Today I was meeting a friend down at the beach for lunch at 12 noon. We've been friends for nearly 40 years, and I was his minister for nearly half that time. Unassuming, kind, quiet, coping with late life issues of illness, bereavement and the probability that soon it would be best to be within a more sheltered living environment. But a man who is so much more than these encroachments; in his day a very good footballer, a lifelong Christian whose faith oozes faithfulness and integrity, a man whose family love and celebrate him, and he them, and someone for whom hundreds of people thank God or their lucky stars or whatever, that they encountered this serial helper of other folk.
It's hard to describe the constituent parts of a human friendship - affection, admiration, shared joy and laughter, also shared sorrow and tears, and as well as that memories of life that intertwined with him and his family, and us and our family. So we were meeting to have a soup lunch, a catch up with recent whatever's been happening, and at least some attempt to understand 'the state of the country'!
But before then, I had arrived early enough to have a coffee, before a long walk the length of the beach and back. The tide was out and on the turn, the sea was that January blue that can't be improved by photo-editing, and the waves were in determined mood to draw attention to themselves. The result was a couple of hours of alternating thinking, and not thinking, paying attention to my inner climate but then looking outwards to a world that gets on with what its doing no matter what my inner world is like. The result was a sense of the presence of the Creator who makes waves. The sea is like an extra sacrament to me, a place of grace, of remembered encounters, of healing and hearing, an ancient rhythm of movement, sound and sight. Several times I stopped, stood, waited, wondered, looked, listened, breathed in beauty and breathed out thanks, in general and in particular.
On the shell-encrusted breakwaters there are usually turnstones feeding. So small, swift, fragile and persistent. Photographed (picture at the top) against the backdrop of the waves, they have perfect timing to skip, fly and dart back, an instinctive ballet performed to the accompaniment of that same ancient rhythm of musical waves. Jesus said, "Look at the birds of the air..." - being the inclusive kind, he would also mean "look at the birds near the sea". Same lesson to be learned. They don't spend their lives anxiously predicting what might happen; instead they go about their lives, turning stones to eat, doing what they do and being what they are.
A two hour walk becomes a mini pilgrimage along the shore. At one point I stopped for some minutes, camera in my pocket, paying attention to the play of light on water and sand, raking around amongst the multi-coloured pebbles, listening for that pause just as the wave balances for the right moment to tumble. I was obviously absorbed in the pebbles because the wave tumbled noisily enough, but I found myself in six inches of foamy water. I'm obviously less agile than the turnstones.
By the time my walk was finished the sea had done its work as nature's specialist in sensory therapy. No matter the inner climate, the weather of the heart and the pressures on the inner barometer, the sea is a reliable counsellor. Gathering to itself the words spoken and the more difficult thoughts of guilt and gratitude, washing away the deep footprints of resentment stamped on the sand; and then re-setting the rhythms of come and go, of give and take, enabling us to recover faith in the inner ebb and flow of daily life, as regular as the tides, and as renewing.
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