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Reflection for August 7 2005

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What the waves are saying

The prophet Samuel was born during a dark time in Israel's history. The nation's priests had lost interest in the God who brought them out of Egypt. They were more impressed by the gods of the Canaanites, who as a people were much more prosperous. And so they had begun to incorporate Canaanite superstitions into their own rituals just to cover all bases. The result? Israel's spiritual condition was aptly summed up in the opening lines of the 1st Book of Samuel: "The word of the Lord was rare in those days and there was no frequent vision.

Still, "the lamp of God had not yet gone out". The boy Samuel, serving at the Hebrew temple, remained innocent enough to pick up God's lingering whisper. He wasn't sure of its authenticity but he had the curiosity to say: "Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth." And what he heard was a summons from God that would produce an age of moral poetry (otherwise known as Hebrew prophecy) that would forever deepen humanity's understanding of what true freedom and humanity are all about! Of course, it took a child to catch that whisper. Adults too often lose that capacity. They become deaf to any other opinion but their own; blind to any other vision but short term gain. That was true of Samuel's era; it's true of our own modern age as well.

Take for example Mr. Dombey in Dickens' Dombey and Son. A prosperous, uncompromising businessman, he was much like the new railroads in which his Firm invested: a kind of juggernaut, determined to push his way forward, to lay track through town and countryside, to create a shambles of the landscape and people's lives, as long as it produced a profit. And he was so delighted when at last his wife produced a son named Paul to share top billing in the Firm's title: Dombey and Son! But how inconvenient that the mother should die in childbirth and that her son should remain so frail! How could Nature be so uncooperative with the will and intent of the great House of Dombey? And why was the child so pensive, so distracted as he grew to boyhood?

Well, perhaps, like Samuel, the boy (not being suited to his father's kind of world) was more susceptible to echoes and visions of another reality beyond modern materialism. For example, while convalescing by the seaside one day he awoke suddenly from his slumber and listened. His sister Florence asked him what he heard. "I want to know what it says," he answered, looking steadily in her face. "The sea, Floy, what is it that it keeps on saying?" She told him that it was only the noise of the rolling waves. "Yes, yes," he said. "But I know that they are always saying something. Always the same thing. What place is over there?" He rose up, looking eagerly at the horizon. She told him that there was another country opposite, but he said he didn't mean that; he meant further away - further away! Very often afterward, in the midst of their talk, he would break off, to try to understand what it was that the waves were always saying; and would rise up in his couch to look toward that invisible region far away.

Perhaps there's still some vestige of a child within each of us that, despite the material din generated by the Dombeys of this world, can still hear what the waves are saying - that, despite the admonition that it's only the noise of water dashing against the shore mingled with wind from some bleak quarter, there's still something within us that insists: No! it is something greater / That speaks to the heart alone / The voice of the great Creator / Dwells in that mighty tone! *

* From a poem written by Joseph Edwards Carpenter shortly after the publication of Dombey and Son.

-- Geoff Wood