Some of you know I’m back from a week away after Easter. I planned the trip around getting to the ocean—which I’ve missed the past couple of years. As much as I love Iowa’s (soon-to-be) lush farm-scapes, I find myself longing for waves and surf and sand.
It’s not so much the beach that draws me. I enjoy a visit to a warm beach where I can cool off in the water. But my fair, un-tannable skin makes a sunny beach as much a worry as a delight. I’m always covering up, reapplying my SPF-70, and repositioning with the sun.
What grabs me is the ocean. The drawing together of that wave, with its accompanying, mounting roar. The way it crests and falls in on itself, rounded and moving, approaching and pulling back at the same time. Its arrival—its diffusion—on the shore where it becomes a dynamic, lacy, moving masterpiece, suddenly melted into a soft sheen on saturated sand.
And all that again, and again. The swell. The fall. The reach.
Standing on a beach north of Boston last week, these words from an old hymn by Isaac Watts bubbled up in me, watching this repeated marvel:
Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all who breathe away;
they fly, forgotten as a dream dies at the opening day.
“Stream,” or surf—this inimitable 18th-century hymnwriter was onto something here. The elements will complete their appointed task, under sun or clouds, rain or hail, whether or not we are there to watch.
I always have that sense when I come to the shore. We are but a breath in contrast to this ongoing, powerful energy that draws waves endlessly against the coast. All this beauty and wildness were here long before any of us knew it.
The words of an even older hymn, though—Psalm 42—speak to the draw I feel to stand there as witness:
Deep calls to deep
at the thunder of your torrents;
all your waves and your billows
have gone over me. —Psalm 42.7
As I watch that wave far out from shore begin to gather itself, I feel something of that “deep calling to deep.” Have you felt it? Some small part of my gut stirs at what’s happening in that water—its persistence, its endlessness, its power.
I think it’s the deep out there, calling to the deep in me. The persistent, powerful rhythms of breath and heartbeat, of fluids and enzymes, of bone-making and blood-spawning. Not to mention rhythms within molecules and atoms that make up our bodies–all flowing and beating from our very first day until our last breath.
The writer of Psalm 42 wants us to notice God in that experience of “deep calling to deep.” There’s a thirst there, a longing that is first and always for God:
…for I shall again praise him,
my help and my God. —Psalm 42.5b & 11b
Even when we are cast down (verse 42.6), we are built to remember that God is with us. That’s where the “deep calling to deep” comes into play, and it’s followed with these words:
By day the Lord commands his steadfast love,
and at night his song is with me,
a prayer to the God of my life. —42.8
Do we know this? Sometimes our bodies do before our minds catch up.
On Sunday our Chancel Choir will offer a selection during the offering using a melody written by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina in the 16th century and this translation of the opening words of Psalm 42:
Like as the hart desireth the water brooks,
ev’n so longeth my soul after thee, O God.
I hope you’ll notice the yearning in this music and its words, more familiarly rendered this way: “As the deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God” (NRSVue).
Your soul longs for God, just that way.
I wonder: How might God be inviting you to notice that truth in your deepest parts? Sit with that question; maybe talk it over with God in a few minutes of silence. What would have to shift—in your thinking, your time, your priorities—to let your soul be nourished with more of God?
These are the kinds of questions I found myself pondering, looking out at those waves. For now, I have that sun-dappled surf as the background on my phone, so I’m seeing it often. It’s reminding me of God’s “deep” calling to mine.
Because I need that reminder, too—again and again.
