Beach Surrender

We went to Cape Cod this weekend. In the morning I go to the beach alone to pray. My favorite beach prayer involves writing the names of each person I’m thinking about on the edge of the shore and watching as the tide comes in and gradually takes those prayers out to sea.

This weekend I wrote the names of all of our family members --his and mine, adults and kids, parents, exes, kids and their spouses too. I wrote his name and my name and the people I work with. It’s a lot of writing and a way of surrendering each person that I love

and even the people that I fuss with in my head.

 I live in the gap between wanting to make a complete surrender, making that surrender for an instant or a moment and then, seeing, even as I walk aback to my car how worry returns and how quickly my tendency to control is already back in my head.

Surrender is such an imperfect process but it is a process. I really do wonder about people who say they made their surrender once and it’s all done. Do they really never worry again? Worry means that I still think I can affect an outcome. Curiosity might be the antithesis of worry. Being able, after surrender, to wonder: “I wonder how God is going to play this one out?”

Maybe this worry of mine too is something I need to surrender.

Over and over I surrender and return. It’s familiar. The ocean’s rhythm: in and out, in and out, washing, soothing, wearing me down. Creating surrender.

Beach Prayers

I love the beach. The beach has always felt like my natural home. I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and every summer my family went to Lake Erie for a month. I grew up with that great lake surf, and then in my 20’s I started going to Cape Cod and early on I found my truest spot on earth: Coast Guard Beach in Eastham, Massachusetts.

Over the years I have been to many beautiful beaches—Elbow Beach in Bermuda being one of the first that comes to mind-- but the National Seashore on Cape Cod is my spiritual home. Over the years I have left every troubling issue, ever moment of gratitude, and every great love and great loss on Coast Guard Beach. I have sobbed there, begged there and danced there.

And amazingly I have almost always been alone there. Yes, it’s a public beach and very popular but I have been lucky and/or blessed that most mornings I arrive on the beach I have it all to myself. That may be one of the reasons I feel spiritually present on that beach.

One of the ways I pray at the beach is by writing in the sand. It’s a ritual and a habit and very centering. I take a stick or a sharp shell and I turn my back to the ocean and begin to write every issue, every person, every institution that I am struggling with. I also write the names of the people I love—living and dead, and I write things I wish for, and the questions I am presenting to God. As I work down the beach the surf nips at me and I dance and jump as the ocean starts to embrace and take into itself what I have written down.

Even when I cannot be sure there is a God or Higher Being I know there is an ocean. Any time of day that I stand on the shore and watch the ocean and tides I have no doubt that there is something bigger than me, and that Bigger Something is always my way back to God. I always leave the beach surrendered and grateful have written my prayers and sent them into the waves.