At the Beach (Mid-week)

 At the Beach

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

July 18, 2018

Elena and I are still at the beach in Brookings with three of our 
children, their spouses, and three granddaughters.  The coolness 
and clarity of the air here was a great break from hot and smoky 
Ashland this week.  

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