Читать книгу Be Still! - Gordon C. Stewart - Страница 10

Therefore, I bend to thy resounding tides, And list the echo of thy countless waves,A lone disciple, if perchance, my soul That poor shell-gatherer, on the shores of time, May by thy lore instructed, learn of God.

—L. H. Sigourney (1850)1

As a boy I would spend hours lost in the magnificence of the tide pools that dotted the coast of Rockport, Massachusetts. Wading in the tide pools is still my favorite thing to do. The tide pools are filled with fresh seawater. They are the temporary homes that give shelter to the starfish, crabs, periwinkles, and sea anemones that are left there for a few hours at low tide.

Perhaps religion is like a tide pool, a small pool of ocean water that points us to the vast mystery of the ocean on which its life depends. The tide pools hold a few drops of a vast sea. They are filled with the ocean, but they are not the whole ocean. Their health depends on the eternal rolling of the tides to refresh them.

Wading in a tide pool, it’s easy to lose track of time.

But there are other tide pools, far back from the water’s edge, created by the unusually high waves of a storm. Unreachable by the normal daily tides that would refresh them, they are cut off from the ocean that gave them life. They are without oxygen, yellow, and covered by green-yellow slime. Their original beauty has left them to the flies.

Perhaps, like religion, the soul is like a tide pool.

Watching the news these days I feel the way the great preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick did when he put the question from his pulpit at the First Presbyterian Church in New York City, “Shall the fundamentalists win?”2 Elsewhere, in “Dear Mr. Brown: Letters to a Person Perplexed About Religion,” Fosdick wrote,

Since when has the Pacific Ocean been poured into a pint cup, that the God of this vast universe should be fully comprehended in human words? When one considers the reach of the sea over the rim of the world; thinks of the depths that no eye can pierce . . . one dare not try to put these into a teacup. So God sweeps out beyond the reach of human symbols. At once so true and so inadequate are all our words.3

I can only take responsibility from within the tide pool of my Christian faith tradition. Muslim imams, like Minneapolis Imam Makram El-Amin, are doing the same in theirs. A news story in the Star Tribune quoted him as saying, “We will stand in unity against these attacks and the appalling killing of the diplomat who was there on a peaceful mission.”4 Every pastor, rabbi, and imam is called to do the same in the face of the torrent of toxins of the yellowed tide pool.

When any religious tradition mistakes its pool for the ocean itself, when it denies the existence of neighboring tide pools along the edges of Eternity, fundamentalism wins. Things turn yellow and nasty. Only the daily refreshment of the tides can keep the tide pools fresh. Otherwise, we watch the news, asking Fosdick’s old question, praying that fundamentalism and fanaticism will not win, knowing that without the ocean tides, the tide pools will pass with time.

1. Sigourney, “To the Ocean,” in Poems for the Sea.

2. Fosdick, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” Christian Work, 716–22.

3. Miller, Harry Emerson Fosdick, 399; Fosdick, “Dear Mr. Brown.”

4. French, “Minn. Muslims Denounce Attacks.”