Miracles

A Night on the Beach

I was on the beach at two in the morning. If you’ve never been on the beach at two in the morning, I highly suggest it. One, you will almost certainly have the place to yourself and, two, you can get a fairly good preview of what it is like to stare into eternity. Sitting on the sand, facing the water, a moonless night without clouds and nothing but stars going on forever. The sky is black. So is the ocean. Where one ends and the other begins is anyone’s guess and at any moment it seems that either of them could swallow you. There is a sense of smallness there that cannot be forgotten. There, on the beach before the endless black, you are nothing and you know it. The grains of sand beneath you are of equal size to yourself in relation to the universe. You are a speck. Less than a dot. There seems to be nothing to hold you to the earth and prevent you from falling up forever into the void. In such moments even gravity seems illusory. You are overcome with awe. The vastness of the deep.

I was praying.

I do not often get to do the whole mystic sitting alone on rock somewhere thing and so, when the opportunity presents itself, I take it. I had my prayer beads and was sitting on a towel. I believe I was shirtless. There was a great wind blowing in off the water and the air smelled heavily of salt and the waves were high. I had come because I was inspired by the story of St. Cuthbert of Scotland who used to disappear from his monastery every night and not return until dawn. Curious, one of his brother monks followed him clandestinely one evening. He followed Cuthbert to the sea and watched as the saint disrobed and walked into the ocean in the dead of night up to his chin and proceeded to sing psalms.

I was not as brave as Brother Cuthbert.

I was not going to go naked into the ocean in the middle of the night up to my head.

Nonetheless the act of coming to the ocean had shown me why he did it. Cuthbert had wanted to be engulfed in the infinite. He’d wanted to feel as small as he really was when he sang his prayers to God. The story goes that at dawn the saint walked back out of the sea and reclined on the rocks and that a pair of otters came and lay on his hands and feet to warm them after a night spend in the frigid water.

I didn’t know if I believe that bit about the otters. Seemed too Disney.

There’s a reason people like The Matrix movies. I ran an informal poll of my friends and found that about 90% of them had made a serious effort at trying to move an object with “the force” as a child. I believe people tried this even before Star Wars came out. Children seem to be convinced that telekinesis should be possible and are a bit perplexed when it isn’t. Jesus seemed convinced of it too. Indeed, if you listen to him, he goes well beyond the powers of Skywalker or Neo. For Jesus it’s not simply that there is no spoon. For him there’s not even any mountain.

“Truly, I say to you, if you have faith and do not doubt, if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ it will happen.

Jesus

I don’t believe he was speaking metaphorically here. Lots of people do but I’m not one of them. I think that’s an easy out. In general I’m not willing to regard much of anything Christ spoke as symbolic. It seems to me that for centuries the primary occupation of Christians has been explaining away the things Jesus said and did, perhaps because they themselves cannot live up to it. I’m not claiming to live up to his teachings either. Not by a long shot. But at the very least I will not dismiss it or explain it away. And I have had moments where I could see what might be. On the beach that night was one of them, and I don’t know why I did it.

The impulse just came over me. Like a surprise. The thought just jumped into my head. Now was a time to test. Now was a time to push against reality a little and see if it moved. Perhaps it was the isolation. I was braver alone. Had there been anyone else around I would’ve been too embarrassed. To scared to take a leap of faith and come up looking stupid. But there, alone, in the dark, I was with infinity. With God. With all that is.

So I stood up and spoke to the ocean.

I know that sounds crazy. Maybe it is. Maybe I am. Personally I think insanity is relative. I consider it insane to go pay money to sit inside a dark room and watch people be murdered but people do it all the time. We call it going to the movies. It is a popular activity for date nights.

To each his own.

So it happened that alone beneath the stars I determined that I would walk forward into the water like Brother Cuthbert had so many years ago. Only, I didn’t want to get wet. That was too scary. So instead I asked the ocean not to touch me. Politely of course. The ocean and I do not speak often enough to be informal. I began walking forward as the waves rolled back from their most recent surge. To my surprise, the next wave did not rise up as high on the sand as its predecessor had, stopping just before my feet. The water receded again and again I took another step. Again, the next wave came, as they always must, but again it did not come as far as the one before it. My feet remained dry. Toes still covered with sand. The waves receded. I stepped forward once more.

On and on I continued in like fashion, inching a little further out into the sea every time the waves receded. Each time when the waters came forth again, they would stop just before my feet. How long this went on I cannot say. I only know that at some point I looked back and saw that I was some distance from the shoreline. All along the sand, the waves were behaving as normal, rising over and over again to the level they had been all night long. Almost touching my towel. But, somehow, directly in my path, they were not.

I screamed in terror.

Heart pounding with fear I turned and instantly began sprinting back to where my shirt lay on the sand. The water rushed behind to catch me. It got my the back of my legs. Then it engulfed my knees. Sploshing through the water, I made it back to my shirt, drenched on my lower half. I sat down. Had any of that really just happened? I wasn’t sure. I’m still not.

“The wind was flapping the temple flag and two monks were arguing about it. One said the flag was moving; the other said the wind was moving. Arguing back and forth they could not agree on the truth. The Sixth Patriarch, passing by, resolved their quandary. ‘It is neither the wind that is moving nor the flag that is moving.’ He said. ‘It is your mind that is moving’. The two monks were struck with awe.”

Zen Koan