A different kind of communion
This morning, in the meeting of our Deer Isle Writers’ Group, we were prompted to write about an animal encounter. This is what I wrote …
I was a boy. I was a fish, swimming and diving, exploring the cerulean waters of the remote Catalina cove.
I was there because of my father. He came to mentor university students in the way of following Jesus and brought his family of five with him. We had driven five days from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, then taken an hour shuttle across the bay to Avalon, where we were taken by launch to Gallagher’s Bay and Campus by the Sea.
Campus by the Sea was one of several summer leadership camps developed by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. There was also Bear Trap Ranch in Colorado and Cedar Campus in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Campus in the Woods in Ontario. I had been to them all with my father, but Campus by the Sea was my favorite.
Because it was rustic and primitive and wild. We slept in tents, one-room half-walled wooden platforms with tattered canvas roofs and no amenities: no kitchen, no shower or toilet, no running water at all. We used outhouses and ate in a common mess tent and had to keep watch for rattlesnakes and wild boar. I loved it.
I was there because of my father. And I was there, in the water, because of my father. At the age of four, he taught me to swim and the waters — the clear and soothingly warm waters of Sebago or Winnepesaukee or Saturday Pond, or the clear and exhilaratingly frigid waters of Prentiss Bay on Lake Huron or Dog Lake in Ontario or Penobscot Bay — have been like a second home, another realm for me to live in and move in and be in, ever since.
I was a boy. I was a fish, swimming and diving and exploring. I spied something, something bright and shiny, maybe it was a bottle cap, on the bottom, five or six feet below me, and I dove for a closer look. As I reached for that serendipitous treasure, I happened to look up.
And I saw and I was seen.
The truth of the matter was that I straightaway swam up and away in adrenaline-infused alarm, but that is not really the truth of the matter. There was the moment of seeing and being seen, an almost timeless moment, sharing space, sharing consciousness, sharing being with something wild … almost endearing, almost a kind of communion, almost the making in that moment of a cross-species friendship, my face and its face just inches apart, I and the stingray.
David was a poet, sharing his poems with me during my tenure at the church and still as we have both lived in retirement half a country apart. His poems are sometimes hard to read, because they expose the world as it is in all its cruelty and hypocrisy and injustice, but never, never despairing, always holding up the bright light of hope, hope rooted in a compassionate and faithful God, for all to see.