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