Sophocles, Seagulls, and Desire
by Carl Mazza

Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean,...
- Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach

We sat on a bench at the edge of the beach looking out at the ocean. It was a clear, moonlit summer's evening.We were resting after a long bike ride and we soon began to talk about the projects we had both been involved with over the years--helping homeless persons and doing what things we could to end homelessness itself.

Ken Smith and I came to know each other in the mid-1980s. He was director of Delaware emergency housing services for the Salvation Army and I was heavily involved with the organization of Friendship House in Wilmington. He phoned one morning to ask if the canteen truck would be of any assistance in helping the homeless persons who were gathering for shelter in the old Friendship House thrift store on Market Street. I was surprised by his offer, even bewildered -- it was so generous, sincere, and quite unexpected. From that time We became friends and over the years we have worked together to organize projects in Maryland and Delaware.

There are a lot of pitfalls in this work, also discouragements and heartaches. The effort to establish new programs is difficult enough, even if they do not include innovative elements which stir negative emotions. Even among people who seek to do good there is often much pride, selfishness, jealousy, and fight for territory. The pure instincts to help, show mercy, to express love -- are often caught up in a swirl of mistrust and hostility. It can become very discouraging. And so we sat on the bench in the quiet of the night

discussing our mutual hopes and dreams -- some realized, but many buried in seeming failure. It was uplifting to be able to laugh at ourselves, and with the hindsight of humor to re-evaluate some wrenching and embarrassing episodes of the past in the gentler light of hindsight.

We recalled some of our mutual visions of social change. Looking back now over a couple of decades, we wondered why more could not have been achieved, and why human injustice -- albeit in many subtle, new forms -- seems to be more entrenched now in human affairs than ever before.

As we spoke, and the longer we sat, I became aware of two prevailing and persistent sounds. There was the cadence of the ocean, as ancient as Sophocles. And just as present was the intrusive, blunt conversation of the sea gulls-- their shrill, demanding calls conditioned by decades of a bizarre feeding relationship with vacationing humans. Yet, even in these ravings, their presence is as timeless as the sea. The realization soon came home to me that, even as we sat discussing what seemed to us such weighty matters, we could not alter the fact that both the sea and the sea gulls would long outlast the small concerns of our conversation-- their movements and voices, even their silliness, extending year after year, century after century into the distant ages, while our daydreams would long be gone and forgotten.

As I thought about this I felt the urgency of our cause. The time which is given any of us to make a difference, and the space which our consciousness allows us to enter, is so very brief and fleeting. Yet, especially because our concerns and interests seem so important, our action -- especially that which is heightened by the passionate desire which we feel -- must be applied in a constant hopeful practice of thoughtful commitment, even if our immediate success is elusive.

It would be so easy to despair. Against such a background of eternal changelessness -- as the order of the universe proceeds through the millennia with little thought for the feeble bluster of human activity, all our frantic action to alter the course of events could seem so futile. But my experience that night by the sea led to a far different realization. The poet Matthew Arnold said it well when he spoke of the "sea of faith," and how necessary and important it was for human beings to be surrounded and immersed in that certainty. The playwright Sophocles thought as much 25 centuries ago: the solution is not to be found in the stars or for that matter in the sea. Rather, the answer is within ourselves, if we have the courage to face it.

Like the ocean which circles the world, so our belief and hope must remain fixed. Our commitment, after all, is not to a gossamer success, but to that which is eternal and unchanging in the course of human affairs.Martin Luther King understood this so well when he said, "the moral arc of the universe is long, but it always bends toward justice."