In the mid-1950s, I was an undergraduate at the University of British Columbia. While there, three of my four summers were spent training as an Officer Cadet with the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN), the goal being a commission as a Sub-Lieutenant. The vehicle for attaining that heady rank was the RCN's University Naval Training Division, the UNTD, an acronym that led inescapably to the matelots referring to us as "The Untidies" - probably not because we were so terribly unkempt, but because our seamanship, at least initially, was often pretty inept.
Each summer, the Navy's main interest was in getting us to sea, and in our first year, we gathered from across Canada at HMCS Stadacona, the RCN's big East Coast shore base in Halifax. From there we were sent out onto the Atlantic in small ships - Algerine Escorts - apparently with the idea it wouldn't be a bad idea for us to get firsthand experience of mal de mer, and really small ships would pretty well guarantee that. And so we quickly learned two of the RCN's maxims on seasickness: 1. You'll Get No Sympathy Here- "Nelson was seasick every time he went to sea, so what's your problem, . . . Sir?" 2. Never Barf to Windward - "That nasty mess is yours to clean up, . . . Sir."
There were other things to learn of course, some of them terminological - that the ship's sharp end is the bow and the blunt end is the stern; that anything between you and the bow is forrard and the other way is aft; that up is aloft and down is below, and so on. Others were practical - no one in the real Navy ever uses a granny knot, even for a parcel to one's mother; and almost the greatest sin is to fall overboard, since turning around and picking you up wastes valuable time and is highly inconvenient. (The Greatest Sin? - to wander up to the Captain and engage him in friendly conversation.)
As I remember, the two main seamanly skills learned on that first cruise were (a) the fine art of chipping rust off the ship, and (b) the messier art of painting over the bare patches. We were quite good at the second of those, although a lot of the paint seemed to end up on us - it had the uncanny knack of migrating down our arms, staining our torsos, sometimes penetrating to undershorts, and, in one case, to socks. (This last was clearly a flagrant violation of the naval dress code, gray socks being definitely non-regulation.)
The second summer we were on the West Coast, shipping out of Esquimalt. Although now in larger ships - Frigates - seasickness was still a preoccupation for some. However, the Navy's interest now lay in our practicing the navigational skills we'd just learned at Royal Roads. First came pilotage - manageable enough, despite BC's complex coastline - but then we moved on to a bigger challenge: figuring our where the ship was when there was nothing but sea and sky to be seen. An empty sea isn't much help, but providentially there are often two very helpful references overhead, the sun and the stars. Just take readings on them, do some calculations, and presto, you know where you are. Magic!
That sounds straightforward enough in theory, but taking readings on sun and stars from a deck that keeps moving around is really tricky. It turned out in practice that our plots put the ship, quite literally, all over the map. ("That's a chart, Sir!) And then, if by happy chance one of us did manage to come up with the right location, the cunning instructor would respond with something like, "OK, that wasn't too bad. But now for the last 24 hours there's been nothing but heavy cloud . Where are you now?" Which plunges you into the unnerving field of "dead-reckoning" (i.e. educated guessing). It's called dead-reckoning because, if you're wrong by much, you and you shipmates end up drowned.
Happily, no one was naive enough to consider our efforts as in any way indicative of where the ship really was. Nonetheless, that didn't stop our examiner, the ship's Captain(!) from fuming over our approximations, especially one in which advised him his ship was high and dry, 20 miles inland of the Oregon coast.
All of the foregoing is by way of introducing a metaphor to describe much of today's Christian Church, especially in Europe and North America. Influential leaders in many, many denominations are steering their ships with a lack of precision akin to ours of 50 years ago. And these leaders have much less excuse - they have training and experience in the spiritual navigation; their decks are not pitching and heaving; they have reference points just as reliable as ours. Sure, we had the sun, but they have the Son; we had the stars, but they have the Scriptures; we had reference tables, but they have two millennia of authoritative Christian teaching.
Sometimes, in heavy overcast, we had to rely on dead-reckoning, But they don't, not ever - their navigational references are always visible. So why does their "celestial navigation" go increasingly wonky? Because they have set aside the sun and the stars to concentrate on space ephemera - the theological and scriptural equivalents of meteorites, comets, space junk, unidentified satellites, perhaps even the Norther Lights. Here today, gone in an hour. Their astronomy often approaches astrology.
My own denomination, the United Church of Canada, is a proud, confident exponent of all this nonsense. The result is that not many people want to ship on our vessel, and those who are already aboard are increasingly jumping ship. (The UCC's own statistics show our membership is now half of what it was in 1965! Is that what God had in mind for the UCC at its founding just over 70 years ago?)
Like some others, this denomination has lost its way. It's way off course. It's about to run aground and sink. In trying to be "contemporary" and "relevant" it has watered down the gospel message so much that almost no one is interested.
Mainline denominations like the UCC are in desperate need of leaders like our West Coast skipper, who didn't hesitate to be blunt about our more flagrant navigational errors. Why did he always, without fail, call us on those mistakes? Because in the real world, our blunders would have put lives at risk. That is exactly what my denomination is guilty of, . . . and here we're talking about eternal life. For his part, Jesus was pretty blunt about leaders whose navigation lead others astray (Matt 18:6).
God bless -- Geoff
PS For those who are interested, I successfully became a Sub-Lieutenant, but after a short time I went onto the inactive list, partly because being constantly seasick had become a considerable bore. Still, several years after my rustication, a letter arrived with the news I'd been belatedly promoted to Acting Lieutenant (retired). That got me thinking, and I decided to wait until the Navy offered me an Admiralship, and then I'd go back. Sadly, that promotion has still to arrive.
Recent Comments