#24 - I've always found surfing competitions too abstract. It's like saying one is going to enter a prayer competition. The activity is insular, dependent on what is identified by the individual as important and what is determined by Nature as possible. I don’t know exactly how you can judge it objectively, as what may appear to the observer as the clumsiest moment in wave riding is actually something of sublime experience to the surfer. I once achieved a life’s dream of actually riding within the tube of the wave, the so-called “green room”. I lasted about three seconds before being nearly crushed by the wave and held on the bottom as if by a giant hand. When I was done coughing up the water, something made more difficult by the fact I was also laughing with joy, I was, according to the quote, the best surfer on the beach. The others, the ones who were able to stay on their boards, might have disagreed, but I know there was no one happier than I was.
In prayer, we offer up what we identify as important and see how it is determined by God. I feel as if all of my prayers are clumsy, yet I always receive an answer. When I pray, whether leading a congregation, or with them, or in those few, quiet moments on my own, I know the happiness that Christians can know. It doesn’t matter what others think, or what I think of my spiritual abilities. God has granted me a way to know happiness and, with others, be lead to being the best Christian I can be.
#25 – I’m a sucker for Hopkins. I liked his poetry before I knew anything of his personal life [he was a Roman Catholic priest who kept most of his poetry hidden until well after his death]. In all of his poems [another was offered as Lenten Wave #3] he meditated on how a confluence of seemingly incongruous things comes together to create a glorious one-ness. It is in this way that we see God in nature and nature in all things.
#26 – This is the last portion of Tennyson’s Ulysses, which is one of the great poetic meditations on age. There is a verse that I regret leaving out, as I think of it more and more often these days:
“…you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done….”
I think of this when I try to spring up on the surfboard like I did even just twenty years ago, or when I now feel the need for a nap on Sunday afternoons. It is a wonderful reminder of what purpose may do for the heart and the soul. It is in that light that this portion of the poem engages us. Ulysses laments that there are so many who feel, “…as though to breath were life….” He strives for purpose, for meaning, for adventure, until the very end. “…that which we are, we are…Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” It is a marvelous distillation of Christian purpose, the quest that calls us all, and God’s eternal will for us.
#27 – A favorite of mine since high school, mainly because, after losing a beloved grandfather and a beloved brother when I was still a child, I had occasions to think of death in light of both the graceful language of the burial office and the jarringly ponderous attempts by people to “explain” to a kid what they understood as God’s will. If I had been a more addle-pated child, I would have grown up thinking that what was “all part of God’s plan” actually described the acts of some sort of metaphysical madman. Bryant’s poem, especially when read with John 14:1-6, captures beautifully, again like Hopkins, the manner in which nature reflects the movement of God in our mortality and promised immortality.
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!
By only issue with the poet is that he was a little too addicted to exclamation points!