Ahura Mazda

Way back right before Susan and I got married, I embarked on a vision quest with my men’s group.  We spent a week or so in sage-and-pine country south of Mono Lake—half the time as a whole group and half the time alone and fasting, questing after visions.  Our leader / bodhisatva, Larry Robinson, taught us to begin each day with a chant to the sun god.  The moment Helios crested the mountains, we stood facing him, spread our arms, and sang, “A-a-a-hura M-a-a-a-zda.”  Ahura Mazda, the Zoroastrian god of creation, was a welcome sight: it was c-c-cold those October nights in the high scrubland.

Each morning on the MV Explorer, a crowd of congregants gathers at the stern of the ship.  Most people have cameras: point-and-shoots, GoPros on the ends of selfie sticks, high-end SLRs with long lenses, iPhones.  We’re all quiet—sleepy or reverent or just concentrating.

We wait, we watch, we feel more than see the light change around us.

Eventually the sun pricks his way over the waves or, more commonly, peeks redly through the clouds.  A light trail blazes across the miles to the ship, igniting the wavetips.  Then the cameras really come out and chatter begins.

Noah has been enjoying the beauty around him—to some extent.  Most mornings I have succeeded in getting him up on deck for the sunrise ritual, and he enjoys it, although I think he enjoys the daddy time more than the show (he’s irritated, for instance, when I  get up off the deck chair to take a picture).  Yesterday he pointed out an orange sunset peeking in the dining hall windows.  

Noah preferring Nannie's iPad over the sunrise

Being such a hound of beauty myself, I have wondered, all the time that Noah has been with us, when and how his apprehension of beauty will truly awaken.  I have distinct memories of being young and hearing my dad, who is very sensitive to beauty in all forms, wax eloquent about a mountain vista or a Mahler symphony.  I would look or listen and say, “cool,” and turn away mostly unmoved.  Only rarely as a child did I find myself caught by a view or a melody.  The Episcopal Church liturgy definitely moved me; I remember liking a few songs; I remember enjoying the sunsets in Hawai’i when we visited during my fourth grade year.  It was adolescence that woke me up.  Only then did music and books and the night sky really go in and go deep.  It’s the same for all of us, am I right?  It’s adolescence that plugs us in and turns us on and makes it clear to us that everything matters and everything passes and so we had better love this world while we can—in full knowledge that our hearts will inevitably be broken.  That’s what happens, actually: adolescence breaks open our hearts.  It’s no wonder that we then clam up and shut down for five or eight years.

I do think it’s then that we truly begin to become spiritual—intentionally so, I mean.  Though I still think of myself as a Christian, I have over the years loosened myself from predigested answers to many of the big questions.  The result is that I now see spiritual work going on everywhere I look.  I do think we supplicants at the stern rail each morning are taking part in a religious service.  I see communion happening at each meal, as students make more room at a crammed table to let a stranger join them for lunch.  I see baptisms happening as Noah and the other kids play around the pool.  And I see God “happening” everywhere.  Although a member of a religious community (Unitarian Universalist), I am weary of years of thinking that religion only happens in church and in an approved way.

Here on the ship, in the middle of the Pacific, there is breathtaking beauty everywhere I look.  I think I could float forever just watching the ever-changing sea and the ever-changing sky, the white blaze of the Explorer’s deck framing the deep, deep blue of the open ocean.  And the people.  Noah and the other children and my colleagues and the cheerful, smart, hardworking students and the saintly crew.  We all secretly love each other and revel in each other, rocking and rolling from swell to swell as the sun gets up and chases us toward Japan.