Untangling from the navy was a little complicated and I asked God to please understand if it took me a while. I was placed in the reserve with links to the SAN base at Port Elizabeth. My future seminary at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, was 80 miles inland from there but one of the schools in the college town had a naval cadet detachment and I was also attached there as an instructor. The deal was that I would report for sea duty during university vacations.
One of these stints was during the Christmas vacation of 1957/58. I was attached to the fast frigate SAS Vrystaat under one the SAN’s legendary captains, ‘Tackers’ Terry-Lloyd, when we received orders to proceed at speed to a surprising destination. Margate was the premier holiday resort on the Natal south coast and in a real-life precursor of the movie Jaws, the area had suffered nine shark attacks in quick succession, six of them fatal. There were no shark nets in those days and ‘Black December’, as it became known, caused panicked vacationers in their hundreds to pack up and trek back inland, emptying most hotels and holiday accommodation. Margate and the surrounding resorts faced a serious economic crisis. Whoever had the idea that the navy could do anything about this I wouldn’t know, but it led to us using our anti-submarine weapons in anger for the first time. On 6 January 1958 the citizens of Margate packed the headlands to watch the fearsome sight of SAS Vrystaat racing toward the beach with a fine bone in her teeth, then executing a tight turn to starboard to bring her parallel. Speeding across the bay to ensure that our stern was not blown off by the explosions, we depth-charged the sea-bottom, causing spectacular bangs and masses of water to plume into the air behind us. Then, with the rocks of the northern headland looming perilously close, another tight turn took us out into deep water. The genesis of all this spectacular action was some mad scientist’s theory that in addition to any sharks we might kill, if we could sufficiently distort the shape of the bottom of the bay, the predators would stay away. We therefore went about redesigning the bottom of Margate Bay with a will, repeating the exercise. I modestly recall that all of us showed courage and determination in the face of the foe, but some massive explosions later we had accounted for only eight enemy casualties while hundreds of dead fish unfortunately had to be classified as collateral damage. We made a final, much slower sweep with a squad of riflemen in the bows, despatching any enemy wounded while other crew members with scoop nets ensured a decent disposal of as many of the edible fish as could be handled in the ship’s galley. We had no hope of picking them all up and the mad scientist had apparently not anticipated the attraction that multiple dead fish might have for even more sharks than before. Perhaps that is why I’m still waiting for my Battle of Margate Bay campaign medal.
Ultimately – except for a six-month stint as chaplain that I tell of elsewhere – even this limited connection with the navy had to end. By the close of 1959 I was about to be appointed to my first church and had to hand in my papers. My longing to be at sea has never left me and I still feel more at home on the water than I ever did on land. One of my sons – Christopher – understands. He has the same gene and no speech is needed when we sail together.
There my spirit is always at peace.
6
The God Thing
Where does one start with God? I’m not sure that arguing about God’s existence is a helpful use of energy. We may be influenced one way or another – especially during childhood and youth – by familial or other external factors, but ultimately the choice is ours: we either build our lives around faith or we don’t.
I choose to believe.
If one makes that choice, however, a critical question is what kind of God we’re talking about. In the name of Christianity alone, a lot of different models are peddled out there, and most I wouldn’t spend the time of day with. Today’s televangelists, prosperity preachers and religious hucksters give God a bad press. Whether exploiting people’s fears of divine wrath or commodifying God into a cross between a therapist and a stockbroker, their poor theology and ill-disguised greed are persuasive arguments for atheism. But the genuine article is worth another look.
I chose faith because of the beauty of the God I grew up with.
I suppose my first sense of the numinous was linked with churchgoing in the early 1940s. At Sunday School before church I got filled in on most of the better-known Bible stories but it was when sitting in the pews with the grown-ups that I felt it. They seemed to be engaging with an invisible presence among and around them. My childish curiosity needed to locate this presence and I decided that ‘he’ must reside behind the ornate organ pipes in the old Wesley Methodist Church in central Pretoria. They made loud noises and looked impressive enough to conceal whoever everyone called ‘God’. Much of the service was spent staring at the pipes, hoping for an appearance.
More meaningful, however, was the influence of our home life on my child-soul. A quiet acknowledgement of God permeated our home. It was understated in a typically English way, with little push and a minimum of outward ritual. In grace before our meals and prayers before we slept, God was honoured as our authority, provider and guide. It was comforting to feel that there was this ‘Somebody’ above and beyond us who watched over us. But the most powerful God-moment in my early childhood had to do with Dad. One day I blundered into his study and found him at prayer. I can still see him now, on one knee, an elbow on the old horse-hair armchair next to his desk, one hand supporting his bowed head. It stopped me dead. Dad was the ultimate strength and security in my young life, yet here he was, kneeling in submission to some authority beyond himself. He wasn’t angered by my interruption, neither did he show embarrassment. If there was any impression at all, it was that he had been in deep conversation with someone and wasn’t quite ready to come away – that I had broken in on a special friendship. It was a profound parable and the impact on me was enormous.
I began to listen much more carefully to his sermons, and was increasingly drawn to the God he spoke about with such intimacy. His sharing about God included the entire biblical saga of a desert people’s fortunes and sorrows through slavery and liberation, conquest and exile, but it was his focus on the life, teaching and example of Jesus of Nazareth that captivated me most. This young Jew’s nobility of character and utter selflessness seemed to be the ultimate in human goodness, the Everest of what humanity could aspire to. More than that, it seemed that God was embodied – incarnated – in a unique way in his life, so that looking at him, one saw beyond the human and encountered the divine. Religious faith therefore, was not so much an attachment to dogma or ritual or creed as it was a friendship with Jesus. Religion was a relationship with him, and through him, with God. The heart of this relationship was discovering that one was loved, cherished, welcomed and embraced by a God whose essence was Love itself. Dad’s preaching was the beginning of my discovering that this was true for me too. More important than my knowing about God was that I was known. God knew my name.
Therefore the Sturm und Drang of hell-fire religion had no place in my upbringing. Anyway I was a stubborn little fellow and I doubt that the terror of hell would have been much of a motivator. Fear of betraying a great love was another matter. If you spend time in the company of Jesus and of people whose lives have begun to look like his, you don’t need legalistic threats of damnation to know that there are things in your life that need sorting. In the presence of real goodness my character blemishes showed up unbidden and my sense of alienation, of somehow falling short of the best I could be, was real. The most beaten up, abused word in the Bible is ‘sin’, which is sad, because the condition it refers to is real and should not be trivialised by religious legalists. Ever since humanity’s first stirrings of God-consciousness, we have had one or other form of soul-police obsessed with listing and codifying our ‘sins’, presumably to be able to tick all the boxes to their God’s satisfaction, but also to expose and exploit the guilt of others. This obsession with ‘sins’ is possibly the primary sin of religion itself. It was widespread in the time of Jesus and his refusal to buy into it was one of the things that got him into fatal trouble.
During