The Quiet of the Water

Music by Ron Klusmeier
Words by Walter Farquharson
Tune Name: CORKUM

Lyrics as Poetry

The quiet of the water,
the awesomeness of sky,
call to my inner being:
I wonder “Who am I?”

Life’s given by the good earth,
renewed by falling rain.
There’s beauty in all laughter,
and tenderness in pain.

The world around speaks clearly
of God who loves us still.
There’s healing in creation;
our emptiness is filled.


Words by
Walter FarquharsonCopyright © 1974 by Walter Farquharson
Administered by Hope Publishing Company
Carol Stream, Illinois • USA

Comments About Song

BY WALTER FARQUHARSON

This is really a very simple reflection or personal meditation. Written in 1974, it probably has roots in my early childhood.

I grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan, prairie land, part of the Great Plains of North America. People speak and write of the sweep of the prairies, the vastness, the infinite horizon.

The sky is the great reality – watched and studied by true prairie people as it is by people of the seas. Sunrises and sunsets can be spectacular, long-lasting, ever-changing. Thunderstorms and northern lights can provide spectacular shows of light and sound.

Winter stars have a pristine silencing brightness. Infinite. Boundary-less. A surrounding serenity. Humbling and exhilarating in the same breath.

To enter the quiet , the place where babble and barrage have no power to demean or confuse, is to find a home in the healing creativity of God who Is. Peculiarly, it is a place of being filled. Of being graced, where neither emptiness nor meaninglessness can lay claim upon us.

I learned much of the quiet from my Scottish grandmother with whom I lived for some significant years of being child. Winter evenings she would sit studying the fire burning in an open-faced heater. “Wheesht Laddie,” she would say, “it is the thin hour of the evening.”

I believe that wondering is as basic and natural to our being as taking a first breath, as suckling and searching out nourishment. In later life we may ask, “What am I?” but the prior question is “Who am I?” Who am I? Why am I? What are my origins? What is my place? What is my destiny?

Did the ancient story of creation, the breathing into clay the breath of life, speak of this reality? The question “Who am I?” is perhaps just the response to God’s “You are.”

                                                  Audio Sample for "The Quiet of the Water"

One verse
played on piano

Scripture References

  • Genesis 2:4b-7
  • Exodus 3:1-12
  • Job 38
  • Job 38:1-7
  • Job 38:31-33
  • Job 39
  • Psalm 8:1,3-5
  • Psalm 19:1-4

Season, Theme
or Subject

  • Creation∶ care of
  • Creation∶ gift of
  • Earth, Earth Day
  • Ecology
  • Environment (care of)
  • Faith
  • God∶ nature of
  • Grace
  • Heal, Healing
  • Laughter
  • Life∶ living life
  • Love∶ God's
  • Nature
  • Pain
  • Renewal
  • Trust
  • Water∶ water in nature
  • Wholeness
  • World

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