Visions of sorrow and boats
14/03/14 05:19
I have been told that the salinity of our tears is roughly the same around the world. That is, all humans cry with roughly the same chemistry. That same salinity is roughly the same as the waters of the world’s oceans. We carry inside us the waters of creation and when grief overwhelms us and he tears flow, we express our common connection to to the waters of our birth.
I was thinking of salt water yesterday for a very strange reason. I was meeting with a family to begin making plans for the funeral of a husband and father who died Wednesday on his 85th birthday after a short struggle with a very aggressive cancer. I was rushing from a meeting at Black Hills Works where we were wrestling with a rather complex balancing act of providing reasonable and adequate support for adults who live with disabilities while insuring their basic human rights to privacy and personal choice. It is always a challenge to achieve a fair balance and I always feel a bit out of place when defending the rights of another person who doesn’t need me to speak for them. So I was rushing from one meeting to another and I wanted to arrive at the funeral home ahead of the grieving family. I made it in time to go to the restroom and there in the very clean and tastefully decorated restroom of the funeral home was a copy of the famous Currier and Ives colored print of the 1857 schooner Magic.
Magic is a very famous boat. It was the first defender of the America’s Cup, which in those days was still known as the Queen’s Cup. In 1851, the yacht America defeated 15 English yachts to win the cup. 1870 was the first challenge and attempt by England to win back the trophy. If you are a fan of sailing, you know that the US successfully defended that and every subsequent challenge for more than a century until the Australians captured the cup in the 1983 challenge. Since that time New Zealand and Switzerland have also temporarily held the trophy, but the USA continues to dominate the sport. The queen’s cup, now known as the America’s cup, has never gone back to England.
Magic was a very special boat. It struck me as a bit silly for this famous yacht to be sailing across the wallpaper in a funeral home rest room in western South Dakota. We are people of the prairie and not known for our sailing expertise and acumen. Both the owner of the funeral home and the man whose funeral we are preparing have ties to Aberdeen, South Dakota, which unlike its Scottish namesake is far from the ocean and the business of sailing.
I was tempted to give a brief lecture in the history of sail racing to the owner of the funeral home, but the family arrived and there was other business at hand.
For some the connection between sailing and creation is as obvious as the saltwater in our tears. Both of the languages of the Bible, Hebrew and Greek, use the same word for wind and breath as is used for spirit. In both languages our spirit is literally the air that we breathe. Sailing, of course, is the art of working with the wind to propel a craft across the water. Our bible begins with the famous sentences, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void and the spirit of God was moving across the face of the water.” That word spirit, in Hebrew, is “Ruah,” which also can be translated wind. Before there was anything else, there was wind and water.
In my mind yesterday, another connection, though distant, was being made between the picture in the rest room and the grieving family. Although the schooner Magic wasn’t a yacht from the Herreshoff yards, there is no doubt that Nathaniel Greene Herreshoff is the most famous boat designer in the history of America’s cup. You can’t tell the history of the cup without telling the story of Herreshoff. What is less well-remembered is the story of the rest of Nathaniel’s family. He would not have had the means to produce the fantastic boats that he built were it not for his brother John. John was the older brother who taught Nathaniel how to sail. John also taught him how to use tools. John founded the largest of Bristol’s boatyards and grew it into a complete shipbuilding center. The Herreshoff boatyard had foundries to make the fittings and fixtures, lumber mills to produce the wood, and even a steam engine manufacturing plant. It was the product of the genius and leadership of John Herreschoff. John was one of four of the children of Charles and Julia Herreschoff who were blind. In a time before special schools for visually disabled people. In a time when a visual impairment usually meant a life of dependency, the Herreschoff children who were blind were amazing successes. John was the founder of the greatest shipyard for racing yachts. Julian was the inventor of baking powder who went on to develop a language school. Sally was a prodigious knitter who produced sweaters, hats and mittens for countless residents of Bristol. Lewis was a long distance swimmer and musician.
None of them would have gone blind had they lived a century later and met the man whose funeral we were planning. Glaucoma is hereditary. It is also treatable these days. And the ophthalmologist whose funeral we were planning had once presented a fascinating discussion of the recovery of sight for the blind for a bible study group in our church.
The family will never make the connection between tears and loss and blindness and sailing that somehow leapt from that historic print into my brain as I prepared for our meeting. But I will never be able to look at that print without thinking of the doctor with the big white mustache and his love of liturgy and worship.
We are more connected to one another than we realize. The water of our tears, the wind of our spirits and the vision of our eyes and imaginations are all precious gifts of the same Spirit that moved over the face of the waters at creation.