Take Me to Church [#30]

I didn’t grow up in the church. I mean, I’ve been to church (for a handful of Christmas Eve services) but organized religion has never been my thing.

John grew up Catholic — really Catholic — but if you ask him now what his idea of church is, he’ll be the first to tell you that attending his church looks a lot more like throwing a stone fly on the Yellowstone or diving a wreck off the coast of Zanzibar than it does sitting in a wooden pew.

Convenient thinking, perhaps. But it seems to serve him just fine.

Years ago, a friend told me she read that if you don’t expose your children to religion by the time they’re six-years-old, they’ll have a hard time truly understanding how to have faith.

It likely goes without saying that John and I took that gamble.

We don’t take our kids to church. We haven’t reared them in religion. They’re basically godless heathens.

But, we do talk about about The Universe in similar ways to how John’s über-Catholic mom spoke of God — as a powerful entity which deserves not just acknowledgment, but deference.

At best, Wyatt is curious. Hudson, on the other hand, is eye-rollingly repulsed — he makes endless fun of the way I personify The Universe. I can’t blame him — I maybe made him faith-less (or his math-minded teenagery-ness did).

But probably mostly me. I can’t help it. It’s in my DNA.

My dad was many things: a thinker, a dreamer, a writer, a historian, an explorer, a sailor…

An agnostic.

He didn’t subscribe to most of the doctrines of organized religion, but he acknowledged the distinct possibility of an energy bigger than himself — of the potential power in the unknown, the unproven, the undefined.

Sometimes, on our walks along the Budd Bay docks, he’d get lost in the possibility of reincarnation.

"If we get to return to this planet after we die, I'm coming back as a whale. Or a blue heron. Oh, to travel the deep blue seas...or soar above them."  

To this day, when I see a heron, I pause and say an extra hello to my dad, just in case that’s where he landed.

Forrest William Wilcox, Jr. didn’t accept Christianity’s version of God, but he was quick to qualify his stance: “If there is a god,” he’d pause, “clearly, she’s a woman.”

I knew my father for just shy of 18 years. In that time, he spoke some version of that declaration approximately 723 times.

And. I. Loved it.

Our family unit consisted of one man, one woman, two daughters, and a female dog; my father had seen the light (or perhaps just hedged his bets appropriately given the abundance of X chromosomes calling the shots on his chosen playground).

At any rate, I grew up feeling both a freedom and an almost-responsibility to craft my own faith, to build my own church.

There’ve been moments in my life when I’ve envied those with deeply formed religious convictions. They have answers when I have none. They travel a clearly marked path where I stand baffled inside an impossible corn maze. They calmly whisper prayers to an attentive god while I shout obscenities into thin air like a maniac.

Contructing my own faith — my own version of prayer, my own church — has been an ongoing, though largely passive, project.

Then, we set out to sail around the world.

I still can’t articulate what I believe now (nor do I really care to) — aside from acknowledging the inexplicable magnitude of a universe I can’t begin to grasp.

But I will say, crossing an expanse of deep blue sea on a sailboat with my family has brought me just about as close to defining my church as I ever thought I’d get.

We charted our journey from Negril, Jamaica, to Bocas del Toro, Panama, at just under 600 nautical miles. No one crosses the Caribbean Sea expecting flat seas. Or cloudless nights. We chose our weather window with great care — but we’ve been fooled by forecasts before. So this time, we set off with eyes wide open.

Our forecast was about as good as it gets for a sail along our southwestern rhumb line: one- to two-meter swells, 15-knot winds just aft of our beam, and isolated squalls.

Not to be burned again, we mentally prepared for three- to four-meter seas, 25-knot winds on our nose, and a deluge of rain and lightening that would rival the apocalypse.

As it turns out, the old adage about preparing for the worst, has endured the test of time for a reason.

The usually-nasty seas mostly behaved. And, until they completely died on Day 3, the winds stayed remarkably close to our port beam — never registering a gust higher than 26 knots.

The squalls? We watched nervously as rainbowed Rorschach blots of storm cells tap danced across our chartplotter. Then, we marveled as they disappeared just before we would’ve sailed directly through them. Ruby Vi was a curling stone and she had a gold medalist sweeper just ahead of her, furiously clearing the path to her final destination.

