DOMINATORS OR PARTNERS: More Gifts from my Beach Chair

Scroll down and you’ll find an earlier one.  “Gifts from my beach chair” I call them. Today it’s Montauk Point, Long Island.   We park on the sand where jeeps position hundreds of yards apart, the only sounds the tumble and hiss of the rising tide, feet pressed into the sand and the sun warm on my face.  My usually active and busy mind slows with the quieting pace of my breathing.  I may doze, read a page or two of a novel, or gaze mindlessly across the expanse of the sea.  Unforced, uncontrived, more by grace than intention, things I have been diligently pondering in search of insight and understanding come into focus, make sense, become, on their own it seems, unexpectedly clearer.  In this moment I have wandered to ocean’s edge, the foam tickling my feet as I watch the tumble of waves pressing higher onto the beach as the top of the tide approaches. 

The rise of the tide is not incremental, each wave merely rising higher than the one before.  Some edge forward, while some surge forward; but others, the majority in fact, lose ground.  A true ebbing and flowing.  At closer look, the rise and flow, advance or retreat, of a given wave has everything to do with its predecessor.   Every wave is unique and one-of-a-kind, yet, as they recede, they tend to behave in one of two ways.  It may roll back gently, flowing low to the sand, “contributing” its volume and momentum to the rise of the following wave, “helping” it rise to a higher peak and stretch to a new high water mark.  Or, it may tumble back, twisting and churning, battering and fracturing the wave mounting behind it, impeding its rise.

Everything has metaphor potential to me!  I imagined each wave as a generation, a nation, an historical era, private or public sector leaders – those who have risen and crested, now receding; and, those rising and forming, seeking to crest.  Then my metaphor-making became more specific, framed now as a question:  What kind of wave will I be, will my generation be as it recedes?  How will it relate to the waves to come?  And a template for an answer was close behind. 

• Will the hegemony of militarization, the use of power as force, the strategy of “shock and awe” and “preemptive strike” yield quietly to a commitment to peace-seeking, international collaboration, shrinking defense budgets that funding for humanity can expand, or, will it strut and posture, re-arm and re-load with deadly consequences?
• Will globalized capitalism, enhancing the already rich, a rising tide that lifts yachts but swamps dinghies, yield to a democratic free-market economy that more justly allocates resources and more justly spreads wealth?
• Will the “dominator-paradigm” that has prevailed for 5,000 years yield to a “partnership paradigm,” will “power over” yield to “empowered with,” will the “survival of the fittest” yield to a “thriving of all”?
• Will the U.S. surrender its role as “sole superpower” to becoming a “nation-among-nations,” sharing the center of the global stage with nations such as China and Korea, Brazil and India, and making room for all nations to find their place?
• Will mainline Protestant denominations, in statistical free-fall for forty years, graciously liquidate their massive assets, dismantle their top-heavy and largely inefficient bureaucracies and budgets, stewarding the financial resources liberated to nurture new forms of faith expression and fund programs responding to human need?

Always seeking illumination from a progressive Christian faith perspective, it is predictable a biblical allusion would come to mind.  John the Baptist, who came to “pave the way” and announce the imminent arrival of Jesus, was encouraged by his followers to maintain his popularity and power base and compete with Jesus.  His response was focused and compact: I must decrease that he might increase.  Apt and timely advice.