The recessional for Sunday Mass at my parish this week was “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” popularly called the “Navy Hymn” (linked below). It was written by English Protestant William Whiting, although Catholics should find no issue with its theology. It was initially adopted by the British Royal Navy, at a time when “Brittania rule[d] the seas!” I am guessing it might have been chosen due to the coincidence with Memorial Day, which, along the East Coast, is also a long weekend for port calls.

I’ve always liked the hymn because of its dignified music but, today, I was also struck by the lyrics. Rooted in Scripture (especially Psalm 107:23-33), the four original verses are Trinitarian: the first three are directed to particular Persons of the Most Holy Trinity, the last to the Trinity itself.

Not long ago I wrote an essay (here) about how the Jewish and Christian understanding of God fundamentally differed from the “gods” of Greco-Roman mythology. Among the differences, two stand out. (1) God is separate from and above His creation. (2) God’s relationship to mankind is based on morality.

The deities of the Greco-Roman pantheon compete for niche competencies in particular domains: sea, earth, underworld, beauty, war. When push comes to shove, none is as much master of his domain as something of a “patron saint” to whom intercession might be directed. But whatever “mastery” he has over his “dominion” is checked by other dominions of other masters.

Even more important is the revolution in the understanding of “God” that Judaism and Christianity have given the world: God’s relationship to humanity is built on morality. God relates to man on moral terms. That means God is good and the source of all that is good. Contrast that to the hound dog morality of the gods — particularly the male gods — of Olympus. And God deals with man on moral terms. One example is the primordial Flood. Although many cultures, including many Mideastern cultures, have original flood stories akin to Noah, there is one thing distinctive about Noah that stands in sharp contrast to all the others, e.g., the Epic of Gilgamesh. It is that God unleashes the flood because “the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Gen 6:5). The flood is a punishment for wrongdoing, not — as in Gilgamesh — some sadistic torture a deity decided to unleash on man until he is almost destroyed himself when he couldn’t find the turnoff valve.

No, the true God is not a jealous Neptune. He is not the keeper of the Kraken (a Norse mythological sea monster that recent Greek mythological movies have turned into a Neptune surrogate).

In “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” God is master of the sea. The unthinking sea may put man “in peril on the waves” but the singer appeals to God for rescue. Because God controls the sea. His “arm doth bind the restless wave.” His voice “bids the mighty ocean deep//its own appointed limits keep.” Because Jesus’ Word “the winds and waves submissive heard,” and He treated the waters as just another floor. Because the Spirit moved above the waters and brought order out of the primordial chaos that Genesis envisioned as aqueous.

In all these instances, it is not God pitted against nature but God ruling nature: what He commands, is. And it is not God being pleaded with for some special favor, because God’s solicitude for humanity comes not from any merit of ours but from His Love. And that is why the singer can ask with confidence: “Hear us when we cry to Thee!”

But, you say, popular culture suggests that the Greco-Roman gods demanded human worship and that they disappeared when men “outgrew” that kind of thinking. Doesn’t the God of Christians and Jews demand the same thing? No.

Yes, God expects our worship but not because it is some extrinsic demand He imposes because He is bigger and stronger than us and can retaliate in its absence. No, our worship of God is also a moral question. St. Thomas Aquinas makes clear that the virtue of religion — of worship of God — is part of the cardinal virtue of justice. Now justice is about ensuring another receives “his due,” i.e., what he is entitled to. There is no one to whom humanity has any greater debt than the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who created us from nothing out of love, sustains us in existence, recognizes our self-inflicted injury of sin, and came Himself to save and heal us. Nothing like that can be said of the Greco-Roman deities (who themselves are not creators of all that is). So, when God asks our worship, He seeks nothing more than what the justice of minimum gratitude presupposes.

That is why “Eternal Father” ends with a full-throated salvo of thanksgiving and praise to God who “your children shield in every hour//from rock and tempest, fire and foe” (i.e., animate and inanimate threats on land and sea). That is why “Thus, evermore shall rise to Thee//Glad hymns of praise from land and sea” (emphasis added) — because there is no place to hide from God (Ps 139:7-12).

As we honor this Memorial Day servicemen and women who guard us and have given their lives for our protection, let us commend them to Him who is our ultimate Guardian and Protector, who shields us from perils on land and sea. Let us also raise a hymn of thanksgiving, in justice, to the God whose care for us is gift.

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May their souls and the souls of all the faithful departed rest in peace. Amen.

[Link to “Eternal Father, Strong to Save” is here.]