Home : The Voice : August 2002 

Voices

by Vic Jameson

Lighthouse May Be Metaphor for the Church

For one born about as far from the sea as is possible in the USA, a lighthouse is a thing of wonder. There were scattered beacons on the sparsely-populated plains, helping airline pilots know where they were in the dark of night; but they lacked the adventure, the romance, that boyhood’s imagination could conjure. I was well past the halfway mark of life before I first saw a lighthouse anywhere but on a picture postcard. Maybe that’s why the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse on the shores of North Carolina captured my attention so thoroughly and landed me among the millions who think of the Cape Hatteras light as something of their very own.

The lighthouse is easily the most distinctive landmark in its vicinity, in the area called the Outer Banks. It stands 180 feet tall with black and white stripes spiraling from ground to sky. It wasn’t always painted so; records speak of one and a quarter million bricks being delivered to its site. Some enthusiasts wanted the lighthouse to remain unadorned; there was some fuss, too, over what kind of stripes it should have, if any. Black and white won; if something more mundane had been chosen, imagine what good causes of argument would have been lost over, say, how the painters managed to keep their balance while applying paint at barbershop pole angles.

Other superlatives pertain, too: It’s the tallest brick lighthouse in the record books; it was established partly because a young Alexander Hamilton, later to be secretary of the U.S. Treasury, came close to losing his life in the dreadful Diamond Shoals and remembered the experience some years later as he campaigned for a light in the area.

If there’s a “Battle of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse” mentioned in any of my history books, I’ve missed such, but battles there were. Confederate troops were there even before North Carolina officially seceded from the Union; Federal sporadic fighting left the lighthouse itself in the control of one side then the other. Over-simplified, Federals wanted the light left on to warn their seamen of dangers; Confederates wanted it off because they didn’t like their foes to have access to it and didn’t have much use for it anyway. The first was built in 1803 but its tower was too low and its light too dim to be of much value. Another, erected in 1835, doesn’t seem to have made much impact. The one built in 1870, had been on duty for nearly 130 years when it was moved to a safer, more visible location in 1999. But more of that later; our story is about what happened to and because of the 1870 building most commonly known as the Cape Hatteras Light.

Soldiers (mostly) and sailors fought each other about the light but possibly the more crucial battling was in Washington and Richmond. There men of influence haggled over how the light should be repaired after times of neglect; how it should be protected after storm winds and waves washed the sand away from the base, leaving it ever more vulnerable to being blown over; and whether to move the tower to some new location altogether.

The last option won out at least partly because others had been tried with little or no success. At one point, for example, Federals pumped more than three hundred thousand cubic feet of sand in front of the lighthouse, only to see it wash away almost immediately. Later the Park Service tried sandbags to protect the foundation; again, it didn’t help.

It is here that one of the most intriguing elements in the Cape Hatteras story comes into the picture. It seems to me that the lighthouse is a metaphor of the church:

There are times and circumstances when the only way to save the church is to move it.

This is not a campaign for change. Or against it. It may be nothing more than a simpleminded rumination about our faith and how we try to live it. One thing I’m sure it is not is a material answer to a spiritual question.

If all this answers any questions for you, good. If it raises any questions, all the better.