Early on in our now almost sixty years of marriage, my wife, Laurel, and I were lucky enough to be able to stay for a couple of weeks in the elegant North Truro, Cape Cod beach-house of an affluent friend. By that time, I had already worked my way through Thoreau’s narratives in his book, Cape Cod. So I was ready for a romantic escape that was truly both a romance and an escape, early on in my theological life.
Innocently, perhaps, Laurel and I soon found time on a sunny day to trip the light fantastic. Hand in hand, we worked our way over a few dunes to the edge of the vast Atlantic Ocean. Was that the very point, I thought to myself, where Thoreau had once taken his stand with what for him was a pristine vision of nature and then said this? Here we can stand, look East, and put the whole of America behind us.
Laurel and I then began trekking north along those vast sandy beaches. We of course lost any sense of time – why notice that the sun was sinking in the Western sky? But for some reason, as I recall it was a tidal stream in front of us that blocked our way northwards, we decided that the time had come to turn around and to begin to make our way home.
But the miles we’d walked northward were then nothing compared to the prospect of the same distance of return, we, short of breath, with aching legs, soon realized. The sun had already begun to sink below the sand hills to our right. The early evening was upon us. I felt, in those moments, as if I had no energy left; but I kept silent about that. No problem. Laurel kept trudging, more vigorously than I, or so it then seemed to me. So much for my instinctual, heroic masculinity. She appeared to be the one who was holding steady.
But another thought was, for me at that moment, even more troublesome:: were we actually going to be able to return to our romantic beach house alive?
Eventually, we made it back. There each of us eschewed a cooling and cleansing shower and collapsed on to our thin mattresses, which were built into the very structure of the building itself.
Call that adventure: trudging into Dark Infinity. Or, in the language of theologian Paul Tillich, think of us then and there as experiencing “the threat of Nonbeing.”: But whatever technical mystical or metaphysical terms might come to mind here, I, for one, learned all over again, that Luther was right when he repeatedly insisted that the hidden God whom we encounter in the world of nature is profoundly a God of wrath.*
*That that very God is revealed in beauties of nature as a God of glory is also, I believe, dramatically true. See my little book, Behold the Lilies: Jesus and the Contemplation of Nature – A Primer (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017)
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