“God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”
—St. Bonaventure
The sun rose through the winter Ferris wheel on the horizon and filled me with a welcome joy. I had to shut my eyes, as the glare upon the Atlantic Ocean could damage them if I kept staring into such overwhelming light. I’d woken up too early for Sunday Mass, heading to a church I’d never attended in the coastal Maine town where my elderly mother now lived. I stepped over the lined ridges of the train tracks, reaching the sea, the sun spilling an ever-widening path upon the water.
Winter beaches have always called to me, and now, I stood beholding the Ferris wheel perfectly parallel to the beach. In its off-season silhouette, no seats dangled. A monochromatic wheel that didn’t turn but will turn once again; a silver circle whose perfect shape brought St. Bonaventure’s words into my mind: “God is a circle whose center is everywhere.” Turning from the off-season playland, I scanned the wet sand, the footprints of dog paws, and the rest of the Bonaventure quote came to me: “and whose circumference is nowhere.” The ocean’s immense span held one single surfer bobbing. One dark human shape in the overpowering light, alone, ocean all around. The words of one of the hymns I’d been listening to in my car on the way to Old Orchard Beach echoed in my head.
“O the deep, deep love of Jesus / Vast, unmeasured, boundless, free / Rolling as the mighty ocean / In its fullness over me / Underneath me / All around me / Is the current of thy love / Leading onward / Leading homeward / To his glorious rest above.”
I wondered, what if this surfer is each of us? Could it be? What if we are in this sea of Jesus’ love, awash in a luminosity that spreads for miles, north and south? Vast, unmeasured, boundless, free. The surfer in that sea disappeared under the froth of the waves, then reappeared within the light. I felt my hunger for God already filled as I headed up the hill to attend Mass.
Always Returning
When we moved my mother to this town, each time I visited her, she knew me less and less, until at last she no longer recognized me as her child. She lives with 24-hour care, and I spent many sleepless nights in the little daybed in the guest room, the streetlights upon me, the window open to let in air stirring under the stars. One visit, I googled “beaches” and realized that, during the whole year of fading away as a daughter my mother knows, I was only eight minutes away from a beach.
Eight minutes! The hymn had been true for me, and I didn’t even know it, that the ocean was so near. That Jesus had been near. Lying awake, lost, lonely, terrified of what is coming for my mother, for me, for our family. He’s right here, within, but he’s also at the end of my mother’s road, if I take a left, and head straight into his love. Since then, I’ve sought God in Kennebunkport, Camp Ellis, Ogunquit, and Biddeford, whispering to the waves all that I’m holding in my heart. And now Old Orchard Beach, which I recently realized was the setting of a yellowed photo of my sister and me standing bravely in the breeze of the ocean chill, grinning in our checkered two-piece bathing suits.
I had come full circle.
We return over and over to the same place, a connection to the unswerving, the unchanging: God. There is no beginning and no end. My idea of time may be linear like the train tracks; my life had its beginning, photographed at the sea by my mother when I was a small girl, and now my mother’s life is beginning its end. But God is our circle in the Sunday morning sky, with clouds so pale they have no edges. I longed to receive Christ in the Eucharist, but first, I had found his beauty in the sunrise through a winter Ferris wheel, gray spikes and spokes radiating out from the center.
I headed back up the littered cobblestones to Mass at St. Mary’s. The soprano who sang the Psalms wavered, her voice going flat on the high notes. The priest’s homily rambled. I stared out the ordinary window, a clear view of empty tree branches moving in a blank sky. I was content and full. So, I thought, this is faith. How it turns and turns until we are windswept.
Prayer
God, as the wheel of my life turns,
let me always trust that you are within me,
at the center.
As I travel through these years, you are already there
to the places I am headed.
The center of your love shines in straight lines—
rays of light reaching farther than I can ever know, farther than I can ever see.
Boundless and free.
Amen.
