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.
This hymn- one of my favourites- was sung at Enger's wedding and its message is why the song is popular at both Christian weddings and funerals. The lyrics were composed by Horatio Spafford (1828-1888) who was a devout Christian and very successful businessman. A prominent lawyer in Chicago, he had invested in numerous properties around the city and was quite wealthy. In addition, he had a loving wife and five children- four daughters and a son, a truly blessed existence. But then things went terribly wrong. His four year old son died suddenly of scarlet fever and the following year the Great Chicago Fire occurred in which most of the real estate Spafford had invested in was burned. This was closely followed by the Panic of 1873, a financial crisis which caused an economic depression across Europe and North America (it was referred to as The Great Depression until the 1930's) and which depleted a lot of Spafford's remaining investments. Hoping to get his family away from the turmoil for a while, Spafford planned a family trip to Europe where he and his wife would help out for a while with Dwight L Moody's evangelical meetings. He booked passage for them all on the steamship Ville Du Havre but was himself delayed by business- zoning issues caused by the Great Fire. He sent his wife and daughters (aged between 11-2) on ahead, planning to rebook himself on a later ship and meet up with them in France. It was then that tragedy struck: mid-Atlantic the Ville Du Havre collided with another ship in the dark. It was sheared nearly in two and sunk within minutes, killing 226 people. Mrs. Spafford was found unconscious, floating in some wreckage, but all four of their daughters were gone. Horatio Spafford got a telegram from his wife which read, heartbreakingly, "Saved alone..."
Grief stricken, Spafford boarded a ship to rush to his wife's side. During the trip overseas, the captain called Spafford to the bridge and, showing him the charts, told him they were passing over the exact spot where the Ville Du Havre had gone down. After gazing out over the water, Horatio Spafford returned to his cabin and penned the words of It Is Well With My Soul. The message of this hymn is deceptively simple, heartfelt, and borne out in Spafford's life: whatever our lot in life, through the good times and bad, the beautiful and terrible, God is with us. We may be bowed down with grief, but our souls shall not be broken. In the words of the Apostle Paul:
"Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me. " -Philippians 4:11-13 KJV
Jeremiah Land is portrayed as something of a Christian prophet or mystic who throughout the book, on occasion performs miracles, documented by his younger son Reuben who is narrating. In my summary of the novel I don't actually mention many of these because frankly, they don't very often affect the story. There are exceptions: at one point they are trying to avoid police checkpoints with the Airstream and they drive for a very long time on an empty tank because they can't stop at gas stations. And there's one near the end of the book which affects the outcome so I won't spoil it. This is just my opinion of course, but I would have been just fine if the miraculous stuff had been left out; the plot could have played out in pretty much the same way without them and I would have frankly preferred to have it without the distraction of the seemingly miraculous. Don't get me wrong, it's refreshing to have a Christian family at the center of a popular novel in which they are not portrayed as the bad guys, or treated condescendingly as backwards, back woods yokels. I just was more interested in seeing Christians struggle with the issues involved according to their principles without the narrative being occasionally muddied with some sort of miraculous occurrence which isn't actually needed to further the story. But maybe that's just my Independent Baptist suspicion of latter day miracles. I'm not saying that God can't still perform them- obviously He can if He so chooses- just that seemingly everyone who claims to be a conduit of them these days is a phony. As I said though, this is subjective and others may certainly disagree.
What really interests me about Peace Like A River has little to do with the miraculous. Rather, it's the moral conundrums that the characters face and wrestle with in their own ways. I'll discuss these in part two.