Jesus said to them, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.” For many were coming and going.” – Mark 6:31
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, in her book Gift from the Sea, echoes the call of Jesus to his disciples to come away and rest a while. In our coming and our going, Anne brings us to the shore and summons us to widen our understanding of the ebb and flow of life’s tides, to strengthen our “inner being” and to deepen our sense of self as a child of God. Each chapter begins with a description of a shell, which she would take home following her time on the ocean to remind her of an insight into life and relationships. I first came across Anne’s book on a visit to Captiva, Fla., when our son Paul was a young boy.
Anne wrote this book in 1955, while she was raising five children in Connecticut. She was married to Charles Lindbergh, who flew one of the first commercial airmail routes between Chicago and St. Louis through Springfield before becoming the first man to cross the Atlantic Ocean in an airplane. Anne was a woman familiar with the abrupt changes of life’s tides. She grew up in a family devoted to literature and public service and received a degree in English from Smith College. Anne met Lindbergh in Mexico City, where he had flown at the invitation of her father, Dwight Morrow, who was then the U.S. ambassador to Mexico. After their marriage in 1929, Anne involved herself in Charles’ flying career, accompanying him on his survey flights for future airlines. Following the tragic kidnapping and murder of their first child, the Lindberghs moved to Europe for protection and privacy. World War II meant yet another change, bringing them home to the U.S. where Anne wrote Gift from the Sea while vacationing on Captiva Island.
Amid the coming and going of a complicated and full life, Anne would retreat to the water each year for a time to reflect on her many varied and changing relationships. In the ebb and flow of the tides that shaped the shells Anne collected, she recognized that movement and change are a part of life and something to be celebrated rather than feared. She writes: “We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity – in freedom. … Each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of the relationship is valid. And my shells? They are only there to remind me that the sea recedes and returns eternally.”
A few hundred years earlier across the Atlantic Ocean, the same ebb and flow of the tides offered Galileo another gift of insight. His publication, Theory on the Tides, was part of his scientific journey toward proving Copernicus’ theory that the rotating Earth revolved around the sun. This journey brought rage and storm into Galileo’s life when the Roman Catholic Church convicted him of heresy, condemned him, forced him to recant his discoveries and confined him to house arrest. For the powers that be in Rome at that time, a world in constant motion challenged the theological doctrine of an unchanging, immovable God. The Earth revolving around the sun threatened the position of the church as the center of the world and its ability to control. It was not until 1992, 350 years after Galileo’s condemnation, that Pope John Paul II rectified one of Catholicism’s most infamous wrongs and apologized.
The commentaries for Sunday’s lectionary readings emphasized a widening circle in the ebb and flow of God’s family. We have evolved from God’s exclusive fidelity to the nation Israel through the shepherd King of David to God’s inclusive fidelity to all people: “every family in heaven and on earth” (Ephesians 3:14). In Christ’s coming and going, his ministry reached beyond the narrow flock of Israel to include all “without a shepherd.” Our fidelity to Christ’s call for inclusion requires our recognition and respect of other faith traditions in our country and around the world. The ebb and flow of God’s love is beyond our comprehension and our control.
The rhetoric that is emerging in recent politics about reclaiming America as a Christian nation is both concerning and dangerous because it echoes the kind of overreaching and excessive control demonstrated in the medieval Roman Catholic Church. Our faith is not about politics, control, hierarchy or exclusivity. This is not who we are or what we preach. The wonder of our faith is that the only constancy in this ever-changing world is the love of God, which like the sea, is wider, broader and deeper than we can comprehend.
In the coming and going of the tides within our complicated and rich lives, may we reach out with the same compassion as Christ, may we honor the ebb and flow of seeking rest and personal renewal, and may we celebrate the God whose mercy is wider than the sea.
