Consider the sea, how effortlessly it is continuously present. It fills in, rounds up, becomes the edge to every gap, every low spot in the land, from a child’s trench on the sandy verge to the mightiest fjord. It presses upon the coasts with the utterest intimacy, laving each grain of sand, each water polished rock, each basalt footed cliff alike with the same ease and constancy.

“Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain,” wrote Byron; not a track do they leave that lasts more than minutes. The cleverest creations of human technology sail, in the end, on no more than sufferance and fortune. Brendan’s leather boat crossed the Atlantic; the mighty Titanic did not, and yet this same sea can be a lavish and high way from every margin in the world to every other one, imperturbable in its completeness.

Among those few things in this world which without question endure we count the sea. It has been before us--the great US, all those things of which humans are the tiniest part, those things which live for a season and pass away--and will be after us. The first being recognizable as human looked out upon the sea and saw it the same as we see it today and the last of our kind, before their eyes close in whatever misty future awaits us, will see it then the same.

God’s Spirit is like this, close upon us in every moment. Even more ancient than the sea, it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, but unlike the sea, the Spirit of God is not indifferent to us. The Spirit embraces us as the sea embraces the land, yet with infinite love and compassion; loving enough to give us radical freedom, compassionate enough to grieve with us when freedom misused results in evil; with thunderous power and rippling stillness; powerful enough to call prophets and shake kings, still enough to soothe the most troubled soul; infinite fountain of life and great purifier of all things; everchanging in aspect yet in essence ever the same. Consider the Spirit of God.

Steve