Riding the Waves

“And when He got into the boat, His disciples followed Him. And behold, there arose a great storm in the sea, so that the boat was covered with the waves; but He Himself was asleep. And they came to Him, and awoke Him, saying, “Save us, Lord; we are perishing! And He said to them, “Why are you timid, you men of little faith?” Then He arose, and rebuked the winds and the sea; and it became perfectly calm. And the men marveled, saying, “What kind of a man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey Him?”      

Adversity, by its definition and very nature, is an “attack” on whatever is foundational to us. When significant aspects of living become lost to us, a part of us is lost. Alas, we have no magic wand to compensate for whatever undercuts the fragile footage of life.

Beloved faces are swept beyond our touch by the ravages of death or the failures between us. Or a job disintegrates—the livelihood that was our “outer garment,” perhaps worn a bit thin at the elbows, but still part of our daily pulse, our daily bread. Or the very roof above us, our shelter and part of our identity—that which grounds and shapes us in community—is taken from us, swept away by nature or the "nature" of economics. Even losing a small accumulation of treasures that remind us who we are, where we have been in life, and who has been a part of it—even this may be a grief. A greater loss, our health—immobility, psychological problems, various afflictions that threaten our very life or bring devastation upon us and those around us. And always, the non-corporeal scars, our invisible wounds: the loss of dear ones, or the deep sickening that others’ betrayals lay upon us  . . . the robbing of our very soul. Any of these, and more, may defeat us. Grief is utterly personal, and our hearts sometimes break for reasons that seem inadequate to others. So, adversity brings to us "loss" in some form.

"Sweet are the uses of adversity..." says the bard. We do not ask for them. They are hard “gifts,” after all. We humans, who by nature cling to whatever we deem as desirable, as good, perceive the harsher blows of life as a seedbed for more bitter fruit of such kind. Passion fruit does not spring from poison oak.

And so true adversity (as opposed to the “setbacks” that fret us) is not “useful.” It does not offer solace, redemption for what is torn away, repair of the irreparable, comfort and bedding for the plundered psyche. Adversity is a great shadow that passes slowly, inexorably over us, stripping all that it touches—or a tsunami that strikes quickly, leaving a wake that leaves us breathless. We cannot fathom, cannot see beyond it.

We are set adrift in rough and alien seas, flotsam around us, flotsam within.

But consider this: Jesus rode upon that sea, in a teetering boat—asleep, incredibly, in the throes of a violent storm. The disciples, paralyzed with fear, wakened Him. The rest is history: the Christ who lay exhausted among them, weary human that He was, woke up—and rose  up—to a stature that engulfed the chaos threatening to engulf them all. He spoke into the implacable deafness of wind and water . . . and the roiling was stilled, within Him and then around Him.

Jesus doesn’t ride in our leaky boat. But . . . but, He does—if we see Him there. No, He’s not holding that fabled magic wand. He is holding our lives, lifting us—that fragile essence of us—above what threatens to engulf us.

When we see Him, when our interior eye is refocused, life itself—all that is our life—rises with His hand. He absorbs our adversity. He contains it, constrains it—prunes it down to a size we can endure. The thrashing wind and waves, our utter brokenness. He enfolds it all, bearing witness to YAHWEH’s timeless Truth. Not fact, that barren word!—but to the indefinable, immutable Life Energy, the outflow of His Authority, which keeps us, succors us.

This is sustaining Truth that we can live with and live within: Love, life, endures. No—more than endures! It’s not that He will rewind or resume the reel of our days and ways for us, move things along the familiar track, patch up our humpty-dumpty hulls. No, that’s not what endures. What we discover, slowly or in a flash of intuition, is that because He is unlimited of scope—that He once and forever rose above the violence of waves, above His own small earth-personness, beyond the loneliness of loss and sorrow—so may we. He has not perished. Nor shall we. 

He gathered up the storm and silenced it. He will gather up our storms. A silence—a release—will come. Not in the margins of our being, but the center of our seeing.

We have loved deeply and suffered deeply, or not been loved and never flowered with passion for life—a sorry seedbed indeed. But both poverties are drawn into His own sudden rising, still numb with exhaustion, His springing from a troubled slumber in the hold of that small ketch, stretching to the inner height of Heaven . . . .

He reigns there, commanding the darkened sky—containing, before our startled eyes, the uncontainable. Controlling within our ravaged souls the uncontrollable. And within Him are stored our hearts’ treasures—those we have known and lost, those we never truly recognized, and those—ah yes—those not yet bestowed that He holds in custody.

For this, all this, we may fully live again. 

~Judith