A gentle reminder as we head into an exciting/challenging General Assembly1:
Imagine if you will, a hot summer day on the eastern seaboard – beautiful clear skies and a tide gently rolling in – or out – there’s the noise of overlapping conversations and competing radio stations, the roar of waves breaking, seagulls cawing above… children screaming with delight as they play in the surf, and a row of men – because it was mostly men when I was a kid on Cape Cod – feet stuck in the sand, watching for their children, but also watching the waves, thinking about … who knows what… as each wave that comes over their feet deposits a little sand around their toes, then their ankles, also taking away some of the sand from underneath. And sometimes a wave would bring along with it a shell, or a stone….or sometimes a crab who would scurry away, having been revealed from its watery hiding place, or at least once, a whole large conch shell, which my father held high as he shouted in joy.
And among the shells, and the sealife, and even the kelp that sometimes wrapped around ankles and caused a shudder of ick, the wave would bring a piece of sea GLASS. Sometimes it was newer, bits of a beer bottle still sharp from having recently been carelessly tossed overboard. Sometimes it was much, much, older, edges soft and worn, a burnished matte covering the glass where years of sand and salt polished and softened it.
Now, except for the conch shell, which seemed an anomaly, my father would stand there, feet sinking into the sand in his bright yellow bathing trunks (bought so that my mother could spot her husband from the plot of beach we’d staked out for the day) – Dad would just stand there, watching the tide roll in, and out, leaving for a moment the gift of a shell or a crab or a stone only to take it back a few waves later.
Except for the sea glass.
There was never much sea glass – only a few pieces ever made it all the way back home to our farmhouse in upstate New York – but to my father, those gifts of glass seemed like some sort of talisman, some gift he was personally given by the sea.
I didn’t notice it much until our last year on the Cape, when I was 12 – when my folks finally sold the broken-down trailer we spent our summers in – but I realized that my father, who never seemed very religious or into ritual, absolutely showed his gratitude for the tides, holding that precious sea glass to his heart for a moment before slipping it into his pocket – and as he extracted his now fully buried feet from the sand, he held his hands in a posture of prayer and whispered “thank you.”
I think about that moment a lot, that moment that I realized that my father was not just watching to make sure I was safe, but that something was happening for him as he stood, sometimes for an hour or more, seemingly stock still, gleaning some wisdom from the tides.
Now of course, part of that wisdom was probably just the chance to stop, be still, and give thanks in the midst of a busy work life and raising a family, and that is likely enough.
But Dad’s choices, and his gratitude, tells me it was something more.
You see, we didn’t just go when the tide was high so we could ride the waves. Dad loved low tide too, and that hour when you sense the tide changing, and if I am anything like my father, and I hope that I am, the relationship between constancy and change may be what fascinated him the most.
We know, and we hear over and over, how the only constant is change. Octavia Butler put it best when she wrote “All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change.” And so watching tides… seeing how even one high tide is different than the next, understanding the gifts those waves bring and take away… reminds us of this truth.
And when you return to the same place year after year, you see how the tides have slowly changed the coastline. Sometimes a storm comes and radically shifts the shape of an inlet. Sometimes that part of the dune cliff that seemed unshakable was indeed more precarious than we thought, and it’s come crashing down. Sometimes after a storm there is a completely different kind of debris than appeared before – driftwood where there was kelp, stones where there were shells.
And still, the tides come and go, like clockwork, always changing, always the same.
Change comes. Change changes us, yet we are always the same.
Sometimes change looks like a revelation, or a realization, or a decision, or a new habit. Sometimes change looks like a new relationship, a new house, a new job. Sometimes it looks like loss and grief. Sometimes it’s all of those things at once.
When it is just a change we personally experience, we wonder how the rest of the world is still the same. And when the change is experienced by all of us, we wonder how we will ever adjust to this new world.
This is especially true for us now, as the hard and confusing and way too long ending of the pandemic leaves us here and not, together and not, safer and not, tired and traumatized – so traumatized that we aren’t even registering major news events anymore, only trudging on, wondering how the tides can even keep going like clockwork when the world’s turned upside down.
And it’s even more true for us as we have been exploring changes to how we understand and describe that which we affirm and promote in Article II of our bylaws. Some are mourning the loss of the seven principles”, some are excited about the “seven values” and others are somewhere else, thinking change is good and not sure the way the Article II Commission has presented it should be the final answer but is on the way to describing the faith as we know it now and want it to be for the next couple of decades at least.
And how can the tides even keep going when our world is turning upside down?
In the before times, we remembered that change happens, that beloved members and staff come and go, that revelation is continuous, that change in our congregations and denomination is inevitable. In the now times, time stood still for so long – what even is time? And change seems sharper.
But change comes – like clockwork.
And it changes us. Like the tides, we have been given some gifts, and some we slipped into our pockets, and some we shouted about, but most we observed as the gifts were taken back, temporary parts of our lives.
But remember: even the shell that landed at my father’s feet for a few moments was changed too. That shell got polished a little, dried off a little, finds itself in a different place, showing its now revealed deeper colors to someone else, carrying with it the unspoken memory of being changed. As Stephen Schwartz wrote in a song for wicked “because I knew you, I have been changed for good.”
What a blessing this faith has been, and what a blessing you have been for this faith. And what a blessing the changes are - as we grow and change, so does our Unitarian Universalist faith - changing with us and for us, calling us forward, persuading us always toward goodness, kindness, justice, and of course Love. That is a blessing that never goes away.
Maybe… just maybe… my father picked up sea glass, not because it was interesting to look at, but because he understood that he, too, is like sea glass, forever, constantly changed by the wisdom of tides.
I close with these words from poet Bernadette Noll:
I want to age like sea glass. Smoothed by tides, not broken. I want the currents of life to toss me around, shake me up and leave me feeling washed clean. I want my hard edges to soften as the years pass—made not weak but supple. I want to ride the waves, go with the flow, feel the impact of the surging tides rolling in and out.
When I am thrown against the shore and caught between the rocks and a hard place, I want to rest there until I can find the strength to do what is next. Not stuck—just waiting, pondering, feeling what it feels like to pause. And when I am ready, I will catch a wave and let it carry me along to the next place that I am supposed to be.
I want to be picked up on occasion by an unsuspected soul and carried along—just for the connection, just for the sake of appreciation and wonder. And with each encounter, new possibilities of collaboration are presented, and new ideas are born.
I want to age like sea glass so that when people see the old woman I’ll become, they’ll embrace all that I am. They’ll marvel at my exquisite nature, hold me gently in their hands and be awed by my well-earned patina. Neither flashy nor dull, just a perfect luster. And they’ll wonder, if just for a second, what it is exactly I am made of and how I got to this very here and now. And we’ll both feel lucky to be in that perfectly right place at that profoundly right time.
I want to age like sea glass. I want to enjoy the journey and let my preciousness be, not in spite of the impacts of life, but because of them.
May we too change like sea glass.
Programming Note: I’ll post something next Tuesday (and a treat this Thursday for subscribers), but unless time stands still whilst in Pittsburgh for Ministry Days and General Assembly, there won’t be a post on June 20th.
A version of these remarks were delivered at The Unitarian Society in East Brunswick, NJ in November 2021.