Human Driftwood: Walking along the shore of the Resurrection

Have you ever paused to consider the ocean’s art of driftwood, walking along the shore at dawn? Ever paused at dusk as the foam chilled your feet to meditate on a silver gray block of washed up planking? Or delayed in the sandy, noon-tide heat of a beach to pick up a damp piece of worm-holed wood?

Some decorate their houses with driftwood. Others take it as a starting place for woodcarving. Most never pause to look. Like wooden driftwood, human driftwood also exists, a product of continual battering, beautiful with an otherness often neglected.

“Human driftwood is plentiful enough, but all too few are those who stand on the shore ready to gather it up,” writes English Benedictine author Hubert van Zeller in his book We Live With Our Eyes Open. In the light of Easter, perhaps we can take a moment to walk with Christ along the shore in the reality of His Resurrection, and consider what is to be found there.

To one extent or another we are all human driftwood, battered on the waves of life. Yet some are more than others: a sensitivity to “the snubbed, the strayed, the left behind, the lonely” is a sensitivity to human driftwood; “the sick and the poor are not the only ones deserving of our charity,” van Zeller writes. “There are also those who may not deserve our charity but who nevertheless require it: the impostors, the ungrateful, the tiresome people who make capital out of the generosity of others….the more it costs us to display our charity, the more directly is it a charity done to Christ.”

Yet taking notice of “human driftwood” is not a question of a stale, hypocritical, or duty sodden, kill-joy “charity”. It is a question of becoming receptive to the beauty of humanity, not only opening our eyes but training them to see the experience of loneliness, failure, and suffering, as full of potential.

One of the greatest traditional poets of our day, Richard Wilbur (1921-2017), wrote in his mid-twenties of the mysterious nature of driftwood; his 1948 poem “Driftwood” speaks of the enigmatic and lonely shaping of the wood upon the waters:

Then on the great generality of waters
Floated their singleness,
And in all that deep subsumption they were
Never dissolved;

But shaped and flowingly fretted by the waves’
Ever surpassing stress,
With the gnarled swerve and tangle of tides
Finely involved.

Men and women know this experience too: and it is the experience of never being dissolved despite floating in singleness which can give poets, artists, lovers, spinsters, and tramps the penetrating eye which perceives a poignant beauty where others see nothing but the prosaic. At the furthest extent, Christ is the most glorious example, who consented to ride on the ocean of the world’s sin, and bear its crowning marks forever on his body as a token of beauty of “excellence earned”:

Curious crowns and sceptres they look to me
Here on the gold sand,
Warped, wry, but having the beauty of
Excellence earned.

This “beauty of excellence earned” is perhaps what instinctively causes us to reverence those who have passed through great trials; why saints who survive concentration camps without despairing can be both “warped, wry” and beautiful. Trials make or break: when they break, we face the horror of shell-shock, PTSD, and addictions; when they make, we find gold seven-times refined in characters like St Athanasius, St Thomas More, or, more recently, Bl. Stefan Cardinal Wyszyński (to name but one of many survivors of communist or Nazi persecution).

They have passed through death to life even before natural death; they have washed up on the shore of the Resurrection, of Tiberias, not the Styx or Acheron.

We all have the potential to become human driftwood—and the potential to befriend it as well. Whether through the death of a loved one, unemployment, loneliness, vocational uncertainty, a failed marriage, recurrent temptations, struggle with addiction, or regular temptations, we all know men and women who are or have been “shaped and flowingly fretted by the waves’ Ever surpassing stress”.

Ours is not to repudiate but notice the “beauty of Excellence earned” as we walk along the shore of life, and gather its precious silver to our hearts. “If it costs us our comfort it is far from worthless; if it costs us our time and energy it is better still; if it costs us something in the way of shame and shyness it is certainly leading us in the way of the saints; if it costs us our reputation it is best of all,” van Zeller wisely writes.

We have much to learn, not just much to give, to those who “saved in spite of it all their dense Ingenerate grain”. People with such a deeply ingrained strength and resilience are usually excellent teachers, who have gained much wisdom from their time at sea:

In a time of continual dry abdications
And of damp complicities,
They are fit to be taken for signs, these emblems
Royally sane,

Which have ridden to homeless wreak, and long revolved
In the lathe of all the seas,
But have saved in spite of it all their dense
Ingenerate grain.

Indeed, 2023 is a time of “continual dry abdications And of damp complicities” if there ever was one, both within the Church and without. The “lathe of all the seas” never turned faster. Therefore, since “Human driftwood is plentiful enough, but all too few are those who stand on the shore ready to gather it up,” let us pause, and take note of the shores where it may be found in our lives. Those are the shores that Christ walks along, offering us the joy of His Resurrection.