The sea awoke at midnight from its sleep,
And round the pebbly beaches far and wide
I heard the first wave of the rising tide
Rush onward with uninterrupted sweep;
A voice out of the silence of the deep,
A sound mysteriously multiplied
As of a cataract from the mountain's side,
Or roar of winds upon a wooded steep.
So comes to us at times, from the unknown
And inaccessible solitudes of being,
The rushing of the sea-tides of the soul;
And inspirations, that we deem our own,
Are some divine foreshadowing and foreseeing
Of things beyond our reason or control.--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
That's what has always lived in deep water: things beyond our reason or control. In distant ages, people believed the forces of nature were controlled by the gods and bore messages from them. People heard the voice of god in the thunder, and the whisper of god in the silent air. They sensed the anger of god when the earth shook and the wrath of god when floods ran high.
The ancient Greeks discovered that the elements were actually elemental: basic physical substances out of which the world was made. The philosopher Empedocles believed that all matter was composed of four essential ingredients--water, air, fire, and earth--and that growth and decay occur as the four elements are drawn together in various combinations or driven apart by the elemental forces of Love and Strife. The scientific insight of the ancients may have been inadequate, but their intuition about sources of wonder and mystery was not. The forces of nature have always inspired awe and provoked reflection. They still do.
This month at All Souls, the elements will surround us musically. Today we've plunged ourselves into deep water, in order to ponder things in our world and in our lives that are beyond our reason or control. We may be more in command of some physical forces than were the ancient Greeks, but the sea is not one of them, as we were reminded by the sinking of the swordfishing vessel Andrea Gail in the so-called "Perfect Storm" of 1991, and the loss of the Russian submarine Kursk to the depths of the Barents Sea last August.
But the sea is equally powerful as a metaphor for describing what it feels like when we find ourselves in circumstances we cannot control or confront feelings we cannot understand. There are events in our lives that feel exactly like the perfect storm: sudden, powerful, and devastating. We feel it when death comes to someone we love, or when an unexpected diagnosis puts our own lives in serious jeopardy, or when the loss of a job we counted on or a relationship we depended on leaves us drifting without anchor or rudder. I have stood in these deep waters with many of you over my years as your minister.
One of the most haunting illustrations of life's stormy season was described to me a number of years ago on a summer day at the beach. Some of you have heard this story, but it bears repeating. My daughter Zoe and I were wading along the shoreline at low tide one morning, picking up bits of aquatic flora and fauna to put in our sand bucket. A collection of hermit crabs, a few snails, lots of seaweed and even a pipe fish made it into the bucket. As we puttered about in the water, a boat came motoring quietly up and anchored nearby. The man in it slipped overboard with a clam rake and started the laborious job of raking the sea bottom. Each time he brought the rake to the surface, he threw the clams into a laundry basket floating inside an old inner tube. The seaweed went back into the water.
After watching at a distance for a time, we decided to have a closer look. We waded out toward the boat, a weary-looking wooden affair which had once been bright blue but now was merely bluish. Its owner was the man in the water, himself weatherworn and weary-looking as well, whose name turned out to be Short Dog. "My friends call me Shorty for short," he added. He asked where we were from, and when told Manhattan he exclaimed, "Man-hattan! God bless you! Myself, I've lived in that town just across the bay all my life--except for the time I spent in Vietnam." He paused as though there were more to say, but didn't.
After he asked what I did for a living, he explained that he worked as a handyman at a local motel during the week, then went fishing and claming on the weekends. "I have orders for ten dozen clams for a wedding party tonight and another eight dozen for a restaurant," he said. When I asked if he would have any extra to sell, he said I should check back with him in several hours, but the answer would probably be yes. "If the claming is good," he added. He then lowered his rake and went back to work.
Mid-afternoon, I waded back out to where Shorty was still digging away. This time, I went alone. "I'm glad you came back," he called out as I approached. "I'm about to head home, but I have lots of extra clams. Take whatever you want." Before I put his clams in my now-empty sand bucket, I asked what the going price was. "Just take them," he insisted with a dismissive wave of his hand. I persisted, however, and he finally told me that he charged his customers three dollars a dozen. "Can you spare three dozen?" I asked. "Do what you gotta do," he responded. "It don't matter to me."
I took three dozen clams from his floating basket and put the money in with the remaining clams, as he instructed. I thanked him and was turning to wade to shore, when he started talking again. "Your daughter is very beautiful," he said. "Seeing her playing there on the beach reminds me of my time in Vietnam. You know, we would go into villages and simply level them. Everybody died. Everybody." He paused with a far-off look on his face, while I waited there with him, the sun shining down on us, the waves lapping gently at our waists.
Then he spoke again, softly this time. "The one nightmare I still have, even after all these years, is of a little girl about your daughter's age. My company--there were about thirty of us--walked into a village one day and she came running out. She wasn't more than ten feet away, reaching her arms out toward us, when suddenly she disappeared. She just disappeared. Someone had strapped a grenade around her waist and sent her out." His voice trailed off into the sound of the waves.
He told me more: about getting caught one night in a firefight along Rocket Alley, about only three of his company surviving by fleeing into the woods, about his one buddy subsequently dying of his wounds and the other committing suicide a year after he returned home. He also talked about his nightmares and the time he spent in a mental hospital, about losing his marriage, about finding a job and trying to put his life back together again. And he talked about his son. "He was the one good thing in my life," he said. "I always thought I did pretty well by him: raised him right and everything. And then one night about midnight a cop showed up at my door and said my son had been shot dead in a fight outside a bar here in town."
"When I heard the news, I grabbed my gun and headed for the door. But a neighbor of mine stopped me on the porch. 'That's not the answer, Shorty,' he said. My neighbor was right, of course. But it was hard to take that after everything else." He paused again, and we watched a sailboat work its way through the waves. I didn't say much; there wasn't much to say.
"That's mostly why I come out clamming whenever I can," he said. "I like the feel of being in the water with the sun on my back. I feel comfortable here. It almost seems like I'm going to be all right, like someday I will be able to watch a little girl play and not have nightmares."
I saw Shorty a number of times over the following few seasons, but I haven't seen him since. I don't know if he's all right today or not. My guess is that he's probably doing pretty well, because he has figured out how to survive the kind of tragedies that destroy many people. What is his secret? Why are people like Shorty able to endure difficult times, while others become self-defeating or self-destructive?
What Shorty evidently discovered is the paradox voiced by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott. The sea is a place, he said, where the waves are soothing in their unrest. The waves are both restless and soothing, both troubling and comforting. Soothing calm and deep healing come to us not because we have avoided the storm, but because we have weathered it. It does seem like a paradox, that the most difficult situations in our lives, when we have the most to fear, are also the ones where we have the most to gain. But that's the way life is. Nothing anchors us more deeply than to know that we can deal with life on its own terms--come what may. Deep water is the place where we encounter fearful monsters, but it's also the place where we find profound peace.
That discovery is something like what Anne Morrow Lindbergh described in her now-classic book titled Gift From the Sea, which was written during a two-week vacation by the sea and first published in 1955. She writes about the ebb and flow of the tide and of life.
We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid that it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity.
Intermittency--an impossible lesson for human beings to learn. How can one learn to live through the ebb-tides of one's existence? How can one learn to take the trough of the wave?... Perhaps this is the most important thing: simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid. One must accept the security of ebb and flow, of intermittency.
None of us looks forward to times of disappointment, failure, grief or loss. But tempestuous times will inevitably come to each of us. And the way for us to achieve deep calm and abiding peace is to accept difficult times as an invitation to grow stronger. And we will grow stronger--if we have the courage to sail in deep water.