My Body is a Wave. My Soul is the Sea.
In a metaphorical sense, we are like the ancient paradox of the ship of Theseus. We are being renewed plank by plank, which raises the mystery: Am I still me? Are you still you?
Every seven to ten years, I am a different man. My blood is not the same blood. My skin is not the same skin. Even the heart that beats within me, though it has worked faithfully since my first breath, has shed much of its substance, cell by cell. I am remade in silence, without asking for it, without noticing. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once wrote, We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.
And yet, I remain myself.
This continuity astonishes me. If I am no longer the sum of the parts I once was, then what exactly endures? When I look in the mirror, I see a face etched by time and illness. The man staring back is not the boy who once gazed at the stars in wonder, nor the young husband with laughter at the corners of his mouth. Yet he is not a stranger. Something binds all these selves into one story: mine.
Perhaps we are not things but patterns, woven again into new material. Like a melody carried across shifting instruments, the notes remain though the sound changes. Our bodies are the violins, the cellos, the flutes. But the tune persists.
Science tells me my atoms will one day return to the soil, the sea, and the stars. Faith tells me that I, the I that cannot be weighed or measured, will not vanish with them. The continuity of my body is fragile, fleeting. The continuity of my soul is another matter. When Stephen, the first Christian martyr, was stoned to death, he cried out, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Something continued to exist beyond his broken body.
And here lies the surprising comfort. If I am more than flesh and memory, then life is not a desperate clinging to what slips away but an anticipation of what endures. The pattern is not yet finished.
When I walk the shoreline in the morning, I sometimes think of the waves. Each one breaks and dissolves, yet the sea remains. My body is a wave. My soul is the sea.