This morning as I crept out into the break of daylight, the sun shone in through a low hole in the drizzly overcast to ignite a steep rainbow in the trees and elicit a blue glow from the rainy western sky. In my morning reading I’ve been incorporating parts of the Book of Common Prayer. I use a copy I found in the basement of a used bookstore in Cambridge, where old books can be bought relatively cheaply. This one is from 1795. I wanted one that was old, but a little beat up and cheap enough I wouldn’t worry about using it casually and often. Although the strange long S (ſ) still takes ſome getting uſed to, I like the older language. So often, “updates” do damage to original intent. And it’s leather, with marbleized end-pages. Yum!
After blending a perfect cup of Mexican hot chocolate to complement the weather outside, I came across the section entitled, “Forms of Prayer to be used at Sea.” Now just to be clear, most of my life I’ve had a personal distaste for pre-written prayers, and most other things high-church as well. They always seemed to me insincere, artificial, and pompous, if not downright mechanistic, as if we needed a specific prefab “prayer to be used during one’s engine breaking down in a rural setting.” However, if one recognizes liturgical prayers merely for what they are—a well-intentioned devotional aid for true and sincere personal prayer, then they can be quite intriguing and inspiring.
In any case, I found myself taken back to the late 1700s on a large ship, with chilling salty spray and creaking, soggy wood, thousands of miles from home. A storm’s terrible wrath was mounting quickly, and a group of men huddled around someone with a small leather book who read in haste:
“Most powerful and glorious Lord God, at whose command the winds blow, and lift up the waves of the Sea, and who stillest the rage thereof; We thy creatures, but miserable sinners, do in this our great distress cry unto thee for help; Save, Lord, or else we perish. We confess, when we have been safe, and seen all things quiet about us, we have forgot thee our God, and refused to harken to the still voice of thy word, and to obey thy commandments: But now we see how terrible thou art in all thy works of wonder; the great God to be feared above all: And therefore we adore thy divine Majesty, acknowledging thy power, and imploring thy goodness. Help, Lord and save us, for thy mercies sake in Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord.”
Sitting warm and dry with only a drizzle outside did not dull the point of the passage, that we silly humans tend to suddenly cry out to God when things get really bad, and the rest of the time, we wrestle to truly comprehend his power. I’m not talking about power to punish or scare people back into submission, like an angry, insecure god. No, most of the time, most of our lives, we have things so comfortable and safe and convenient that we grapple with all sorts of other weird questions and beliefs. It’s a rare privilege when we get to experience something that shakes us to the core, and suddenly snaps life back into perspective.
I experienced this kind of thing one summer night on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake. A lightning storm blew in over the small peninsula where I lived. Reddish-purple flashes began to light up the sky all around, and thunder boomed and shook windows. I went outside to see the flashes and feel the wind. The fury grew and grew into a lightning storm like I had never experienced in my life. I lay down in the grass looking up at the sky to see as much of it at one time as I could see. The light was light a strobe—constant and overwhelming, and the thunder nearly shook the ground on which I lay. It was so big, so incomprehensibly vast and powerful compared to the scale of my own body. It was terrifying, but just terrifying enough to remind me what greatness lies beyond my own ego and tenuous life. It felt like a gift, because in that moment I could finally understand with perfect clarity all those stories I struggled to understand about people falling facedown before the presence of God as if they were dead. The feeling, the reaction, made perfect sense to me in that moment. It had nothing to do with anger. A little human has to seem angry to seem powerful. This was just sheer power, unassuming power. Even beauty, scaled to the proper magnitude, can put us back in our place and shift the reference point from which we view the world and ourselves.
In The Magician’s Nephew, C. S. Lewis imagines this kind of an encounter with beauty and the effect it would have on the common man, like Frank the Cabby:
‘Hush!’ said the Cabby. They all listened.
In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it…
‘Gawd!’ said the Cabby. ‘Ain’t it lovely?’
Then two wonders happened at the same moment. One was that the voice was suddenly joined by other voices; more voices than you could possibly count. They were in harmony with it, but far higher up the scale: cold, tingling, silvery voices. The second wonder was that the blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars. They didn’t come out gently one by one, as they do on a summer evening. One moment there had been nothing but darkness; next moment a thousand, thousand points of light leaped out – single stars, constellations, and planets, brighter and bigger than any in our world. There were no clouds. The new stars and the new voices began at exactly the same time. If you had seen and heard it, as Digory did, you would have felt quite certain that it was the stars themselves who were singing, and that it was the First Voice, the deep one, which had made them appear and made them sing.
‘Glory be!’ said the Cabby. ‘I’d ha’ been a better man all my life if I’d known there were things like this.’
I still struggle every day to find and remember those reference points of power and beauty. Fleeting experiences in my life have given me glimpses of where they lie, almost unimaginably far off in the distance, but the mere fact and assurance that they exist never ceases to comfort me. It relieves me of the burden of wrestling with my own fickle perspective that changes day to day like the weather.
