Ride the waves

Mary DeTurris Poust (Courtesy photo of CINDY SCHULTZ)

On a recent vacation to the Jersey Shore, I sat on my prayer cushion with a clear view of the Atlantic Ocean. As I settled into my sacred space, I spied a lone surfer out in the mild waves along the North Wildwood coast. Paddling on his board and looking out into the distance, he’d wait for what appeared to be a bigger wave and then race to meet it and stand atop the rolling water. Although he caught a few, more often than not he ended up under the water, his board rushing to the sand without him. He’d resurface, chase down the board and paddle out again to wait and watch.

It made me think about the fact that in the surfer’s world, the bigger the wave, the better the ride, and how that’s just the opposite of what we hope for in our daily lives. While the ocean with its pounding surf and untamed power tends to inspire and awe us, we prefer still waters and minor ripples, at best, when it comes to the channels we must navigate. Of course, we know from hard-earned experience that the waves will come anyway, sometimes one after another without rest and other times breaking over us in ways that bring us to the shores of life with a force that leaves us gasping for air.

So how do we, like the surfer, learn to ride the waves? Our faith tells us the only way to keep our heads above the swirling water is to ground ourselves in God and let ourselves be carried by the current of God’s love, even when the water rises around us. Psalm 89 says, “You rule the raging of the sea; when its waves rise, you still them.” That’s not the only time we are reminded in Scripture that God is the antidote to the storms that fill us with fear.

In the Gospel of Matthew, we see the disciples in a boat “being swamped by the waves” as Jesus sleeps. In their fear, they wake him, and he says, “Why are you afraid, you of little faith?” (Mt 8:26) Then he rebukes the wind and calms the sea.

We, too, are often people of “little faith,” when we find ourselves riding a wave or navigating a storm. We cling to our proverbial boat for dear life, filled with fear and anxiety, wondering why God is seemingly asleep and unaware of our struggles. We send up frantic prayers to heaven as we tread spiritual water. When the seas of our life eventually calm, however — usually without the drama witnessed by the disciples in the Gospel — we are often quick to dismiss the calm as life-as-usual, or maybe we don’t even bother to notice the calm at all. We’ve moved on to the next crisis, the next wave on the horizon.

The artist Vincent van Gogh, in a letter to his brother, Theo, summed up the ocean-life metaphor beautifully. “The heart of man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides and in its depths it has its pearls too,” he wrote. We tend to focus all our energy on the storms — past, present and possible at some later date — and we often avoid the depths out of fear of what we might find there. As a result, we can miss the “pearls” hidden in plain sight, those glimpses of the sacred swirling amid the flotsam and jetsam of our lives.

Our challenge then is to paddle through our days knowing that, as Thomas Merton wrote, “God rises up out of the sea like a treasure in the waves.” We are not alone as we attempt to navigate the waters of our life. We are submerged in an ocean of mercy and love, one that carries us ever forward, and rises up to meet us, offering us the promises that shimmer like pearls.

Mary DeTurris Poust is a writer, retreat leader, and spiritual director living in the Capital Region. Visit her website at NotStrictlySpiritual.com.