For 101 hours, I marveled at Sailboat Magic’s sleight of hand — thoroughly mesmerized by The Universe and my own itty bitty place in it.

My church began to take shape.

We stood in awe as pods of dolphins appeared out of nowhere, hurling themselves through the air with choreographed precision, in a race to occupy the apparently-prime position just off our bow. Mom-dolphins with baby-dolphins swimming in total synchronicity with powerful and swift grace, inches from our hulls. They jumped and dived and twisted. Periodically, one or two would peel away from the pod in hot pursuit of a flying fish before returning to join the fun.

We enjoyed the company of a wayward traveler when, for the better part of a day and throughout the night, a brown booby called our port bow pulpit home. Occasionally leaving its perch for a quick fishing expedition, only to return a few minutes later with a full belly.

Bear looked at the booby through unusually patient eyes —

she kept her distance, didn’t bark, didn’t threaten our guest as she might’ve had they met under different circumstances. Instead, the two spent quite some time just staring at each other — sharing a mutual understanding that tired souls be unconditionally granted a safe place to rest.

All day every day, we were surrounded by schools of flying fish that darted about the surface of the sea like over-zealous skipping stones. The unluckiest among them met untimely deaths when Ruby Vi’s trampolines interrupted their spastic flights.

At night, we watched the sun slowly melt into a puddle of liquid gold on the water — its last remains eventually dripping behind our own horizon and into someone else’s sky.

In one particularly tense moment in the middle of my watch, just after I realized a Sécurité call on VHF Channel 16 was, in fact, a warning directed at me, a mate aboard Warship 7 hailed me directly. He repeated what I’d already deciphered: I was approaching a giant military vessel (and its various support crafts) that was in the middle of conducting “live fire drills.”

Ruby Vi needed to go away.

As I prepared to temper my panic, alter course, and lament the time we’d now lose in our Get to Bocas Before Dark race, the voice on the radio called me Captain. Repeatedly.

Panic? Gone. Worries about our arrival timing? Gone.

I am a damn captain and I can handle anything.

It’s a running complaint of mine that nearly everyone we meet instantly assumes John is the captain and I’m just the little wifey he brought along on his sailing adventure — good for cooking and homeschooling the children.

(Insert all the eye roll emojis. Add also a barf face and two poop swirls.)

Of course, this isn’t John’s fault and when we run into these chauvinists in person, he’s always quick to share the title, or even relinquish it to me entirely. But on the radio, every time someone speaks with John, they invariably, and within seconds, call him Captain.

When I’m on the radio, let alone in person, I get no such respect — no title whatsoever.

So, in the dark of night, still a hundred miles offshore, caught in an otherwise stressful situation, when that young mate aboard Warship 7 called me Captain (without hesitation, I might add), it was all I needed to pull myself together and manage the situation.

Sailboat Magic? Maybe. An aptly-timed pep talk from The Universe? Perhaps.

At any rate, somewhere between the dolphins and our brown booby guest and the flying fish, between the sunsets and the we’re-not-gonna-die sea state and the steady trade winds, between the perfectly parting storms and the Roger, Captain, I’m confident I spent a little time in church. My church, at least. Maybe John’s too.

If I can convince Wyatt and Hudson to read this post, I’m sure their eye sockets will be sore from all the eye rolling that will undoubtedly ensue.

But maybe someday, they’ll look back on these moments at sea — on their teenage years spent traveling the world — and decide their childhoods weren’t quite as secular as their parents intended them to be.

Maybe there’ll come a time when Wyatt will find himself chatting with an old blue heron about his years adventuring around the globe under the sweet spell of Sailboat Magic — comparing notes about their lives as salty sailors on the high seas.

Maybe one day, Hudson will teach his daughter how to make a wish on a shooting star. Maybe he’ll tell her stories of his nights on passage crossing the Caribbean Sea, when the Milky Way — spilt like a river of pixie dust across a moonless sky — was so bright that it alone lit up the night.

Maybe then, we’ll realize we taught our boys a little more about faith than we gave ourselves credit for.

And maybe, just maybe, when John and I are old(er) and gray(er) and we ask those two heathens to take us to church, they’ll help us aboard, hoist the main, and sail us toward a sunset for a while.