Several years ago, after a winter storm and unusually high seas, we went for a walk at Aberdeen beach, down near the village of Footdee (locally Fittie, contracted from Foot of Dee). Large areas of sand had been washed away or shifted elsewhere on the beach, leaving some old breakwaters exposed.
Beach walking for me is usually as near the sea as I can get without getting my feet wet; and sometimes prepared even to risk that. The old wood, eroded, worn and tempered by who knows how many years of surging sea water and shifting sand stood dark and defiant, a reminder of why they were put there in the first place. I stood beside them, looked closely at the grains and patterns, the whirling contours and ridged lines, and simply enjoyed the sculptured skill of wind and wave and sand, the labour of years.
As I walked away, watching the waves still rushing shoreward, the posts receding and changing their alignment, I stopped. And the photo is the reason. From one precise angle the shape of a cross, the waves visible through a cruciform window. I remember stopping, transfixed by the beauty of an entirely coincidental moment when angle of vision and merging shapes produced a different kind of vision altogether.
This is the only photo I have printed and put up in our home. Within the cross, the shape of a heart. The theological interconnections are obvious enough. What moves me about this image is its accidental nature, the serendipity of the moment, the gift of a seascape in which, it seems, love comes rolling towards us in irresistible waves of mercy.
We all have our ways of imagining what divine love is, and how God's love could ever be portrayed in words, art, music or any other form of human creativity. And yes I can resonate with the most powerful words written about the cross, look longingly at the finest art articulating the meaning of the cross, and listen to music fit for heaven expressing the pathos of God surrounding Calvary, and each will leave its mark on the soul.
This was different. This wasn't human art or contrivance. This was a moment of epiphany, impossible to repeat, and impossible to forget. I could have missed it, but once seen, it was unmissable. A seagull cry, a wave on the cusp of tumbling, a cobble shaped like an egg from constant friction of wave and sand, any or each would have been sufficient distraction for me to take a couple more steps without looking. But I did look, and see, the calling card of God.
I've tried to understand and explain to myself what happens inside us when we know we have been addressed. A passage from T S Eliot has long helped me to appreciate and revere those fugitive moments when something is spoken into us that we can never unhear, and something is seen that becomes a lens through which, subsequently, everything else can be viewed, if we are lucky enough to look, and sensible enough to pay attention.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
(The Four Quartets, Dry Salvages, V. lines 23-31)
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