HOME FROM THE SEA
Forrest Church
April 29, 2001
In a sense, we begin our life at sea. In our mother's womb we swim about untroubled by the dark, fed and warm within our amniotic sacs, as at home as fish are in the life-sustaining waters.
Birth has got to be painful, and not only for the mother: to be thrust or wrenched into the light, gasping for breath, at home no longer and never to be home again at sea. I wonder whether, deep in our sub-conscious, we do not somehow desire a return to the womb's comforts. In dark nights of the soul, when the darkness haunts and does not comfort, we may find ourselves reflexively assuming the fetal position, curled up into a ball, clutching a pillow for dear life, homing for the womb. As grownups, when we feel ourselves at sea, rather than being at home there we are tossed on troubled waters, their forbidding depth symbolic more of pending death than birth.
Yet, even an existential crisis may be preferable to the most common way in which people get lost at sea. Seafarers describe what happens to a sailor after a few days away from land as a sea change. Even as one develops one's sea legs, the grounding experience of home fades in memory. Without special effort, sailors lose their grip on life-sustaining connections with others, especially their family. In the classic sense of the term, when we forget our bearings, especially those that remind us of our responsibilities, we suffer a sea change. Our affections diminish; our lifelines to a saving, grounding reality attenuate. For years we can live in such a state, almost blithely lost, oblivious to our soul's jeopardy, looking forward only to our ration of rum and the appeasement of our hammock.
In every great sea story I have ever read, at some critical moment the fog lifts upon the specter of looming cliffs and hidden shoals. Only then does the captain realize how far his ship has drifted from where his calculations placed her.
Until the advent of modern navigational devices, the most skilled seaman had to home his sextant on the North Star. When occluded from view, without its bearing point to supplement even an educated intuition, the captain relied on grosser calculations, including instinct, to negotiate safe passage and return home from the sea. Without the aid of a star to guide us, we too may come to believe that we are heading toward a port of call, while sailing in precisely the opposite direction. To complicate matters further, accustomed to the fog banking our lives, we may forget the stars' very existence.
For all of these reasons, the sea is a powerful metaphor for life's journey. Even when we are lost there, it challenges our spiritual imagination. If mountain tops naturally suggest images of spiritual destination, the oceans evoke a more generalized sense of existential drift or essential awe. Yet, as Francis Bacon writes in The Advancement of Learning, "They are ill discoverers who think there is no land, when they see nothing but sea."
So cast an eye across your life's horizon. Peer into the vastness of the cosmos and then take out your compass. For we are navigators, pilots steering fragile yet wondrous vessels across the heavenly waters, mortal explorers launched, by no choice of our own, on a brief and precious voyage. We too are ill discoverers that return from our adventures in the seen world without a profound sense of humility and awe in face of the unseen, in face of the vastness encompassing our navigations.
Of course, awesome and awful share the same root, as do terrific and terrifying. In its haunting depths and darkness-together with the spell it holds over the lives of sailors who dare to challenge its power- the sea suggests a more forbidding metaphor for life's journey. When lost, we say "I am at sea," when inundated, that we are drowning in whatever may be swamping us. We can drown in anything, even in details. But most of the time when we feel lost at sea, it is because we are drifting through uncharted or turbulent waters.
Whether borne of fate or hazard, unpredictable winds certainly blow our lives from one island to another. I have spent more than a decent share of my own life tacking against such winds. This particular voyage often takes place within my mind, with conscience contesting willfulness for primacy over my thoughts and actions. Like Odysseus in the most famous of all sea stories, whenever forced to choose between a convenient lie or the uncomfortable truth, I cannot safely sail between the monster and the whirlpool. At times, my appetites have succeeded in casting an unseemly spell over my life and the lives of those I love. At others, I have lacked the moral discipline to resist the sirens' call, even knowing the danger to my soul posed by its enchantment. I have grazed in fields of lotus. I have slaughtered sacred cattle. I have loosed the winds upon others and myself, even once they had been harnessed. And my mind has grown accustomed to hollow comforts that at first I had resented and thus resisted. The tonic of forgetfulness has slowly worked its baffling, subtle magic on my will, until finally I was no longer capable of doing my own bidding. As for my heart, it too has tossed on restless waters far from home.
Whether for good or ill, it does sometimes feel as if we are chance protagonists in someone else's story, our character and development driven by its puckish author's plot. Much theology predicates itself on precisely the same caprice. If God is all-knowing and all-powerful, God knows the plot that our lives will take better than we do. We nod to this whenever we try to explain the inexplicable by saying that it must be "God's will."
My own limited understanding of life and God leads me in a different direction. First, though I may have little control over what may happen to me, I do have some power over how I choose to respond. And the choices I make effect both my character and the plot my life will take. Long before the sirens beckoned them to steer their ships toward the shoals, both Odysseus and his crewmen knew exactly what they had to do to save themselves from perishing. Yet only Odysseus and a handful of others demonstrate the requisite discipline. We too can choose to tempt the fates. To this extent at least, however powerful they may be, often it is "our own damn fault" when we succumb to them.
