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Just Another Jim

Just Another Essay



Some Thoughts on Clarity and Proximity

Essay Posted November 27, 2007 by James E. Nelson

We were in the West Indies for a few days doing some business with Tarsus Trust, a small Nevis based trust company. The confederated islands of St. Kitts (or its more proper name, St. Christopher) and Nevis are an independent nation with a British history and British ties. The place we stayed was once a plantation owned by Fanny Nisbet, wife of Lord Horatio Nelson. Back in those days it was a sugar plantation. More recently it was a coconut plantation. But the sugar market has become so competitive that there's no longer much profit in it and the island's coconut palms have a bug. I don't know much about it, but it sounds very similar to the pine beetle that is killing off the forests of the northwest United States and British Columbia. Today all the old plantations have been converted into small motels. Tourism is easily the most important industry on both islands.

Being a thoroughgoing landlubber and northerner, I could easily go on about the azure oceans, the verdant volcanic peaks, the palm trees, and all that. If you've never experienced it first hand, it is indeed everything the movies paint it to be.

But what has struck me more than anything else is the remarkable clarity of the air. The moon was waxing toward full while we were there. Since our flight arrived just before dinner time, the first opportunity we had to see the beach was in the moonlight on a mostly clear night with scattered clouds. The Nisbet Plantation is on the windward side of the island, so a steady but brisk breeze brought breakers in from the Atlantic. The ocean sparkled in the moonlight.

But as we sat in our beach chairs I found myself continually looking skyward rather than seaward. The clouds were so crystal clear it seemed I could reach up and touch them. I hadn't realized that the clouds of Nebraska, Kansas, and Montana were a bit blurred because of the haze until I laid back and looked up at the clouds from a West Indian beach. It was as if the clarity of the air brought them into closer proximity.

I suppose humans are a lot like cattle or horses. When a herd of livestock approaches a crystal clear lake or stream to drink, their hooves quickly make the water turbid. If it is a still pond and the silt on the pond bed is extremely fine, it can take a day or two for things to settle and the water to regain its clarity. So it is with human civilization. We are not unlike Pigpen, Charlie Brown's sidekick in the Peanuts comic strip. Wherever we go, we tend to stir up a cloud of dust, because we're both industrious and very busy. Whether its farming or steel mills or automobile exhaust, we create a lot of dust to cloud up our moonlit nights.

Nevis is a very old island in terms of its Western culture. It was the headquarters of Lord Nelson, it's where Alexander Hamilton was born. It has both the oldest structure and the oldest church in the Caribbean. From important port, to important sugar and spice territory to its current status as the banking hub of the eastern Caribbean (in St. Kitts) and (in Nevis) the center of Caribbean offshore corporate activity (since Bermuda and the Bahamas revamped their privacy and secrecy laws), the two islands have always played a central role in the West Indies. Today St. Kitts (Nevis' sister island that is only two miles away) has a booming tourist industry as well. Nevis' tourist industry is far more subdued but still quite active. But given the fact that both are just a few square miles of land in the surrounding ocean, they have an extremely small environmental footprint. As a result, the air is clear beyond imagination to a person who has spent most of his life in the mountain west and the midwest.

My only comparable experience was a winter night in Alaska. But typically there were very few clouds in the sky, so the arctic night was all about the stars and, if you were fortunate enough to have them active, the northern lights. Caribbean nights, with the warm air and water are, on the other hand, all about the puffy clouds with the stars popping in and out of view.

The Christian mystics of both east and west speak of clarity of vision. I first became aware of the concept from the Spanish mystic known to us as St. John of the Cross. In his understanding of things, seeing God required that the chaff be burned out of one's life. (Bear with John's mixed metaphor, because in the end it works quite well.) But the pollution John talked about wasn't just internal, it spread out from us in all directions and all relationships. Like smog (a concept completely unfamiliar to John of the Cross) the chaff of sin and passions creates particulates in the spiritual air between us and God. Our glimpses of him are therefore fuzzy and out of focus.

If I understood John correctly, he claimed this is why it was dangerous for "average" people to seek mystical experience. What they see is out of focus and lacks clarity, so it is easy to be deceived; it's possible to confuse the demonic for the holy. But just as spiritual discipline (the fire of repentance) brings cleansing to the soul, it brings cleansing to the space between God and myself. The cleansing of the soul through spiritual fire allows me to look in God's direction without getting burned. And at the same time, the newly clarified air allows me to see God as God really is.

His description of the mystical experience took on a brand new dimension when seeing the moonlit clouds in the crystal clear air of Nevis. The clarity of the air made it seem the clouds were much closer. It brought me into proximity with the heavens.

Likewise, the fire of repentance not only allows us to look upon God, it brings us into proximity with God. At such times our intentions may be to look upon the sparkling sea of life, but our eyes are inevitably drawn upward toward the heavens, where there is clarity in a place that clarity didn't exist before.

Thanks be to God.