There’s something very Kiwi about the beach; body surfing, boogie boarding or just mucking around is part of our national psych – we even do it in Dunedin! The coast is so accessible to most of our population that being water savvy is a significant part of our culture. So how do we respond when sharks of unusual size grace our swimming holes? We close the beach and scratch our heads in frustration!
No one is quite sure where the sharks came from but my guess is Australia. I’m sure the Aussies have had enough of New Zealand’s predator free status, so a few meat-eating sharks floating aimlessly around our best beaches should teach us a lesson. If global warming is a reality we have to contend with, then sharks might just be part of the long-term equation.
Oddly enough the original “Jaws” movie was on television last week and it bought back terrible memories from my childhood of not wanting to go near the water. Though I have to say, by comparison to modern day thrillers it now rates very low on the terror scale.
Most of the things that cause angst in life are circumstances or events that bully our assumptions to one side. They are experiences too big to ignore that often make a mess of our tidy existence. Sometimes it’s an actual experience like sharks at the beach, but other times it can be a piece of new information that renders our previous beliefs as untenable. It happens all the time in science and in religion too. We are shaped by what we learn, but that shaping doesn’t come easily.
I clearly remember the day my younger brother was killed in a motorcycle crash over twenty years ago. My understandable hope that our family would escape such tragedy was thrust into oblivion – our world was changed in an instant.
It’s human nature to hang on to our friends, family, hopes, beliefs and dreams – and we should always do so when those things bring us life. But when holding on begins to destroy any sense of life then it’s time to let go.
When sharks arrive in our watery paradise we don’t tend to join them. Usually we have the sense to play elsewhere. But we’re not always so sensible in other areas of life. Letting go of faulty thinking or leaving a dangerous but familiar environment always comes with a degree of grief and fear, but there is life beyond the known.
Jesus had a habit of shifting religious boundaries so people could see a bigger, loving and knowable God. You’d think such religious landscaping would have been celebrated, but sadly it wasn’t. At the end of the day we’re all a bit myopic. Yet despite the discomfort, Christ continues to offer us a new view of life and God in place of the old.
Sharks may be unwelcome intruders, but rather than ruin everything they enable us
to see new alternatives to living this daily life we have been given.
© Digby Wilkinson 2008