On being a blue seahorse

I'm really into history. My dad- also a history buff- got me a series of biographies and books on history written for kids when I was still in grade school, and I was hooked. John Paul Jones, the Battle of Gettysburg, Queen Elizabeth I, George Washington Carver, the Battle of Britain, Ben Franklin, Ethan Allen, Toussaint Louverture, Osceola,  and other historical events and figures were all my childhood companions.

I attended fifth through eighth grades at a Lutheran parochial school where two grades shared a classroom and a teacher. Half the time, our grade was being taught; half the time, it was the other grade's turn, and we were supposed to be studying. My life could have been so much easier and my grades so much better if I'd spent that time doing my homework. But instead, I spent it reading ahead in my American and Church History textbooks, for pleasure.

Flags and coats of arms play a major role in history, and also in fiction. I'm a major fan of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, (aka Game of Thrones in its TV version) and the Dune series of science fiction books, set in a Galactic Empire far in the future. Just as is the case for nations today and in actual European history for families and nations alike, each of the Great Houses of Westeros in ASOIAF and of the Landsraad in the Dune universe had heraldic coats of arms and sigils and emblems to represent them. House Stark had the wolf; House Lannister, the lion;  House Targaryan, the dragon; House Baratheon, the stag; House Atreides, the hawk; House Corino, another lion; and House Harkonen, the griffin. Individuals often had sigils, too-personal emblems used to symbolize themselves by identifying them with characteristics of an animal or object and often placed on their belongings as a mark of ownership. In ASOF, Littlefinger has the mockingbird; in history, Richard III had the white boar, and Queen Katherine of Aragon, the first wife of Henry VIII, for some reason had the pomegranate as her sigil.

Sometimes, in moments of idle fantasy, I've thought about what I would use as a sigil if I were one of them. I suppose that I could use a "canting" (punning) sigil, like a bobcat or drops of water. But what if I decided to go deeper, and chose a sigil that described more than my name?  I've thought of ravens, talkative birds that are easily distracted by shiny objects. Unfortunately, though, they also symbolize wisdom, so I can't very well use a raven!  Pegasus, the winged horse, is a heraldic symbol for poetic inspiration (I dabble in poetry), an active mind (overactive, in my case), and even for a messenger of God. As a kid, I even thought of the planet Saturn, which held a special fascination for me for some reason and spoke to my love of astronomy and science fiction as my "sigil. "But I think I've found a more fitting one than any of them.

In heraldry, blue is the color of truth, and also of loyalty and faith. And there's a creature whose habits speak to what I've learned about dealing with the troubles and trials and worries of life which are often more than we can handle and can be overwhelming. One of my greatest faults is my tendency to worry- and, well, we all know what the "O" in "OCD" stands for, and it isn't "oranges!"

Seahorses are strange critters. Well, so am I.

They're the only species I know of in which it's the father who gives birth! At an early point in gestation, the mother transfers the babies to the father's belly. He's the one who carries them around as they develop. He's the one with the big belly. I have a big belly myself. I can identify.

Seahorses aren't very good swimmers. They have tiny fins, and they do the best they can with them. But to a great extent, they're at the mercy of the ocean currents and pretty much go where events take them. We human beings like to flatter ourselves about being in control and about getting where we want to go by the force of will. Well, sometimes willpower helps. We all admire strong-willed people and people who accomplish great things against great odds by determination and effort. But as reluctant as we are to admit it, we have far less control over our lives than we'd like, and certainly, less than we'd like to admit even to ourselves. We're all born with talents and abilities (and weaknesses and disabilities) over which we have no control and concerning which we don't get a vote. 

As Christians, of course, we believe that while the bad things aren't God's idea and that He's not particularly happy about them,  He permits them and even uses them for His purposes in assigning us our vocations and bringing us to where He wants us to be. After all, we're here to serve the purposes He intended our lives to serve from all eternity. He does us the honor of using our sufferings the way He used His own, even if we don't always see how: to heal that world. He gives the world the people we become because of our sufferings as well as because of our gifts and talents just as He gave the world Himself and the healing that flows to it from His wounds.

