Wade in the Water

While listening to a song by The Hanumen, the words wade in the water caught my attention. Something in their rhythm felt both mournful and alive, as if they carried a message about trust, surrender, and great courage. The phrase stayed with me, repeating quietly like a reminder to keep stepping into the deeper currents of life.

In my work as a therapist, I often sit with people who are learning to approach their own emotional depths. This is work I recognise, because the same waters move through all of us. Learning to meet them with steadiness and care is part of what allows something deeper to unfold.

Wade in the Water began as a song sung by enslaved African American people in the southern United States during the nineteenth century, before slavery was finally abolished following centuries of human suffering. During that time, music was one of the few things left within reach, and through song, people carried both pain and hope. These songs were not only prayers, they were also messages and acts of resistance, expressions of courage and communal faith. Drawing on stories from the Bible, the singers spoke of deliverance and trust, affirming again and again that the human spirit could not be chained. The refrain of Wade in the Water, God’s gonna trouble the water, spoke of divine movement, of something greater stirring even in the darkest places. The song also carried a secret message. Those escaping the plantations were told to walk through rivers so that the dogs sent to track human scent would lose the trail. The water became both a physical passage and a sacred symbol, a crossing that carried a sense of danger and deliverance, a current through which freedom and faith moved together.

Water appears again and again in the sacred stories of many traditions, often as the boundary between one life and another. In the Bible, it is both a force of destruction and renewal. The great flood cleansed the earth before creation began anew. The Israelites crossed the Red Sea to escape bondage and find freedom. In the New Testament, baptism marks the passage into a different kind of life. At the pool of Bethesda, healing comes when the water is stirred. In each story, water holds both uncertainty and promise, requiring faith to enter and courage to cross. It washes away what has been and opens the way toward what might be.

When I listen to Wade in the Water now, I hear those ancient meanings moving through time, survival, faith, and the courage to enter the unknown. The song carries a wisdom that belongs to all who have faced fear and stepped forward anyway. The same waters that once protected and transformed others still move through our lives today. They invite us to wade in, to trust that even when we cannot see the bottom, something larger holds us.

Perhaps this is what healing truly means, not escaping the flood but recognising that the flood itself is sacred. The current knows the way even when we do not. In the midst of our own trembling, we remember those who sang before us, and we too lift our voices. The song continues, ancient and new, wade in the water. May we have the courage to step in, the faith to be carried, and the grace to be delivered to the far shore of belonging.

Om Namo Hanumate. Jai Jai Hanuman.
Sanskrit for “I bow to Hanuman, praise be to Hanuman, embodiment of courage, faith, and devotion.”