On the rise and the fall of the ocean waves

Questions asked and re-asked

I’m sitting typing this ten meters from the Atlantic. It was raining half an hour ago, and little strings of water still drip from the pavilion roof.

I glance over at the table next to me. A man and a woman sit together, both with their phones out. Some tutorial is playing on the screen of the woman’s phone. Her back is to the ocean like she can’t see it at all.

But the ocean.

There are other people at the table with me, but I’m only doing the barest level of conversation. I’m tired—so tired.

And the ocean.

Waves crash against the shore. When I first settled down, I thought they were playful. I watched them laughing across the shore and wondered at the gentleness of a powerful creature playing.

Now they’re more somber. My own weariness echoes across the waves—at least I think it does. How much of the ocean is a mirror?

What must it be like, to be the ocean? Sending wave after wave after wave, rolling and crashing and crowning yourself in white froth.

It rises and it falls, every time, yet every time, it’s a bit different.

Or is that how we live, too? We do the same thing—we rise, we catch the light, we fall in a spray of beauty and death—and we rise again.

For some reason, Anne’s House of Dreams is the book I can’t get out of my mind as I sit here, measuring each breath, watching the ocean.

It’s a quieter one of the Anne books. She’s not going to college. She’s not helping adopt a rambunctious set of twins. There are no world wars or town meetings.

There is, instead, an ocean.

For all her love of Prince Edward Island, Anne never focuses much on the sea before moving to Four Winds Point. Trees fill her days, with their whispers and flickering shadows and musty smells.

But one of the most haunting things about Anne’s House of Dreams is the setting by the sea. The cast of characters is smaller—Anne goes weeks without seeing more than a handful of people—extended time is given to scenes where only one person is present, or where those who are there say nothing.

But the ocean.

There is a great solitude about such a shore. The woods are never solitary—they are full of whispering, beckoning, friendly life. But the sea is a mighty soul, forever moaning of some great, unshareable sorrow, which shuts it up into itself for all eternity. We can never pierce its infinite mystery—we may only wander, awed and spell-bound, on the outer fringe of it. The wood call to us with a hundred voices, but the sea has one only—a mighty voice that drowns our souls in its majestic music. The woods are human, but the sea is in the company of the archangels.¹

Maybe that’s it. The woods are human, but the sea is in the company of the archangels.

Maybe that constant rising and falling—the questions that are answered and asked and answered again—maybe that is what eternity is made of.

There are so many questions in our world. Questions we can laugh about and questions that we cannot put to words. Questions shared by generations and questions torn from a single soul.

I’m thinking of a story about Thomas Aquinas’ childhood. As the story goes, a young Thomas Aquinas was sitting in a class taught by a monk, listening to an explanation on one of God’s attributes. He waited until the end of the lesson, then raised his hand and said—“but Master, what is God?”

What indeed? We can know—we can hear—there are things we can hold to. But can we come to an end of that question?

As the sea rises and falls, gathers its strength, retreats, and does it again—as the sun lifts itself up off the horizon and lowers itself down again each night—perhaps that is the rhythm of our own questions.

And maybe it’s not even doubt. Maybe, in the face of an infinite and unrestricted God, faith is best proved in the continual asking of that question. Of knowing, like the sea knows its time, that we will never come to an end of him.

What strength to come, again and again, and what hope, to know that it will be worth it.

I think the same is true of people and of places. Our world values the new, the unexpected, the next biggest thing. But then there are stories like Anne’s House of Dreams where you can count the characters on your hand and you still discover new things about them in every chapter.

Your own home, your own work, your own neighborhood—it’s made up of a limited number of people. It can be tempting to assume there are no more questions left to ask.

There are always more questions to ask.

No wave is the same. The curve of each little mountain in the sea is different, rimmed in a different shade of blue-gray, touched by different clusters of white froth.

And though the questions and the answers may sound the same, look closer. They are not. There are enough layers and nuances to keep us asking and learning and asking again forever.

It is a task—a calling—a joy—well worth the time. Shall we begin?

1. L.M. Montogmery, Anne’s House of Dreams, McClelland, Goodchild and Stewart, 1917