Amazing Grace

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

Our Word of the Week, see, could lead us in any number of directions for hymns, but we’ve chosen for the Hymn of the Week one that everybody knows — but sometimes a thing becomes so familiar, we don’t really see it anymore, or we don’t attend to it. Robins are thrushes, and all the world over, the thrushes are the most brilliant singers, and yet how many people in North America have listened to the robins, and their recorder-like notes in sets of three or four, early in the morning or at sunset? Jupiter is now brilliant in the eastern sky at nightfall, but who will see it? Inattention is one thing; shutting your eyes is another; and sin can warp your sight so that you “see” what isn’t there at all. And here I will tell two stories on myself.
The first is that, being a Catholic and growing up amid the really awful new church music of the 70’s, I had never heard of “Amazing Grace” at all, till the name appeared in a poem by Elizabeth Bishop which I had to read for a modern poetry class I was taking as a senior at Princeton. The poet was walking along a New England beach, and she saw a seal in the water nearby, and she sang “Amazing Grace” to it. I don’t remember whether the seal clapped or joined in, seal-fashion. The second is that I know exactly what John Newton, the composer of the hymn, was talking about (check out a very similar hymn by his friend and collaborator, William Cowper). “I once was lost, but now am found,” Newton says, thinking of the Prodigal Son, and then, thinking about the man at the pool of Siloam, “was blind, but now I see.”

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Here’s something Newton says early on in his autobiography, actually a series of letters he wrote to the publisher. He’s looking back on the number of interconnected events that led him to where he is now, a preacher, a relentless fighter against the slave trade he had long taken part in, but mainly, a man dwelling in the warm light of God’s favor. It isn’t just that he didn’t see that his behavior in the days of his faithlessness was wrong. It’s that nobody can see with the providential eye of God, who sees past, present, and future in one unchanging and eternal instant: for time is just one of those things that God has created, along with this universe in which time exists. Says Newton:

“If we consider how wonderfully one thing has been connected with another, so that what we number now amongst our greatest advantages, perhaps, took their first rise from incidents which we thought hardly worth our notice; and that we have sometimes escaped the greatest dangers that threatened us, not by any wisdom or foresight of our own, but by the intervention of circumstances which we neither designed nor thought of — I say, when we compare and consider these things by the light afforded us in the Holy Scripture, we may collect indisputable proof, from the narrow circle of our own concerns, that the wise and good providence of God watches over his people from the earliest moment of their life, overrules and guards all their wanderings in a state of ignorance, leads them in a way they know not, till at length his providence and grace concur in those impressions, which bring them to a knowledge of Him and themselves.”

That might well be a gloss on the hymn itself, don’t you think? And I know what he’s talking about. There I was at Princeton, a dark place for the spirit, at sea, ignorant of any connection between faith and the intellectual life, when a combination of unplanned things coincided to lead me toward the harbor. One of those things was simple enough. I was a sophomore, and I wanted to take a Shakespeare class, ignoring the prerequisites. Two courses were available. I chose one at random. In that course, taught by Thomas Roche, I learned that Shakespeare was a profoundly Christian playwright; I was introduced to the medieval and Renaissance way of looking at the world and man in it; and I was encouraged to pick the book up and read it: in my case, Augustine’s Confessions. There I found a philosophy of time and memory, of form and matter and their relations to time, and of all these things as they relate to our lives, that would change my own life forever. Had I chosen the other course, I wouldn’t be here now. I shudder to think where I’d be. And I’d never have met my dear wife Debra, would never have had the family I have now, would not be writing these words.

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I guess it wouldn’t make for an adventure film, not like what happened to Newton, when on board a slave ship he idly picked up one of his captain’s books, a copy of The Imitation of Christ, and the thought came to him against his will: “What if these things are true?” And that very night, his ship was tossed in a violent storm, and Newton woke to find the cabin half full of water, and for two days and nights it looked as if all were going to the bottom of the sea; they even lashed themselves to the pumps lest they be washed away. “Lord, have mercy on us!” said Newton, only half aware of what he meant. It was the first prayer he had uttered in years.
“All is grace,” said Therese of Lisieux. To sing this song best, you should keep that one thing in mind.

Here is our Hymn of the Week sung in a very plain and beautifully simple arrangement by the Salisbury Cathedral Choir.

And here is a magnificent choral and organ arrangement by the Blackburn Cathedral Choir, with the full congregation singing.

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Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound) That saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found, Was blind, but now I see. 'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, And grace my fears relieved; How precious did that grace appear The hour I first believed! Through many dangers, toils, and snares, I have already come; 'Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far, And grace will lead me home. The Lord has promised good to me, His word my hope secures; He will my shield and portion be As long as life endures. Yes, when this flesh and heart shall fail, And mortal life shall cease; I shall possess, within the veil, A life of joy and peace. The earth shall soon dissolve like snow, The sun forbear to shine; But God, who called me here below, Will be forever mine. 

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