Once-young lovers strolling hand-in-hand, an old man re-baiting his hook, a father teaching his young son to throw a cast net, a doting grandmother taking pictures of a toddler’s ventures in the water’s edge, too white bodies getting too much sun . . . a few of the sights trying vainly to diffuse the horizon’s allure.
Some might think it strange that, since childhood, the unreachable intersection of sea and sky has beckoned my vision beyond what is to what might be . . . but so it has been and is. In high school, a line of Robert Browning’s poetry spurred my early penchant for the not yet: “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for.” Subsequently, prose nourished my yearnings as I saw bits of myself in Mr. Chips, Atticus Finch and Don Quixote de la Mancha; while history made the elusive seem obtainable in the lives of George Washington Carver, Winston Churchill and George Whitefield.
This morning in my mind’s eye, I saw my father again sitting on a sand dune intently gazing oceanward. On leave from the sea battles raging in the Pacific, no doubt he was longing to see in the not yet a refutation of the philosopher’s omen, “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” Or perhaps, just perhaps, he was hoping that seemingly impossible dream might be realized at home and abroad in the lifetime of the doting little fellow sitting quietly beside him.
May it be so, Lord; may it be so!