How else can one explain the difference between two men, both addicted to heroin, both knowing full-well that their addiction will first destroy and then kill them? One finds help and breaks the yoke of addiction. The other does not and wills his own destruction. Each is at sea; each is drowning; but only one is saved. Does the man who finds salvation accomplish this by himself? Perhaps he does. More likely, he surrenders his will to God, knowing that he is powerless to save himself, that only a power higher than himself can save him. To illustrate the difference, consider two other stories of self-willed destruction, of souls lost at sea: the legend of the Flying Dutchman; and, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner."
In the early eighteen hundreds there lived a Dutch sea captain, known for his devil-may-care pugnacity. Arrogant and audacious, he sails routes no other captain would dare to contemplate, braving the most vehement conditions-not to insure swift passage, mind you, but simply for the hell of it. One day, the captain swears an oath that never will he balk at any wind or weather, even should he have to sail from here to Judgement Day. The Devil promptly cashes in on this golden opportunity, damning the captain to sail the high seas from that day forward until the final trump sounds. All that can rescue him from this fate is a woman's love. This story held great power over sailors' hearts. Terrified of the mortal consequences that might follow on any encounter with The Flying Dutchman, they would hammer horseshoes to their masts. Legend has it that the ghost ship is sailing still on its never-ending voyage to Armageddon, yet another demon of the deep.
A classic tale of hubris and nemesis, The Flying Dutchman teaches not only that pride can lead to a fall, but also that love can save a prideful heart, whether it is the love of another that delivers us from our fate or the love of God. In either case, once we lock our hearts, only something outside of us can spring them open. Even after we are liberated, we may still wear scars of punishment. Years of self-imposed captivity can do that to a person's heart. Yet such scars have their purpose as well. They remind us and others of the lessons we have learned.
Both of these two morals issue from the tale that English Romantic poet and Unitarian Samuel Coleridge tells in "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner." At a wedding party, an old sea-farer corners one of the guests, importuning him to listen to the story he has to impart. It too is a chronicle of crime and punishment acted out on the high seas. Driven to the edge of Antarctica by a mighty storm and fated almost surely to perish in an ocean of ice, the Mariner and his mates are rescued by an Albatross who guides their ship's helmsman through the maze of icebergs back into the open sea. When first the bird arrives-"as if it had been a Christian soul"-they hail it in God's name. Yet, on a whim, once rescued the Mariner can not resist destroying the agent of their redemption. Lifting a cross-bow to his shoulder, he shoots the Albatross, and with it their good fortune, as if through the heart. The wind dies; becalmed waters and a burning sun seal the ship's fate. Surrounded by water-"with not a drop to drink"-the irate crew drapes the albatross around the Mariner's neck, a symbol of his wanton impiety. Parched and near-death, they at last espy a ship on the horizon, but it is a death ship, and all but the Mariner who damned them meet their doom.
He too, of course, is damned, "alone on a wide wide sea," none to take pity on his soul's agony. Unable even to pray to God, the mariner languishes without hope, until one day he takes notice of a school of water snakes glistening athwart the bow of his ship.
O happy living things! No tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
With this the albatross falls from the Mariner's neck and his journey begins anew. His shipmates first return to life and are promptly and joyfully elevated to Heaven. Soon he finds his way back home, but with a charge he must fulfill to expiate his sin. The Ancient Mariner-for now he is grown old and nearing the end of his days-must share with others the lesson of love that saved him. Coleridge sums this lesson up in his best-remembered words:
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
Who once was lost, now is found. "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" is the story of a wretch saved by grace.
Completing this circle of sea adventures is the story behind the hymn to which I allude here. Sea captain John Newton wrote "Amazing Grace" to commemorate his conversion on that day in 1748 when, having survived the tempest of a hurricane, he offered up his life to God in thanks for his deliverance. John Newton earned his living in the slave trade. Working his way up from impressed seaman to ship captain, he piloted ships filled with human chattel from Sierra Leone to the American South. It was on one such voyage, heading homeward to England, that this man, wholly lacking in religious convictions, threw himself on God's mercy as his ship appeared to be going down. He fell to his knees and prayed, confessing his sinfulness and begging God's forgiveness. Upon surviving the storm, he credited God for his salvation.
To those who knew Captain Newton, the change was evident. For one thing, he finally treated his cargo like human beings. Shortly thereafter, he abandoned the slave trade entirely. Newton educated himself, then apprenticed under Methodist evangelist George Whitefield and became a minister known throughout the world for his hymnody. "Thro' many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come; 'tis grace has bro't me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home."
Only a heart open to grace can receive its gift. A woman's love could have saved the Dutchman. An unself-mindful expression of praise for other creatures opened the Ancient Mariner's heart to God. And when John Newman felt that he could not save himself, he reached out to God-whom he may not actually have needed to keep his ship from going down, but seemingly did need to transform his wretched existence from one of shameless gain to a life of serving others. Conversely, when we don't feel at sea, we must pay special heed, lest we drift away from home unconsciously. Sometimes the wreckage of a life is subtle; it can happen to us unawares. We drown slowly, keeping count of endless laps in far too small a pool.
If less welcome than the peace of oblivion, at least life crises force a reckoning. When such reckonings turn our hearts toward God, they point us homeward. As seventeenth century American poet Anne Bradstreet writes, "Among all my experiences of God's gracious dealing with me I have constantly observed this, that he had never suffered me long to sit loose from him, but by one affliction or other hath made me look home."
Not always to death does the sailor come home from
the sea, but-by the grace of God-to life as well.