Holy Brit

I was up at Berry Head - a high point over Brixham in South Devon in England. During the Napoleonic era a fort was built to guard the coast from attack. I wandered around inside the stockade and past the few remaining walls and roofless buildings. As I tried to imagine what it might have been like to live in this Fort - especially in the winter - I was struck by the constant noise of the ocean below.

Anyone who knows the Devon coastline and has watched the waves crash into the cliffs will know that the sea is not always kind and with the overcast winter sky it was a menacing gray. I imagine that the same ocean which we run to so willingly in the summer would have felt like a trap to a soldier billeted in this cold fort with its tracts of open hillside and cold sea winds.

I have often associated the ocean with God and spirituality in my own life but being up there made me wonder how many people view God like dark and angry waters. For whatever reason, people who have written off God or what they see as the idea of God as irrelevant, callous or even malicious. Then in life they are stuck out there between the world which has little sympathy and religion which can offer them no hope and certainly no comfort. Is it a wonder that our world has become all about ourselves and who we are, about self discovery and basically selfishness.

If so many people in our world place themselves in a sort of spiritual seige and than cannot back down from that position - how sad that is.

That is not the God I know - a God who does mean things and holds us somehow hostage - threatening or controlling in some oppressive way. God is not always the summer beach holiday - there is more realism to our relationship that that - but our stance must be always to release the hostage - both those literally in prison or captivity and those who find themselves lost in a wasteland of fear and hostility. Then the background noise of the water on the cold black rocks becomes not a threat, but a reminder, God breathes in our dark places.