Pacific

At the edges of the infinite. Between Green and Orange. Can you smell it? It tastes like the salt air of the ocean in your mouth and it feels like that place in the highway when you know - you just know - the first glimpse of the sea is around the next corner. It's not that you remember this part of the road or have any clue what the reflective mile marker says. It's that you can feel it. The ocean is near. The infinite beauty of the eternal Good is about to become something you can almost touch. If you look - very quickly - at just the right time - you will see it lapping at the shore.

I read a blog recently that has as its subtitle "the sky is the only infinity we will all accept - so look up." It's a good idea, of course. But ... well, I feel some small sprinkling of pity when I think of it. She must live where it's flat and the sky meets the prairie all around her. The mountains do not block her view - or shelter her - or interrupt the wind.

I can feel what she feels, but I am a daughter of the maritime northwest, and I live on the ocean side of the mountains. The huge river at the edge of our town flows out, miles and miles, out to the sea, and I know it. All day, even when I cannot see the river, I know it. The Gorge that holds the river bends and takes the water out of sight, but if you follow it, you'll see it too. Follow it, and you'll taste it. The ocean is there. It is an infinity you can taste and touch and hear. The weather in the sky pounds down onto the face of the water and the water explains it to the land. The foam whispers it at the edges. The air fills with the shadows and the searing light, and the small bit of eternity that is a human being standing at the edge knows. At the edge of the ocean, human immortality can hear the language of the infinite and touch the face of the deep and taste the water and salt.

A Sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. A parable is an earthly story with a heavenly meaning. The ocean, I think, is the place on earth where the ordinary touches the eternal.