Posted this on my facebook this summer. Was reminded of it again...

Posted this on my facebook this summer. Was reminded of it again this morning, when the pastor at a church I visited mentioned how all our wantings find their rest in God…

On this trip to the water I have been stalked by a sense of—what is it? Longing does not fit. Call it an intense stirring; a desire to be swallowed. Feet half sunken in sand, foam gathers at my ankles. Wave after wave collapses on the shore, as if grasping but never reaching, the heart of land.

Watching this pattern of life that does not need me in order for it to persist, I ache for it to swallow me. To become one with the ocean. But I submerge myself in the water, patted back and forth by the waves as a ball of string under a kitten's paw; never "one."

The term "one" has been stolen by yogis, hippies and John Lennon. I understand it in a broader sense. I want the endlessness this ocean represents to belong to me—for "forever" to be carried in a locket near my heart. That's not meant to sound cheesy. I don't know how to say it.

Simply put, God has placed eternity in the heart of man. My heart included.

Reading an essay on an academic's conversion to Catholicism, I am distracted from the meaning by the form. She spews words like "grace" and "catechism" much as the ocean spews foam. But foam fizzles on sand. I can't hold on to the beauty of waves or words. Everything, in this place, falls apart.

I am reduced to scraping, trying to understand. The dimensions grow thin. At the water, I feel the earth eroding under waves. The sands are shifting. My own balance is quaking.

I wade in.

I feel like a turtle in one of the eggs buried nearby. A whole world of new molecules and colors and light awaits. One peck could crack open this shell. One web-thin membrane stands between me and a different sort of birth. Everything is ready.

A long stream of seaweed clamps around my forearm. The tide pulls.

I am pushed over. Caught, but not swallowed.

Yet.

"Though we cannot experience our life as an endless present, we are eternal in God's eyes; that is, in our deepest reality." -C.S. Lewis