A Hymn on the Sea of Loss

In the city of Chicago there lived a lawyer whose name would become bound forever to a hymn sung beside countless graves. His name was Horatio Spafford. He was a Presbyterian layman, a friend of the great preacher Dwight Moody, a man of standing and faith in a busy American city. And in the space of two short years, his life was cut down to the bone. First came the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which swept through the city and damaged much of what he owned. He was a man who had built something, and watched it burn. But the fire was only the beginning.

Two years later, his wife Anna and their four daughters boarded a ship called the Ville du Havre, bound for Europe. Horatio meant to follow soon after. Business held him back in Chicago for a few more days, so he sent his family ahead across the Atlantic. Picture them on the deck. Four girls. A mother. The wide grey ocean and the open sky.

In the dark of the night, far out at sea, the Ville du Havre was struck by another vessel. The wound was mortal. In a matter of minutes the great ship went down into the cold water. There was no time. Hundreds were lost. And among the lost were all four of the Spafford daughters.

Anna lived. She was pulled from the sea alone, without her children. And when she reached land, she sent word back across the ocean to her husband. The message has come down to us in a few terrible words, remembered as, Saved alone. Two words to carry the death of four children. Two words for a father to read with shaking hands.

So Horatio Spafford did the only thing a father could do. He boarded a ship and crossed the same ocean that had swallowed his daughters, to reach the wife who had survived what they had not. And as the story is remembered, the captain called him to the place where the Ville du Havre had gone down. Somewhere over those waters, near the grave of his children, Horatio Spafford took up a pen.

The words he wrote were not a denial of his grief. They were a confession spoken from inside it. When peace like a river attendeth my way, when sorrows like sea billows roll, whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul. He did not write that the sea had been kind. He did not write that the pain had passed. He wrote that the soul could be held even when the water was still dark.

That hymn has travelled further than its author ever could. It has been sung beside hospital beds and open graves, in churches and in homes, by people facing questions that have no answer this side of heaven. Generations have borrowed Horatio Spafford's words when their own words failed. For grief does not always need new language. Sometimes the church lends a sorrowing soul the words it cannot find, and holds hope nearby until faith can breathe again.

The daughters did not return. Anna would carry the weight of that night for the rest of her life. The waves never became kind. But Horatio Spafford had looked into the deepest water a man can know, and there he found that he was not alone in it. His hymn does not explain the wreck. It does not make the loss small. It bears witness that the God who feeds the sparrows was not absent from that ocean, that Christ had gone down deeper than the sea and risen up beyond the grave. The sorrow was real. And still the soul was held. That is the testimony Horatio Spafford left behind. Not that loss is light, but that it will not have the final word.