Article January 12, 1998 Issue

Time to worship with our lives

You can seek—and find—spiritual light wherever you are.

By Zoë Landale

The Freighter, Its deck piled with wood, slid by a quarter of a mile offshore as my daughter and I were exploring the shallow caves up from the high tide mark. By the time the ship's wake reached us, we were ankle-deep in seawater, heads upside down, inspecting the underside of a boulder. Under it, furled, hung anemones perhaps an inch and a half long, some clear, some light brown. It was a shimmeringly hot July day. In the distance, I could see the splotch of yellow that was my brother's shirt. He was exploring a hump of rock that at high tide was its own island. Now, at low tide, it was part of the beach.

Sunday morning, and we were on holiday. The island we were on had neither a Christian Science church nor one of the denomination my brother attends. We had tried to hold a service down on the beach, but the restlessness and boredom of the children made us give up.

I was struggling with a financial problem in our business that appeared extremely menacing, while my brother wanted very much to draw closer to God. As the wake from the freighter sloshed up to my knees, and my daughter demanded to know what kind of weird seaweed hung from the bottom of the rock, I was still thinking about church. I really wanted some inspiration. The bright glint of water from the ocean made me think of Jesus, as we so often read in the Bible about his being by the shores of the Galilean Sea. What would he have done in similar circumstances?

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