I've just spent the day up on the Moray coast, mainly in Banff. One of my favourite places is the long beach that runs from Banff to Whitehills. It starts off as rocks, then pebble shores and eventually becomes a mile long stretch of sand that is flat, hard and wonderful to walk on. The sky and the water are deeply responsive to each other's colour, and while it's probably an obvious observation, in Banff blue is unmistakably blue when the sun is shining. Is it to do with the cascading light, reflection on water that always seems restlessly energetic, the northerly aspect of a coast that looks towards the Arctic Circle for its next land mass – I'm not sure.
But what is unmistakably true for me is the sense of gratitude and peace that comes from walking a beach like this. The rhythm of waves arriving and withdrawing, and the sound of pebbles pushed and pulled in the forward impetus and backward suction, unforgettably described by Arnold in his poem Dover Beach as the sea of faith's long withdrawing roar; for me the sound has no melancholy, quite the opposite. I am inwardly reconfigured by the rhythm of waves; my inner longings align with the give and take, the push and pull, the restless energy and rhythmic regularity of the sea as it surrounds but does not overwhelm the shoreline.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh's classic Gift from the Sea is her reflective account of a holiday spent on a Florida island in the early 1950's. She too found the sea to have its own rhythms, voices and gifts. The book is a long essay of reflections on shells found on the shoreline, opening up areas of our experience such as solitude, self-care, contentment and the kindness that alone can bring healing and restoration after sorrow and loss. It is a beautiful and unusual display of emotional frankness and that combination of commonsense and imaginative helpfulness that we call compassion.
When considering the ebb and flow of the sea, and of that inner ocean of our emotional and spiritual lives, Lindbergh often spoke with disconcerting honesty: “I would like to achieve a state of inner spiritual grace from which I could function and give as I was meant to in the eye of God.” Beside the sea, I have that same sense of looking on vastness and potential, an energy and rhythm of created things which is indifferent to those inner distractions and unsettling anxieties that get in the way of living, just that, living, without all the self-questioning and examination. To "function and give as I am meant to be in the eye of God" is no small aspiration, and yet that is precisely what Christians mean when we talk of grace, new creation, hope and faith and love.
Walking by the sea, listening to the waves, watching the water roll and tumble and give its energy till it is spent, and allowing my mind and heart to align with those same movements, is for me a deep form of prayer. It reminds me of Robert Herrick's poem, long a favourite, written at the time when new worlds were being discovered and explored across the oceans of the earth:
God's Mercy
Gods boundlesse mercy is, to sinfull man,
Like to the ever wealthy ocean:
Which though it sends forth thousand streams, 'tis n'ere
Known,or els seen to be the emptier:
And though it takes all in, 'tis yet no more
Full, and fild-full, then when full-fild before..
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