Our weaknesses as much as our strengths define us and guide us along certain paths rather than others. The sorrows and losses in life do the same, just as the joys and successes do.  We believe that even an ill wind that blows us in a direction we'd rather not go, a contrary current which carries us away from the goal we'd like to reach, is finally under His control, and in the end can only carry us where He intended from the beginning that we should end up.

But that makes life a difficult path to walk. It's hard to deal with the fact that the direction of our lives in general and even the events of a single day are far less under our own control than we wish, and often go where we don't want them to. Despite our faith that somehow the currents of life's ocean serve God's purposes even when they flow in what seem to be ugly directions He, no less than we, would prefer ideally hat they not go, we're still at their mercy. 

And sometimes it's not just hostile, perverse currents. Some storms and hurricanes and tsunamis come. The entire framework of our lives can collapse in an instant. A parent can be killed by a drunk driver. We can be the victim of a violent crime. A spouse or even a child can be diagnosed with terminal cancer. A pandemic from the other side of the world can suddenly strike and turn the lives of all humanity upside down. A single incident in a remote country can plunge the world into war. Or a financial disaster hits the nation, as the worst in our history suddenly hit during my parents' lifetimes. Or as now probably the second and third-worst financial crises in our history have hit only about a decade- with a pandemic on top of them!

Why? Where is God in all of this? Why doesn't He do something?  Well, He does! He does everything, in fact. And He comes to our rescue exactly in the place where we need Him: in the midst of our very suffering.

Martin Luther is supposed to have once been confronted by a parishioner who demanded to know why God permits evil, and especially why He permits the innocent to suffer. Supposedly Luther replied, that he didn't know, but that he knew where to find Someone Who did: hanging on a cross.

That doesn't give us the why. But the way these things work tells us a great deal about God, We can take comfort in what God tells us about Himself, and from what God's nature and our experience with Him tell us. But He doesn't answer our questions. If only He did! If only we knew! But when our lives are thrown into chaos by typhoons of tragedy, what we do know helps us no more than the strength we try to summon up within ourselves, only to find that the hurricane is stronger than we are. At such times, the book of the Bible which seems to speak to our lives most loudly may no longer be John or Romans, but Job.

Honest, God-fearing Job wanted to know why his life had suddenly had been torn apart. It would be OK, he said, if he only knew why. Instead of telling him why, at the end of the story, God gives a four chapter-long tongue-lashing for his presumption in even asking the question, and forgetting that it's for Job to answer to God, and not the other way around.

Job repents.

But God's most devastating rebuke is reserved for Job's friends, who had presumed to try to answer Job's question themselves! The Lord tells Job's friends to ask Job to pray that they might be forgiven. Job might have overstepped his bounds in thinking that God owed him an explanation. But at least he had known what one could call "the way of the seahorse." A seahorse- a blue one- might have been Job's sigil, if he'd had one.

Seahorses are soft, vulnerable creatures for whom a lifestyle of being carried to and fro by currents and sometimes dashed against rocks and coral can be dangerous. That's why God has given them a hard skeleton on the outside of their bodies, to protect them from all the collisions and bruising and buffeting.

But He's also given them something more. Seahorses, of course, have no hands. But they do have strong, very flexible prehensile tails. When a storm or hurricane comes and the ocean currents become too rough for the seahorse to handle he doesn't waste any time. He finds the nearest outgrowth of coral or conveniently-shaped rock or the thick stalk of a sturdy sea plant, wraps his tail tightly around it, and holds on for dear life.

He simply hangs on and rides out the storm. I don't imagine it's a pleasant experience. But when the storm passes and the ocean becomes calm again, many larger, tougher sea critters and far more accomplished swimmers are dead. But more often than not, the seahorse survives.

I think he was quoting someone else- I've done a Google search without success for the original source- but my seminary advisor and mentor, the late Dr. Ralph Quere, was fond of defining faith as "grasping the hand that has grasped us." Unlike the seahorse, we don't choose our Refuge; He tells us that in so many words: "You have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you." That's why the color of a heraldic seahorse mustn't be white or silver for peace or sincerity, and certainly not for innocence or holiness. That would be to miss the whole point. Our safety is in no property or power of our own any more than the safety of the seahorse depends on his ability as a swimmer or the power of his will. No, it needs to be blue, for the faith by which we, who have been grasped by the hand of Jesus, hold on to Him and to the goodness and love of God for dear life, especially when the storms come.

