We’ve been sitting with meditation this week as a way of sitting with God. As part of my effort to lead by example, I thought I would share some from a journaling exercise I did, coupled with meditation on a piece of artwork: “The Great Wave off Kanagawa,” by Hokusai in 1831. Before I start coping my journal excerpts, I will admit to you that this is an image that has often captivated me, often for reasons deeper than I can name. That is precisely why I chose it as a topic of meditation.
The excerpts I am going to share are not the parts where I heard God say “do this and that,” but I assure you God’s voice was heard in them in the ways they described and opened something more than the woodblock print itself. I have my doubts about whether that will come through to anyone reading, but I offer the following as an offering of vulnerability and community:
“So powerfully does the wave itself draw one’s eye that I am not sure I before noticed there were TWO boats in the foreground below the wave. Below… Surmounted. About to be crashed to ocean’s depths by a force they are powerless to resist. The rowers no doubt did everything they could to avoid this monstrous wave, and yet its tsunamic inevitability proved inescapable. The wave breaks — fractal-like — in near-resemblance of claws, and they will tear the sailors apart just as surely as if they were.”
“There is almost an anger to the wave: How dare these sailors defy the sea by floating? sailing? when the sea has declared all things must sink?”
“Even the mountain behind — Mount Fuji? — appears small, insignificant, and powerless in comparison…… a truth only underscoring the sailors’ folly.”
“But there is something about the sky…… All that negative space stands in stark rebellion against the busy and detailed thrashing of the sea. That one shape — almost anthropomorphic? or cruciform? — at least equal in height to the wave. Though the wave’s height is only temporary, the sky-shape abides.”
I hope you too are abiding. Remember, you’re a part of a Community.
Pastor Michael