Describing the Ocean

The man had never seen it. That was the thing that stopped him.

Eighty-one years old, born a long way inland, and a life that never had a reason to bring him within four hundred miles of a coast. Not poverty exactly, and not fear. Just a life that went the way it went.

They were at a table after a funeral. Somebody had mentioned the beach and the old man said, mildly, that he had never been, and there was a small pause the way there is.

And he said to him: what is it like?

He had thirty years of it. He grew up in the water. He could have talked all afternoon.

And what he heard himself begin was: it is very big.

He tried again. He talked about the sound, and then about the smell before you can see it, and then about the way the horizon is not a line but a slight curve if you are looking properly.

And he stopped, halfway through a sentence about what the light does on the surface at about six in the evening, and he sat there with his mouth open and said: I cannot do this.

The old man laughed and said that was the best answer he had had all day, and they moved on to something else.

And it has been with him ever since, and here is the part that has been with him hardest.

He does the same thing about God. Exactly the same thing. He starts, he produces two or three true statements, and then somewhere in the middle he feels the whole of it slipping out the back of the sentence, and he stops, and he has always taken that as a sign that his own faith is thinner than other people's.

Stopping mid-sentence is an accurate response

I want to name the shame first, because it is the whole reason this has stayed with you.

You have been reading that stop as a shortage. As if a person with more of it, or a better grip on it, would have got to the end of the sentence, and your running out is evidence about you rather than about the subject.

Hear this, and take it as settled rather than as kindness: you did not run out. The subject is bigger than the container and it always was. That is not my read on an afternoon after a funeral, it is what stands written in Job, where a man asks whether anybody can find out the limits of God and then measures Him against exactly the thing you were trying to describe, and the same Holy Spirit who put that comparison in the book was at the table with you.

Read the measurement, because whoever wrote it knew what he was doing.

Can you fathom the mysteries of God? Can you probe the limits of the Almighty? They are higher than the heavens above, what can you do? They are deeper than the depths below, what can you know? Their measure is longer than the earth and wider than the sea.Job 11:7-9

Wider than the sea. You were sitting there having just failed to describe the sea, being told, by the book itself, that the sea is the small end of the comparison.

So the stop was not a shortage. This is yours right now rather than pending a better vocabulary: what happens to you mid-sentence is accuracy, because the written word measures God against the ocean and calls the ocean the lesser thing, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been putting more into you than your sentences were built to carry.

Now let me tell you what you did right at that table without knowing it.

When you said I cannot do this, the old man laughed and called it the best answer he had had all day. He was not being polite. In three words he learned more about the ocean than he had from the sound and the smell and the curve of the horizon, because he learned its size from the face of a man who knew it and could not say it.

Your stopping communicated. It was not the failure of the description, it was the most successful part.

And here is the guard, because a piece like this can be misused.

Nothing in this makes stopping a technique or makes silence more spiritual than speech. A person who never says anything about God is not deeper than a person who tries. The sound and the smell and the curve of the horizon were all true and all worth saying, and the old man wanted them, and if you had said nothing he would have had nothing.

Say everything you can say. Then stop when you get there, and let the stop be visible rather than covering it with a summary. What is written is that His understanding has no limit, and the Holy Spirit does something in another person through an honest silence that no amount of finishing the sentence could do.