God provides even our faith, of course. But the seahorse also needs to be blue because blue is the color of the truth. We grasp the Rock of Ages because It has first grasped us- but also because it is real. Our safety is in the Rock, and not in ourselves. And it would be just as real and just as sturdy even if we didn't hang onto it. It just wouldn't do us any good that it is so real and so strong and so sturdy. It is, as the theologians say, extra nos- "outside of ourselves." We often forget that.

When I was a child, every year one of the TV networks would broadcast the musical Peter Pan starring Mary Martin. There's a scene in which Peter's fairy friend, Tinkerbelle, saves his life by drinking poison intended for him. As she lays dying, she tells Peter that she thinks she could get well if children only believed in fairies. So every year, Mary Martin would, as the expression goes, "break the fourth wall." She'd turn to the camera and beg all the children in the audience to save Tink's life by believing in fairies just as hard as they could and clapping their hands so that Tink could hear them.

Every year, every child in America would clap and believe in fairies just as hard as he or she could. And every year, Tinkerbelle would get better. Mary Martin would turn to the camera, tears of gratitude in her eyes, and thank all the children in the audience for saving Tink, and then "he" and Tinkerbelle would go off to save Wendy and the Lost Boys from Captain Hook and the pirates.

Every child of my generation passed a major milestone in our growth to adulthood the year we realized that Tinkerbelle would get better whether we clapped and believed in fairies or not. But until then, it was a truly magical moment. I just discovered that even at 70, I still tear up when I watch that scene.

Entirely too many people think of faith and how it connects us to God like that. They think that our status as children of God and His love for us depends on our clapping our hands and believing in Jesus just as hard as we can. It's a subtle but very destructive form of works-righteousness. It really turns faith from trust in something outside of ourselves into a good work or emotion which we are called upon to manufacture, and thus really save ourselves.

In a crisis, that sort of "faith" inevitably fails us, and we are ripped away by the currents, our hearts and our hopes bashed upon the rocks and torn apart by the fury of the storm.  Faith is not "believing as hard as we can" to make Jesus or our salvation real. It's not magic. And neither God nor His love for us nor Christ's death and resurrection nor our salvation are created or somehow save us because of our faith. They save us through our faith, just like the tail of a seahorse saves it by hanging on to dear life to something other and outside of itself.

The merits of Jesus and the love and mercy of God- the things we cling to in our own storms- don't save us because we somehow make them true. They are not elusive things that pop in and out of existence because we trust them. They are solid. They are rocks. They are colonies of coral They save us because they are real and strong and immovable in themselves. They save us because they are true whether or not we clap, and whether or not we believe in fairies. 

The Lord's Supper can help us wrap our metaphorical "tails" around Jesus and hang on for dear life. We have a Communion hymn in my church that contains this verse:

Yet is God here?
Oh, yes! By word and promise clear
In mouth and soul,
He makes us whole;
Christ truly present in this meal!
Oh, taste and see,
The Lord is real!

And that is what makes God's faithfulness and love things we can count on. They can never be made unreal even by our unbelief, even if we were to refuse to cling to them and a result are swept away. In themselves they remain are as real and as strong and as immovable whether we believe them or not, and whether we cling to them or not. And we have an advantage over the seahorse: the Rock we cling to provides the strength it takes to do the clinging when we don't have it ourselves. In fact, the Rock clings right back, and no storm or hurricane can tear anyone who clings to it from its grasp.

Coral can break. Rocks can be toppled. Even the strongest of aquatic plants can be uprooted. But God's love, God's faithfulness, God's truthfulness, and God's Son remain strong and immovable no matter what. That is why by clinging to them and hanging on for dear life, we are brought safely through even the worst storms the devil, the world, and even our own fallen natures can ever throw at us.

As Job put it, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him."  When all is said and done, it's not about what we know or do. It's about hanging on for dear life to the One Who does know, and Who can do all things- and Whom we trust enough to say, "Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."