GODSTUFF:

WHAT’S SO AMAZING ABOUT GRACE?

“Amazing Grace” may be the most recorded song of all time.

Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Mahalia Jackson, The Byrds, Jose Carreras, Willie Nelson and Ani DiFranco. Billy Ray Cyrus, Joan Baez, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the U.S. Air Force Reserve Pipe Band and David Hasselhoff. Ram Dass, Pat Boone, Jim Nabors and The Lemonheads. All have offered their interpretations of the famous hymn.

In 1971, Judy Collins had a Top 10 hit with her version of “Amazing Grace.”

A high school student from New Orleans named Tiffany Ameen sang the hymn three times at George W. Bush’s inauguration, and Red Cross workers sang it at the site of the United Flight 93 crash Sept. 11, 2001, according to Steve Turner in his 2002 book Amazing Grace: The Story of America’s Most Beloved Song.

And during a U2 show in Portland, Ore., Bono sang an acapella version of “Amazing Grace” in honor of Joey Ramone the day the iconoclastic lead singer of The Ramones died in 2001.

“Amazing Grace” has been the musical salvo in times of great joy and unfathomable sorrow, here and around the world. Whether it’s a single voice, a mass choir, bagpipes or a jazz combo playing its tune or repeating its lyrics, “Amazing Grace” holds a universal appeal.

According to various sources, the 19th-century Protestant hymn has been recorded more than 1,100 times. There are 746 versions of “Amazing Grace” available on iTunes, and a search of Amazon.com’s music section turned up hits on 478 albums.

So, to borrow the words of the great contemporary Christian apologist Philip Yancey, What’s so amazing about “Amazing Grace”?

A new feature film that opened across the country last week answers the question by telling, in part, the story of the man who wrote the words of the hymn some time between 1760 and 1770.

His name was John Newton and before he was rector of London’s St. Mary Woolnoth Church, he was the captain of a slave ship.

When we first meet him in the film “Amazing Grace,” Newton (played by Albert Finney in a performance so masterful and moving, I’d be surprised if this time next year the 72-year-old actor weren’t trying to figure out where to put his shiny new gold statuette), is swabbing the floor of his church barefoot and wearing what looks like a hair shirt.

“Twenty-thousand slaves live with me in this little church — there’s still blood on my hands,” Newton tells William Wilberforce, the English abolitionist, in the film, which is largely a retelling of Wilberforce’s 20-year fight to eradicate slavery throughout the British Empire.

Newton, who experienced a dramatic conversion during a violent storm on his slave ship and, eventually, left the slave trade for seminary, is a man tormented by his sins even though he believes he’s been forgiven by a loving God.

Toward the end of the film, when Newton is feeble and going blind, he tells Wilberforce: “Although my memory is fading, I remember two things: I am a great sinner and Christ is a great savior.

“I wish I could remember all their names, my 20,000 ghosts. They all had names, beautiful African names. We called them with just grunts. Noises. We were apes. They were humans.”

This is the man who penned the words “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. . . . I once was blind, but now I see.”

Those familiar lyrics held an entirely different meaning and weight when I understood who wrote them.

Newton was not a pious man. Nor was he a saint, by any stretch of the imagination. I can think of few things more repugnant than being a master in the slave trade, a purveyor of human flesh in the most heinous of ways.

It’s hardly a surprise that, while he preached and believed in grace, according to the way his story is portrayed in the film, it took him nearly his entire life to accept it for himself. Newton struggled to believe that he was forgiven for his sins and that God, as he doubtlessly taught his flock on more than one occasion, removes our sins from us “as far as the east is from the west.”

Grace cannot be earned.

It is a gift, and not one that you receive when you purchase something, sign on the dotted line, or win the race.

I believe it was Yancey who once described grace this way: Justice is getting what you deserve; mercy is not getting what you deserve; and grace is getting what you absolutely don’t deserve.

It’s a concept that makes no sense to the human imagination. And even for the man who immortalized the idea of the amazement of grace in one of the world’s best-known songs, it almost was impossible to really, truly believe.

And yet . . .

Grace doesn’t depend on us believing in it or not to exist, to be real, to flood our lives, buoy our spirits or change the world.

And that is amazing.