Lapping waves

Intimations of eternity

Please note: This is my first attempt to record a post. You may listen, read, or both.

Jesus said, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.” (Jn 14:27)

Anyone who has attended our Contemplative Chapel gatherings online knows that the ideas and themes we ponder together are recurring. As we consider the practice of silence and stillness, the availability of a deeper life, and the awakening of the soul in God, we hear repetitive intimations of eternity that we might liken to waves breaking on the shore of our lives. They come to us from poets and wisdom teachers throughout the millennia, and these repetitive soundings are soothing in their familiarity: they are nourishing and life-changing.

What we are hearing, of course, is something that the soul has always known. These lapping waves of repetitive insight can have the effect of bringing us back to our deepest self. “Deep calls to deep,” as the Psalm says, and we can feel as if we are coming home.

But after pondering these things and practicing silence, it often doesn’t take long before I am leaving myself again. After all, the world is constantly sending repetitive messages of a very different sort. Far from soothing and nourishing, many of the world’s messages seem to contribute to an inner tension or simmering stress, reactivity, anxiety, or defensiveness. Far from losing ourselves in messages from the eternal, it sometimes seems that the world’s repetitive messages enlarge or inflame our egos.

But when I am calmed again, it can seem as if God has built into the daily rhythms of life a healing dynamic. Another favorite Psalm includes a verse that comes to me often: “I will bless the Lord who gives me counsel; * / my heart teaches me, night after night” (Ps 16:7).  The world is constantly teaching me things, but so is the Lord.  A gift of communities like our Contemplative Chapel gatherings, for me, is the repetition of those things my soul knows and longs to hear again and again, the way a child delights in the same bedtime story that has words he or she already knows “by heart.”

In this spirit, since we are not currently meeting on Wednesdays for Contemplative Chapel (please stay tuned, though), I hope you will find the following poem by Pablo Neruda soul-nourishing.  Neruda lived in a cottage overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Chile. “I need the sea because it teaches me,” he wrote.  Maybe that’s a good way to read his poem, “The Sea.” Imagine your posture of openness and receptivity, as you lie in bed, listening to the ocean at night outside your window. Perhaps read this poem aloud to yourself, softly, slowly, and maybe several times, like the repeating waves.

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The Sea

I need the sea because it teaches me.
I don’t know if I learn music or awareness,
if it’s a single wave or its vast existence,
or only its harsh voice or its shining
suggestion of fishes and ships.
The fact is that until I fall asleep,
in some magnetic way I move in
the university of the waves.

It’s not simply the shells crunched
as if some shivering planet
were giving signs of its gradual death;
no, I reconstruct the day out of a fragment,
the stalactite from the sliver of salt,
and the great god out of a spoonful.

What it taught me before, I keep. It’s air
ceaseless wind, water and sand.

It seems a small thing for a young person,
to have come here to live with his own fire;
nevertheless, the pulse that rose
and fell in its abyss,
the crackling of the blue cold,
the gradual wearing away of the star,
the soft unfolding of the wave
squandering snow with its foam,
the quiet power out there, sure
as a stone shrine in the depths,
replaced my world in which were growing
stubborn sorrow, gathering oblivion,
and my life changed suddenly:
as I became part of its pure movement.

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), translated by Alistair Reid

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“I need the sea because it teaches me.” Perhaps the Lord teaches and counsels in a similar way. Sometimes this teaching is in the background of our lives, hardly noticed, if at all.  But at other times, as when we are lying still on our beds, in a posture of gradual letting-go, we might feel “in some magnetic way” that we are being drawn into a larger life and deeper way of knowing. We find ourselves immersed “in the university of waves.”

This is a different kind of learning. There is revelation in an individual wave, as well as in the vastness of the sea, and the poet isn’t sure which teaches him more. Maybe there is an echo here of William Blake’s insight: “To see a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower, / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour.”

In “The Sea,” Pablo Neruda ponders the fire of his youth but recognizes how the sea teaches by way of “soft unfolding” – maybe like something we have known in ourselves: an unclenching, releasing, or blossoming. There is unmistakable power, but it is “quiet power,” and there is an aura of divinity about it all, “a stone shrine in the depths.”

Pablo Neruda’s description of falling asleep by the sea, reminds me of how God is speaking to us all the time and of how our souls respond best when we are in a receptive posture of calm, stillness, and letting go.  The poet calls to mind something I have experienced in our Contemplative Chapel gatherings.  As we quietly ponder some of the recurring themes from contemplative tradition and consider insights from poetry, scripture, and spiritual masters through the ages, we might increasingly sense that these somewhat repetitive teachings are of a different sort. They are not teaching us as the world teaches. Rather, they are like intimations of eternity that soothe and nourish our soul or deepest self, like lapping waves of repetitive insight at the shore of our lives, inviting us in.

Jesus said, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.” (Jn 14:27)