By Richard S. DenUyl, Jr.
Sentinel Columnist
Every summer my wife and I, our daughter, Sophie, and our little dog, Daisy, spend three weeks sailing our boat up and down the New England Coast.
We purchased our sailboat ten years ago. It took us several weeks to decide on a name for her. That was finally solved one morning after church. The closing hymn that Sunday was “Amazing Grace.” As we were walking to the car, Sophie, then age 11, looked up at me and said, “Hey Dad, what about Grace?”
“Why Grace?” I answered. At which point Sophie sang a line from the old hymn: “And Grace will lead me home.”
The hymn “Amazing Grace” was written by John Newton. He was a slave trader, and rumored to be profane in the worst possible ways. In March 1748 his sailboat, the Greyhound, encountered a violent storm. The sea was so rough it swept overboard a crewmember who was standing where Newton had been moments before. After hours of the crew emptying water from the ship, Newton and another man tied themselves to the ship’s pump to keep from being washed overboard. At which point Newton turned to his mate and said, “If this will not do, then Lord have mercy upon us!”
Newton rested briefly before returning to the deck and taking the helm for the next 11 hours. Newton and his boat barley survived the storm, which, a few years later, became the inspiration for his hymn “Amazing Grace.”
I thought of John Newton two years ago. We were sailing Grace from Nantucket to our new home in Greenwich when we ran into a sudden squall. The waves were so large that the ocean poured over the dodger, soaking us and Daisy, who, in the end, was green around the gills. For Daisy’s sake and ours we decided to change course. Two hours later we ended up at Cuttyhunk harbor instead of Newport. While we were ashore we struck up a conversation with a couple who had just come through the same storm. We laughed out loud when the man announced that he would be changing the name of his boat to “Bad Idea.” That evening, tied safely to a mooring, we enjoyed some of the best food and company we had all summer.
The whole experience was a reminder that the word for “wind” and “spirit” are one and the same in the Biblical Hebrew. Hence the key to happiness is unfurling the sails of our souls and having the faith to let the Spirit take us to where God wants us to be in our lives. It is paying attention to those telltale signs in our life, those times when we are beating into the wind and the waves, when God is calling us to fall off a few degrees to starboard or port and land somewhere we never expected, some new and wonderful place we never planned on.
Joseph Campbell put it beautifully. “We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so we can experience the life that is waiting for us.”
Grace turned 32 this year. She is a good old boat that has led us home through all kinds of crazy, unpredictable weather. It occurs to me that the same thing is true when we belong to a good old church. Sooner or later we all run into those dead calms and sudden storms in our spiritual life and, just like the man at Cuttyhunk, we are tempted to call it quits—to emotionally and spiritually abandoned ship, to conclude that organized religion is a “bad idea.”
And yet it keeps happening: the wind, the Spirit, keeps leading us back home to the essence of what makes church so unique, those moments where somewhere in the middle of a handshake or hymn, a prayer or confession or a cup of coffee, the sails of our souls are suddenly filled, and we experience Amazing Grace.
The Rev. Richard S. DenUyl is senior pastor of The First Congregational Church in Old Greenwich.
