A Natural Grace

by Dee Wade

I had to put my toe into it. Orange Beach was just too close to ignore. So I drove down to the water, even though the day was dying. I hadn’t been there in years, and wasn’t sure about access. I chose the worst passage imaginable: at the end of a parking lot for an out of business tee shirt store, between one motel being refurbished and another needing it more desperately, there was a sandy path. Picking my way around construction debris, I followed it until the whole Gulf of Mexico was unveiled. I forgot about the abused shoreline behind me, kicked off my loafers and waded into the surf, knee deep. Ahh!

The ocean can make one do silly things. Its attraction is visceral. Like an awkward 13 year old boy attending his first dance with real live girls, I go to the sea in response to a deep and not well understood urge.

Marsha is a friend of mine, an elder member of the church we both serve. She is a birder like nobody’s business. She doesn’t have to see them, though she’s good with a pair of binoculars. She knows a bird by its song, and by what part of the tree it occupies or the type of ground it prefers.

Marsha herself prefers to watch birds by walking along the margins of a forest, where trees give way to field or roadside. For one, it’s easier walking, but that’s also where the birds are -- most of them, anyway. Borders bring them out and expose them as they come and go from forest to field, foraging, flocking, and flirting. At the edge where open light meets filtered light, where grassland meets woodland, a lot is going on. Creative things happen.

It’s like the shore, where big water meets big land, where liquid meets solid, where sun meets shade, where the sand is always in motion, and where, out on the horizon, open sea meets open sky. There is wonder and mystery evident at the bottom of our Synod, on beaches made of sugary sand crossed by a succession of tannin darkened rivers which finally yield to transparent Gulf waters tinted with turquoise.

We Protestant, Reformed types are cautious about naming any piece of ground as especially spiritual. We know that God is present everywhere, even on land that looks God forsaken. Some of the most sacred territory I’ve occupied has been hospital rooms where God’s saints die in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection, surrounded by people they love and who love them. On each occasion, it would have been fitting to remove my shoes, because I was standing on holy ground. Ubi charitas: where charity and love are, there is God.

Scripture warns against setting up idols “under every green tree” and holds the “high places” of the Ba’al gods in derision. We know how easily we human beings -- all of us -- can slip into worshiping special places instead of the One who made them. Anything can become an idol: money, status, popularity. An environmental zealot might revere the Grand Tetons, while a super patriot worships a nation. Too often we praise the gift and ignore the Giver.

The Celtic part of our heritage counters: yes, all that is true. But that doesn’t mean we dismiss those special places as inconsequential to our lives. No, we give thanks for the landscape enclosing radiant blessing from God. We remember where we were and what we were doing when God’s concern for our lives was revealed as clearly as if God had been speaking to us in English and with a Southern accent. We hallow such places and return to them when we need refreshment.

The Celts called them “thin places”, defined as particular areas in nature where a paper-thin membrane seems to separate this world and the other world, through which you might easily step. They are spots on this earth that shimmer with reminders of Eden and promises of heaven. Epiphanies happen in and around thin places; the truth about life, God, and the universe shines through, if just for a moment. Our faith doesn’t just have a literature, history, theology, psychology, sociology, and the like. It also has a geography. It has a sense of place.

Usually such places are, for me, shady and green: a spring, a river, a particular tree. Recently I came upon a wooded glade and turned to see a round, intricately woven spider web the size of an LP record, suspended between two healthy trees about ten feet off the ground. I noticed it because a shaft of morning light struck it just so for the few moments it could hold that angle, and the web glistened like a window of spun silver offering a peek into another reality. Then light shifted and the web blinked off, invisible.

Not long ago, however, at the margin where Alabama meets the Gulf of Mexico, I was compelled to put my toe into a more open-aired, salty, sun struck example of one of God’s thin places. I removed the shoes from my feet and stood on ground that was wet, sandy, and in motion, but nonetheless holy.