Meditations from a Life Raft
A long time ago I picked up Thomas Helm’s Ordeal at Sea about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis in World War II. It was July 1945. The war in the Pacific would be over in two weeks. But that was not foreseen by the cruiser’s 1,196 officers and men who, after their unescorted departure from Tinian en route to the Philippines, were either on watch or trying to sleep – when at one minute after midnight on July 30 two torpedoes struck, sinking the ship in less than twenty minutes. For five days and nights the survivors floated in life jackets and rafts over a ten-mile stretch of the ocean without water or food, subject to frequent shark attacks – until on the fifth day 317 were left.
Besides the agony of their ordeal, what especially impressed me were the fantasies that set in among the men. One thought the ship was only twenty feet below and that the cooks were still in the galley dishing out meals. Another thought he felt a fresh water river welling up from the bottom of the ocean. Others believed an island was only thirty miles away and kept paddling against the wind toward a vision of its sun drenched beach and coconut palms. In other words, I was struck by how active human faith becomes in situations of distress. These men were now reaching out with hyperactive imaginations in every direction to anticipate a happy ending to their plight.
And I thought: what a perfect metaphor of our own collective situation on this tiny globe (which is little more than a life raft adrift within a vast ocean of space) subject as we are, if not to frequent shark attacks, then to disease, war, accident, confusion. And what have we humans been doing down through the ages but envisioning scenarios of rescue. I mean, what are the works of Homer or Chaucer or Dickens or Flannery O’Connor or so many poets but aspirations of a positive outcome to our mortal existence? And what, especially, is the Bible but a heritage of creative faith telling us, by way of the story of Noah and the Exodus and Jonah and Christ’s resurrection that, far from our being hopelessly lost in time and space, we are enveloped by grace and that ultimately Christ will come walking toward us upon the water?
Of course many practical people consider our biblical interpretation of life of no scientific validity, no more than a hallucination. But such nihilists would have never been as welcome at later reunions of the Indianapolis survivors as was Lieutenant Wilbur Gwinn, the pilot who finally spotted them and initiated their rescue – who said on one of these occasions: “What were the chances you would be found? . . . What were the chances that Wilbur Gwinn would fly a course that would take him directly over you? . . . The odds . . . were one in a million. Yet somehow he was chosen as the instrument to overcome these astronomical odds. Some of my reflections have been so startling as to make me think of miracles. Sometimes I believe we are living in a world of miracles.”
Still one may ask, “What about the other 879 whom Gwinn came too late to save?” But to ask that is to underestimate the full scope of Christian faith and hope as expressed, for example, in the closing verses of the Apocalypse where the poet says: “Then I saw the heavens opened and there was a white horse; its rider was called Faithful and True . . . And the earth and the sky fled from his presence – and the sea gave up its dead. And I saw a new heaven and a new earth. For the former heaven and the former earth had passed away. And there was no more sea.” (Printed with permission from Living the Lectionary by Geoff Wood; Liturgy Training Publications, 1 800 933 1800; 2003)