Where I Stand

The sand was wet from the tide and the sun was low enough that its reflection ran straight toward me across the beach, a second light on the water-darkened ground. There was a halo around the sun, ice crystals in the upper atmosphere, the physics of refraction, and off to the left a sundog, a ghost of the sun displaced by the same mechanism, burning at the edge of the halo like a rumor of the original. I had come here to be quiet. I had come, if I am honest, to pray.

I am not sure what that word means anymore. I am not sure it matters that I am not sure.

What I know is this: the beach was empty. The Pacific moved the way it always moves, indifferent to the calendar, indifferent to the fact that this particular morning Christians in ten thousand churches were being told that death had been defeated. Somewhere people were killing each other over which name to call the thing that made the light. The halo didn’t care. The sundog didn’t care. The wet sand held the reflection and gave it back.

Every tradition I know of that has thought seriously about this, be it the Jesus of the gospels, the Buddha under his tree, the Prophet who said the whole earth is a mosque, and arrives at some version of the same instruction. Stop looking at the building. Look at what you are standing in. Look at what is looking.

I stood at the edge of the water on Easter morning and understood, not for the first time and not for the last, that what I was looking for was also what was looking. That the light was not outside me. That I was not outside the light.

There is no church I have entered that has told me this as plainly as the beach told me this morning. There is no doctrine that survives the specific weight of wet sand under your feet, the cold coming off the water, the sun doubling itself in the physics of ice and air. You are here. This is it. That is the whole of the teaching.