Surprised by Joy ~ (After C.S. Lewis)

"To pray means to open your hands before God." What does it mean for you to pray?

I stood at the seashore, the same seashore I had voyaged to throughout my life. I climbed the bluffs and snapped pictures of "Love is All You Need," painted on a flat granite rock beside some straggling yellow flowers. How thorny they are, I thought. They need that extra skelature to hang onto themselves and each other in the swift winds that bellow through the pacific coast. I marvelled at them for a minute, then trekked down the side of the bluff overlooking the sea, down to a beach that was wider and broader than the one I usually call home. Pacifica. For some reason, I felt self-conscious playing in the surf at Rockaway, that touchstone of beaches where I usually stay when I visit my little seaside hamlet a short trip from San Francisco. This beach seemed easier somehow, less rocky. As I made my descent I also set an intention - to ask why.

I approached the waves, smooth and shiny like cellophane being wrinkling and unwrinkling. I looked up at the blue-blue sky - it was a perfect summer day. Cool enough to feel the salt breeze on my skin, yet warm enough to go exploring in a t-shirt. I would approach the sea with questions again, years later and on a hot day, but that's a tale for another time. This was my time with whatever it was that had told me that it was here with me. The Love that kept me company when I was shell-shocked from a terrible voyage in the metal trains whizzing through cities. The translucent green light that wafted into my mother's house's bedroom window and told me that everything would be okay. The Love that sent my grandma to me during that my most uncertain time. This was my time with what I called, "You."

Was it my mother's faith that led me to the sea? She certainly loved nature, and she has a belief in a loving God who cares, who stays, to quote the Christian singer Matthew West. But hers, hers is more specific than mine. When she saw me approaching my You, she recited, half to herslef, a simple, beautiful prayer that can make you a Christian. I was touched but I didn't say it. Haven't. Following a formula someone else gave me is such a firstborn thing to do, and I'm the middle child. And I'm also the baby, so there.

I delve down into the warm sand on the bluff. Brace myself for the steep descent that I must take to get to the shoreline. I'm wearing sneakers, ones that have been with me for over a year, and I shake them off so that I'm barefoot when I reach the sea.

Looking at the waves, I start asking, pouring my heart out, "Why?" Why am I in so much pain? Why did you take the thing away from me that I so loved? Why won't you let me recover, and move on from, a lost relationship? I raised my face to the sun, its white light blinding me. My ears buzzed. I was lost in my own sad revery.

As my heartbeat stilled, I looked towards the rivulets of water snaking in and out and in front of me. I waded further out, up past my calves, until a blue-green wave made me run back towards the shore.

Focus on the now, something seemed to tell me.

But I didn't want to. I wanted to cry some more. I breathed the salty air again, torn about what to do.

Just then, a shimmering pillar of water came up from behind me, getting all me wet, standing in the shallows. It soaked my hair! My whole body was full of salt water! I laughed - Surpirse! You seemed to be saying. I'm still here.

Later, I'd sit in my best friend's church weeping as his minister talked about C.S. Lewis. Surprised by Joy was one of Lewis' essays, or maybe folios, on God. I don't know the exact context that Lewis wrote it for, but it was also after a loss.

Surprise! It wasn't an accident.