When my kids learned the popular story behind “Ring around the Rosy,” they were mortified. According to some folklorists, it’s actually about the Plague! But, that’s just part of childhood: having your everyday life soundtracked with catchy songs about weighty things you don’t understand. If you grew up in church, some of them had titles like “Father Abraham,” and “Who Built the Ark?” These deceptively simple tunes have lain dormant in your subconscious for decades, until out of the blue one day some sick pastor writes an email mentioning them. Then you spend the rest of the day catching yourself compulsively humming the tune, desperately trying to replace it with something else, (anything else!).
One of those for me was “Deep and Wide.” To my knowledge it only has a single line: “Deep and wide, deep and wide, there’s a fountain flowing deep and wide.” The gimmick is that the tune repeats, faster and faster, as each word gets replaced with silly onomatopoetic sounds, until all the participants collapse giggling at the noisy nonsense of it all. It never once occurred to me that this was a song of profound theological significance. It just felt like play.
Yet, the Bible is a picture book, and with a special preference for children. One of its central pop-up images is a river that starts with a trickle on a mountain and flows down to drench the earth. The Spirit winds this image through Scripture as a way of saturating our imaginations with a core truth about how we’re made. There’s not a desire we’ve ever had that doesn’t find its refreshing satisfaction in the waters that come from that mountain. Those who drink from it will thirst no more. And perhaps the thing we need to remember most is, the river is deep before it’s wide.