At the Beach

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message
May 15, 2012

Elena and I just got back from a short vacation at the Oregon beaches.
While there, I was reminded of a great quotation by American writer
Madeline L’Engle (the life-long Episcopalian who wrote A Wrinkle in Time).
She describes an experience she had as a child at the beach from which
her faith began to grow:

“I sense a wish among some professional religion-mongers to make God
possible, to make him comprehensible to the naked intellect, domesticate
him so he’s easy to believe in. Every century the Church makes a fresh
attempt to make Christianity acceptable. But acceptable Christianity is
not Christian; a comprehensible God is no more than an idol. I don’t want
that kind of God. What kind of God, then? One time, when I was little more
than a baby, I was taken to visit my grandmother, who was living in a
cottage on a nearly uninhabited stretch of beach in northern Florida. All
I remember of this visit is being picked up from my crib in what seemed
the middle of the night and carried from my bedroom and out of doors,
where I had my first look at the stars.

“It must have been an unusually clear and beautiful night for someone to
have said, “Let’s wake the baby and show her the stars.” The night sky,
the constant rolling of the breakers against the shore, the stupendous
light of the stars, all made an indelible impression on me. I was
intuitively aware not only of a beauty I had never seen before but also
that the world was far greater than the protected limits of the small
child’s world which was all I had known thus far. I had a total, if not
very conscious, moment of revelation: I saw creation bursting the bounds
of daily restriction, and stretching out from dimension to dimension,
beyond any human comprehension. I had been taught to say my prayers at
night: Our Father, and a long string of God-blesses, and it was that first
showing of the galaxies which gave me an awareness that the God I spoke to
at bedtime was extraordinary and not just a bigger and better combination
of the grownup powers of my father and mother.

“This early experience was freeing, rather than daunting, and since it was
the first, it has been the foundation for all other such glimpses of
glory." (The Irrational Season, pp. 19-20)

As L’Engle suggests, “hearing God’s voice” can only be experienced, as it
were, from the inside, and does not make itself available merely for
rational, objective understanding.  Our God is not a tame god, and not an
object about which we can make pronouncements or talk about wholly in the
third person.  There is always an “I and Thou” involved when we encounter
God.  That is why adoration, standing in awe at wake left by God is key to
prayer life.  It is why finding a daily rule of life and spiritual
practices that allow for the silence where we can stand in awe of God and
bask in God’s love is so important.

Peace and Grace,
Fr. Tony+