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When I was 19, a group of friends and I were camping on a
beach in India on the Indian Ocean. It
was nighttime, and we had a campfire near the coconut palms. Understand that in India, at night, in those
years, the sky was rounded, dome-like, and the stars were thick and went on
forever. I walked away from the warmth
and the people, down to the edge of the sea where the moonlight glimmered on
the water and the phosphorous sand sparkled in the waves.
I stood there in tremendous awe of this lively vast universe. I recognized that I was standing at the
meeting place of three infinitely different and diverse worlds: land, sea and
sky. And at the same time, it felt like
a metaphor for the ‘Jungian psyche.’ The
ocean was the swirling, deep, collective unconscious. Space, full of dark and light, was like the
infinitely unlimited imagination of personal consciousness. The land, terra firma, was like the ego, that
which I am consciously aware of, that which I can see and know. Sts. Augustine or Patrick would have likened
it to the Trinity: with God represented by the ocean, source of all life,
becoming manifest on land represented by Jesus, and infused with the Holy
Spirit of the air. But to me, it was a
moment of moonlit, elemental enlightenment, which both grounded me and allowed
me to soar. To use a term by the noted
Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich, I experienced a dimension of depth. And that moment transformed and enriched my life
significantly. I call it a religious
experience.
Rachel Carson, in her book The Edge of the Sea,
begins “The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place…an elusive and
indefinable boundary.” It is a strange
and beautiful place. But I think that
part of its beauty, its thrill, its liveliness, is that it is the meeting place
of boundaries. All children love to play
the game at the beach where they run up to the water’s edge and run back,
shrieking with delight as the water comes forward. Or stand and feel the water wash away the
sand from around their feet.
Why are those moments so exciting? Perhaps because we stand there recognizing,
as I did that night, that we are on the edge, and that makes us feel quite
alive. We feel we’re on the edge of the
land and the sea, and we’re aware we are on the edge of the globe!
In fact, our whole lives are lived on the edge in other
ways also. We live on the edge between
birth and death. Not between life and
death. No, life is what we do between
birth and death. And it’s in those
moments that we’re most aware of being between that we become truly alive.
Dr. James Fowler, who has written on the psychology of
religions, woke up once in the middle of the night suddenly completely aware
that one day he would be detached from all the life around him and he would
die. He writes in his book, Stages
of Faith: “In that moment of unprecedented aloneness…I found myself
staring into the abyss of mystery that surrounds our lives. As never before I found myself asking, “When
all these persons and relations and projects that shape and fill my life are
removed, who or what is left? When this
biological embodiment of me ceases to function, is there – will there be – any
I? When the ‘I’ steps into the velvet
darkness, will there be this center of consciousness, this ‘I am,’ or not?”
This man was on the edge.
But he’s not alone. We all
are.
The word religion comes from two Latin words: ‘re’ and
‘ligare’. It means to connect
again. And that’s what religions try to
do. They try to connect us again, bring
together these two polarities in our lives, birth and death, like a yin-yang
symbol, so that we can live fully.
Beginning with our awareness of birth and death, each religion attempts
to grapple with, describe, define and re-experience the experiences of birth
and death. The description and
definitions may be different for each religion, but I think that ultimately,
we’re all standing on the same edge – between birth and death – and each
religion is trying to make sense out of what that means.
Religions also try to reconnect our little finite selves
beyond the boundary of our edge to the energy flow of something larger and
deeper. Call it the meeting place of the
immanent and the transcendent, the now and the eternal, the material world and
the spiritual world, the everyday and the extraordinary – it is at this edge
where religions live. In the Qur’an,
Sura Qaf reminds believers that the God who made the heavens and “firmly set mountains and made grow therein [something] of
every beautiful kind” also “created man and knows what his soul whispers to
him, and [is] closer to him than [his] jugular vein.”
Robert Ellwood, author
of the textbook on world religions entitled Many People, Many Faiths
describes it this way:
“For religion, the line between is not seen as solid…The
main idea behind religion is that it is full of doors and windows and much
commerce passes between the two sides.
Words and people pass through those invisible doors and the world is
full of places and occasions that are like windows to the other side. This porous borderline, where the action is,
is the realm of the religious.”
Maybe that’s another reason why the edge of the sea is so
awesomely strange and beautiful: because by being there we remember that no one
realm is the only reality that exists, just as no one view of truth is the only
one. The sea has a beauty and reality
quite different and no less real than that of land or air. Buddhism, in trying to describe nirvana to
us, said it’s like trying to explain to a fish what it’s like to walk on land
and breather. It’s impossible. Yet it doesn’t mean that the other reality
doesn’t exist. It only means that we
can’t conceive it.
The seasons remind us of being on the edge as well, for
they are different realities bound together.
In fact, perhaps part of the reason we feel most invigourated in the
fall and spring, besides the temperature, is that they are the edge seasons:
the seasons between the full ripe richness of life and the deadly dearth of life.
So it is with each religion. In
different spiritual languages, they attempt to put into words, actions and
metaphors our human experience of being on the edge between birth and life, the
known and the unknown, the here and now and the beyond. To rephrase Rachel Carson: “The edge is a strange and beautiful place…an
elusive and indefinable boundary.” Let
us savour and enjoy our time being here on the edge.
A gorgeous description of the experience from many years past--clearly it left a rich impression. And the varied authors you bring into the conversation resonate your own observations. Edges matter. I've felt similarly, too, in spiritual ways and mundane.
ReplyDeleteCan I add a few more instances to add to the formidable list you've compiled?
The best places to look for wildlife are edges. Deer and birds like the zone where woods meets meadow: fields open to the sun provide good forage, and the trees provide protective cover. Land creatures are drawn to the waters' edges, and different fish species head toward their preferred interfaces: the surface, bottom muck, reefs, or continental shelf edges.
When single cell creatures evolved into multicellular cooperative ventures, the prime directive was (and still is) to ensure that all cells retain an edge in contact with life-giving water, leading to sea sponges and vertebrate circulatory systems. On the other end of the elemental spectrum, fire depends on having sufficient surface area of the fuel in contact with the air, which is why wood shavings ignite more easily than a solid log, crumpled paper more readily than a phone book, and a silo full of corn dust more explosively than a silo full of corn.
The erotic spark, too, jumps best across edges: two bodies simultaneously separate and in contact. If lovers were fully merged or absolutely remote, they would miss "the porous border, where the action is." I borrow from above Robert Ellwood's description of religious experience advisedly, not to be glib or sacrilegious, but in the tradition of "Song of Solomon" and Rumi, where the sexual and spiritual cohabit. Edges also explain why a half-dressed lover can be more enchanting than one fully nude; the border between seen and not-seen draws us to the interplay of mystery and revelation.
Neo-Platonic Christians have seen the material world as a manifestation of the fall, a place full of separations, all reflecting an essential separation from God. Some Buddhist traditions, I believe, have a similar view of the material world in contrast to the oneness of nirvana. Not knowing much about the world beyond, I draw my lessons from this one. Borders seem essential in the material world--without zones of differential, energy would not flow and nothing would change. Absolute entropy would make experience impossible. So hooray for borders and edges. And as you say, let us savor and enjoy our time being here--on the biggest edge we know.