ON DOVER
BEACH
February 2007
We arrived early at the port of Dover where we would embark on
our voyage through the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. I had time
to stand on the deck of our ship on that cloudy morning and see
the famed White Cliffs of Dover. These cliffs were such a welcome
sight to the returning airmen of the Second World War who made
it home after their perilous bombing runs over Germany. They represented
a safe return, but also a longing for peace, a hope that the war
would soon end. Nat Burton in 1941 wrote this pop classic which
expressed that hope:
There'll be blue birds overThe white cliffs of Dover,
Tomorrow, just you wait and see.
There'll be love and laughter And peace ever after Tomorrow,
when the world is free.
Nearly a century earlier, the poet Matthew Arnold stood on Dover
Beach, not far from where our ship was docked. He, too, was impressed
with the view, but had an altogether different understanding. The
sea was calm that night; there was a melancholy sadness about it,
an eternal note that echoed across the centuries from the time
Sophocles who
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
For Matthew Arnold, it is the Sea of Faith that tests us in times
of trial and uncertainty and asks us to hold onto love as the only
thing that can help us transcend the pain of this life. He concludes
his poem, "Dover Beach," with these lines:
Ah,
love, let us be true
To
one another! for the world, which seems
To
lie before us like a land of dreams,
So
various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath
really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor
certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And
we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept
with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where
ignorant armies clash by night.
We are still on the darkling plain and ignorant armies are still
clashing by night, stumbling in the dark without clear objectives.
When shall we learn that love is more powerful than hate, and that
the world was changed by a man who took all that his enemies could
inflict on him, yet said not a word in anger, but accepted the
cross. It is strange that we worship this man, but we do not emulate
him. We acknowledge his teachings, but we do not follow them. By
our silence we are complicit in the evils of our day.
As followers of the Christ we need to do more than acknowledge
the words of love and forgiveness. We must be the embodiment of
God's love in all that we do, whether it is to persons or to nations
and societies. Let us continue to work together to achieve the
"land of dreams" of joy, love, light, certitude, peace, and help
for pain.
Dr. Harry L. Serio
|