and eventually
becoming captain of various slave ships. After committing many
crimes, blasphemies, and atrocities in the slave trade, he had a
powerful spiritual experience in 1748 when his ship came close to
being wrecked in the North Atlantic. It was no phony “foxhole
conversion,” because for the last five decades of his life the Rev.
John Newton was a powerful Christian leader. Although best known as
the author of many great hymns including “Amazing Grace,” he played
a key role as William Wilberforce’s friend and counselor in
securing the abolition of the slave trade. It makes a great life
story in which both the devilry and the spirituality of the sea
loom large in Newton’s moral struggles.
