Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise
Immortal, invisible, God only wise,
In light inaccessible hid from our eyes,
Most blessèd, most glorious, the Ancient of Days,
Almighty, victorious, thy great Name we praise.
Unresting, unhasting, and silent as light,
Nor wanting, nor wasting, thou rulest in might;
Thy justice like mountains high soaring above
Thy clouds which are fountains of goodness and love.
To all life thou givest—to both great and small;
In all life thou livest, the true life of all;
We blossom and flourish as leaves on the tree,
And wither and perish—but naught changeth thee.
Great Father of glory, pure Father of light,
Thine angels adore thee, all veiling their sight;
All laud we would render: O help us to see
’Tis only the splendor of light hideth thee.
When a prayer is a poem, it often invites music. The adage that “those who sing once pray twice” reminds us of how music enhances both prayer and poetry. Any number of hymns might be included in these reflections on poets’ prayers. I think, for instance, of a few that take me directly into prayer every time I sing them: “Be Thou My Vision,” “Of the Father’s Love Begotten,” “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” Many hymns are musical settings of poems written as individual prayers, some on dire occasions, like “If Thou but Trusted God to Guide Thee” and “It Is Well with My Soul.” And of course the texts of many spirituals that come from the singing of African-American slaves are poems in which rhythm and repetition crescendo into confidence and proclamation.
It was said of Walter Chalmers Smith, a nineteenth-century Scottish Free Church pastor, that poetry was “the retreat of his nature from the burden of his labors.”* Like Hildegard’s, his poetry seems to have been integral to his prayer life, in which intimacy and awe reflected the great paradox that God the Creator, though “above all things,” also dwells “in all things,” animating the natural world, and dwelling more deeply within us than our own beating hearts. “Immortal, Invisible,” written in 1867, is only one of the many poems in the eleven volumes that Smith wrote during his active years of ministry between 1860 and 1893. It is his best known, having survived as a beloved and familiar hymn that has provided a beautiful reminder of the immensity and glory of the God who created, and whose Spirit infuses all things.
The first and last stanzas of this hymn focus on God’s transcendence, splendor, majesty, mystery, omnipotence—God as light, the Source and End of all energy, power, and love. These are large thoughts; they call us to open the contemplative reach of our imaginations with metaphors that allow some access to omnipotent, omniscient divinity, with special emphasis on light—ambient, pervasive, surrounding and suffusing, quietly, powerfully present, unseen because it is that by which we see.
I remember a sermon in which the pastor pointed out that there are only two “God is” statements in Scripture: God is love, and God is light. Light seems to have a special status, lifting it a little beyond metaphor and inviting us to recognize in what we know about light something about the nature of God—including the fact that only a small portion of its wavelengths are visible to the human eye. We are wrapped in light as we are wrapped in love; both are forms of energy that fuel life.
I think that my favorite phrase in the hymn is “Unresting, unhasting, and silent as light.” This lovely line, slowed by commas that invite us to linger over the slightly antique descriptors, helps me to relax into the truth that God is not the author of “noise and haste,” but of the slow emergence, of the unfolding, evolving of things, of a created order that brings forth its fruit in “due season,” and of the great quiet that is the source and origin of all utterance.
And of all life: “To all life thou givest, to both great and small.” I think of this line when I see small animals who have met their death in the wild or on the roads that crisscross their habitats, and when I see new shoots in the garden. That all life is a gift is a truth to return to with every new morning and every meal. But the next line adds a dimension to that very human understanding of what is given: “In all life thou livest, the true life of all.” God not only gives, but is the gift. In God we live and move and have our being. Jesus’s mysterious words in the farewell discourses of John, “Abide in me and I in you,” remind us that we participate in divine life, draw upon the life source with every breath, and cannot be separated from the One whose we are in life and in death.
The hymn ends with a petition I love for the way it brings me back to awareness of the God “whose presence is everywhere”: “O help us to see / ’Tis only the splendor of light hideth thee.” The paradox is both profound and playful: light reveals; darkness hides. But to consider that God is hidden in the light is to recognize what Einstein hinted at when he mused, “Subtle is the Lord.”
In our breath, in the folding of our proteins and the replication of our cells, in the great quiet that astronauts enter as they leave our noisy planet, in the music that shapes us (“and you are the music while the music lasts”) and echoes after the final note, in the light that wraps us by day and the darkness by night, God is here and now, present and incomprehensible, immanent and transcendent, intimate and unknowable, immortal, invisible. And this good news is new every morning.
