IN AWE

I’ll be back to regular blogging Monday but before I return to Shiites and Swift Boats, I just want to write some kind of note of gratitude to the Cape this summer. This past week reached new levels of beauty. Sometimes at the end of August or, more likely, in September, the air here gets drier and the sun clearer, and the light – ever changing – permeates everything. Colors become more themselves; the sunsets and sunrises dance with absurdly extreme tones of red and yellow and blue; the tides under the waxing moon become all the more alive with freckled, reflected light. There’s a place toward the end of the coil of sand that sends Cape Cod back in on itself that never gets old. The marshland is so shallow and the tides are so dramatic, they fill a mile-wide basin and empty it twice a day. When the ocean first starts pouring into the inlet, it looks as if the sky has suddenly leaked into the earth. And then the earth slowly becomes the sky, except for vistas of green – now reddening – dune grass, separating earth from above. To see this in the late afternoon as the sun begins to decline, to allow yourself to drift with the tide toward more sudden lagoons of sea-water, is about as close to heaven as I’ll ever get. Only the occasional horse fly reminds you that you are still on earth. People have asked me in the past what I understand by prayer. In my own life, it has meant all sorts of things: from recitation of the Rosary, to singing at Mass, to whispers before sleep, to holding a sick friend in silence. But it also must mean days like last week, where every day, if you let it, is a prayer, where the beauty of God’s creation demands your attention, and your love, and your awe.