How to Look at the Waves

Mark 6:30-34

     I’ve never known how to look at the ocean and the waves coming in.  I don’t know how to see it all at once, the whole wide, straight line of it.  It’s not like a cove surrounded by trees where you can grasp the shape of it.  It’s not like a library where the books are neatly shelved.  People love the beach.  Families come with their kids and their dogs, and the kids scream with delight and the dogs run into the surf.  For some people the sight of the sea lifts them up, the way the stars in the night sky do or a mountain range.  I feel flattened.  Emptied.

     Jesus says to his weary disciples in the Gospel for this Sunday, “come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while.”  The ocean is a desert for me, a deserted place, in its vastness, its endless repetitions.  It washes everything away.  The roar of the waves drowns out all my thoughts, my plans.  There is only a single boat on the water as far as I can see.  No human face.  No human figure.  The people are on shore.  Their backs are to me, and I’m on the dunes above them.  The water when you look at it is different colors:  blue further out, then gray as the waves start to rise and comb, then brown as they come in, churning up the sand. The endless grains of sand.  

    What else can we do but turn to God?  The one who promised he will be with us always even unto the end of time?  The one who made the stars and made the seas and takes all things unto himself?  The one who loves us.  Who never lets us go.

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