Thoughts at the Beach

Nobody really likes seagulls: gray and white little birds with beady eyes gleaming with evil. They’re often obese from swallowing stolen Pringles and sandwich crust at the beach, and when they call, it’s this obnoxious high-pitched squeal: “Eow eow eow!” It’s like choking a cat.

            When I was little, my younger sister and I were playing with figurines from the movie Aladdin when a seagull swooped down and stole the monkey Abu from right in front of me. My dad chased it into the water as my sister cried, but the beast took off just as he reached to grab it.

            Damned disgusting creatures.

            In the middle of March, I biked from my house in Rockport, Massachusetts down to the beach by Bearskin Neck. It was 65 degrees—unheard of for the time of year—and a soft breeze was magically blowing tropical air off the Atlantic, sending sand into my sunscreen-lathered face and disturbing the pages of my pocket journal.

            A little girl dressed in a blue skirt was walking barefoot along the sand, her toes braving the frigid water. She was completely silent, staring into the ocean until her older brother and younger sister caught up to her. The two girls lifted their skirts, revealing bright pink underwear, and ran into the water, squealing with euphoric rebellion as they splashed each other’s feet. Their brother, donned in a striped sweater and galoshes, stood in the water for a short time, then crept up to his sisters: stealthily lifting his legs as he approached them. One could easily imagine the Mission: Impossible theme floating through his head. Before he could reach his sisters, they saw him coming, and the two girls ran away from him, skimming the edge of the water and laughing uncontrollably.

They sounded a lot like the seagulls.

Soon, the three children separated. The youngest, who could not have been older than five, was bent over, staring at the rocks as though they were diamonds. The middle contemplated the sea for a few seconds before sauntering back to her parents. The eldest trudged through the wet sand, head down, lackadaisically watching his boots drag, lost in some thought.

An old woman made her way past the children, following her miniature dachshund. She wore a knotted white rope around her neck (presumably the dog’s collar) and stopped every so often to pick up various rocks that caught her eye. Those that were truly exquisite were dropped in a small plastic bag, which already housed a small collection of stones.

            A tall man in a green velvet waistcoat, red baseball cap, and ginger beard leapt over the puddles to approach the three children—his son and daughters. Meanwhile, a stout red headed woman and her family watched their new puppy play energetically in the water, and a teenage couple in skinny jeans and Converse sneakers tried their best to keep their feet dry.

Several people stood on balconies along the coast, taking in the fresh warm air and the salty seaweedy smell of the New England Atlantic. Men rode by on motorcycles, and people behind me sat on benches, watching the small waves collapse on the pebbly sand. A female runner paused in her jog to walk onto the beach, exploring rocks for twenty minutes before heading off again, her brown ponytail bouncing with each step.

As I watched these various scenes unfold around me, I couldn’t help thinking how good it all was. Not good in the la-di-da butterflies and rainbows sense, but the good that God saw when looking over creation and “saw that it was good.” The sea was deep gray-blue, the sky bleu celeste, and people paused to ask me, “Isn’t this great?”

I’m not sure how or when, but somewhere down the line, Christians began to believe that the world was intrinsically bad—even evil; that ever since Adam and Eve ate the fruit, humanity and creation is no longer good.

But when we actually sit in God’s creation, and likewise, when we witness other people’s pure reactions to its beauty, it is impossible to believe that the world is intrinsically bad. Jews do not believe that humanity is wicked from birth—they believe that all people are primarily good. The early Hebrews would not have seen have seen Genesis as a tale of the world’s corruption, but as one of God’s power and personal love for creation—no other ancient Near Eastern creation myth mentions the creator walking with his or her creation.

There is a reason we are drawn to places like beaches and mountains, why we can’t help but stare into a sunset or lie under the stars. It’s because these things are good. Every person at the beach that day smiled as they basked in God’s creation, and I bet not one of them was an Evangelical.

I know that as I’m writing this thousands of Japanese people are suffering from the recent tsunami. The same waters I watch with wonder kill millions of people in natural disasters. I can’t pretend to explain the paradox of beauty and suffering, but I do know that the world is too good to be completely depraved, that those children playing on the beach and the woman with the rocks and the family with their dog and that glorious warm day represented pure, unadulterated goodness that could not exist in an entirely evil world.

I watched the seagulls as well that day, at first scrunching my face in disgust, but then displacing my prejudice with pure curiosity. They really are quite majestic, in all honesty: flapping their long wings as they soar low across the land, suddenly lifting up to catch a wind and gliding over the ocean into the horizon. There were a few bathing in a cold and shallow puddle, ruffling their feathers, dipping their heads, and flapping their wings. From a distance, it looked like they were playing in the water, splashing each other like children. Then two of them took off, and it seemed they were waltzing over the waters—swooping in opposing lines, circling each other, then flying away.

Seagulls are such ugly, disgusting creatures, snapping toys from children and raiding picnic baskets like the Visigoths; but for now, they were still, and it was good.