Shark Tooth Hunting

The present poses a particular paradox for the Christian. For we know that it is only in the present, in the unfolding in each and every moment – every second and split second – that we can accomplish any good. Encounter God. Be made holy. Even our memory and experience of the past unfolds strictly in the present. And we can think about, plan, and hope for the future only in the present. Indeed, the future is only encountered in the present.

It is because of the centrality of the present that in C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, the experienced demon Screwtape instructs his novice nephew Wormwood to tempt the “Patient” to live always looking back at the past, or forward to the future. The content of the past or future – whether good or ill, filled with nostalgic happiness or bitter regret – does not matter as much as its raw power to consume a person. So long as the Patient ignores the present – by being distracted by the past or the future – the devils have the upper hand. For virtue, holiness, and the will of God are only present in the present. Similarly, Evagrius Ponticus, a fourth century Christian monk and ascetic, identified acedia as perhaps the primary temptation for a novice monk; the temptation to look out the window and dream of a different life – if only I could be doing that, all would go well for me. And what is acedia? Evagrius defines it as the spiritual “lack of care.” It is “the temptation to withdraw from the narrowness of the present so as to take refuge in what is imaginary.” In other words, it is to despair of the present moment.

And yet.

Christianity is a historical religion. Events happened in the past – the Fall, the call of Abraham, the deliverance from Egyptian slavery, the Incarnation, the death and resurrection of Jesus, just to name a few – that have significant importance for the present and future. Christians believe that God works through time and in space. That the history of the world is the history of God’s salvation. That God has been, God is, and God will be active in bringing about His Kingdom.

The Christian is, therefore, called to remember (and so too the Israelite, who’s past and memory perhaps plays an even larger role in his consciousness than in a Christian’s). To remember what God has done. To cultivate a habit of holy memory. To live, in other words, partly rooted in the past. This is especially true given that the Christian naturally rejects all secular utopias, convinced that the single most important event – the incarnation of God – has already happened, and that secular notions of human progress and human perfectibility are a fairy tale and a fancy.

But the Christian must also live in hope. Which involves eschatology – the end of human history, the Second Coming, the New Heaven and the New Earth, and the Reign of God in his holy kingdom. A Christian without hope – who, for instance, despairs of the past, present, and future – is not really a Christian. Therefore, the Christian must live for, must set her gaze toward, must have a penetrating vision of the future.

Now here’s the paradox. How can a Christian live fully in the present, and halfway in the past, and three-quarters of the way in the future? This challenge, I propose, has been magnified in recent years by what I shall call the Tyranny of the Present (or perhaps, the Tyranny of the Temporal, which has a better ring). For a variety of reasons, including but not limited to loss of faith, poor education, mass media, social media, and the deification of politics, many people act as if we live in unprecedented times. That the world is changing rapidly. That events are happening the likes of which have never been witnessed before. That the apocalypse – environmental, political, spiritual – is upon us. Rejecting or acting as if beset by amnesia, we often seem uprooted and untethered from the past, uncertainly spiraling toward the future, living for the now now now of entertainment, consumption, and the daily newsfeed, basting in the Tyranny of the Temporal.

That’s at a macro level.

At the micro level, I have five young children. These five young children have many demanding needs. These demanding needs are ever before me, omnipresent almost. At times I desire to sit down and contemplate the past, to attempt to ascertain what God is doing if not at a macro world historical level, at least at a micro-me level. What’s he been up to these past 36 years? And what does he have in store for me in the future? In other words, to look at the past and to try and gaze into the future. But alas, if I sit on the couch, I inevitably soon have five boys doggy piling on top of me, quickly reminding me of the immediacy and necessity of the present.

Wishing to integrate – to live well – the past, present, and future? What’s a person to do? Or, at the very least, what am I to do?

Go shark tooth hunting on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

I recently vacationed near Venice, Florida, the “Shark Tooth Capital of the World.” Going into the trip, we hoped to find a few fossils scattered along the many miles of Gulf beaches. But we were surprised and enchanted by the sheer number of teeth lying all about. Over the course of about a week scavenging several different beaches, my wife, boys, and I found hundreds of fossilized shark teeth dropped from the mouths of sharks millions of years prior. The great diversity of size, shape, and color was delightful. Hammerheads. Great Whites. Bull sharks. And many others. A potpourri of blues, reds, yellows, blacks, grays, and dappled teeth.

There are multiple strategies for collecting these fossilized teeth. The very serious hunters don scuba or snorkeling gear and dive in deeper water further from the shoreline. These hunters are looking for the big prize: megalodon teeth. But the average hunter buys herself a “sifter,” essentially a metal pole fitted with a metal basket at the end. You scoop up sand, rocks, and shell fragments at the shoreline, sift out the sand, and dump the remains in a pile away from the water. Then you dig through the wet pile to find the shark teeth. Don’t have an overpriced sifter? No problem. Simply walk the shoreline and watch as shark teeth are literally deposited at your feet, a gift sent 5 or 10 or 15 million years before.

But my favorite method was to find a large pile of shell and rock fragments someone had deposited – and searched – the day before. Twenty-four hours later, the pile would now be thoroughly dried from Florida’s omnipresent sun, and therefore easier to search. Dozens of shark teeth previously clumped with and hidden by wet sand and rocks would now emerge as if by some magic.

I’d lay belly down in the sand, the Floridian sunbath delightful, a solid 70 degrees warmer than my home state of Minnesota, gently running my pinky or thumb over the dried fragments, brushing away the top layer and scanning the newly emerged surface for shark teeth. I could lay like that for hours. One or two or five of my children sprawled beside me or on top of me; my wife next to me; noiselessly sifting through the debris looking for buried or not-so-buried treasure. The ocean moving, in and out, in and out, at times roaring, other times barely whispering, an almost infinite expanse perpetually calling, beckoning. And the wind, sometimes a mere gentle breeze, and at others pounding, kicking up sand and shells and whipping them at my back and into my eyes. My belly feeling the gritty sand, sometimes warming it like dough on a heated oven, and at others biting into it with cold (especially the time we went to the beach before sunrise). And you just let your mind and your body go, go, go, recede, and flush like the sea.

Let the anxieties, frustrations, doubts, dreads, dreams, fears, and plans ebb, ebb, and ebb. Fully present to the present. Fully alive to and aware of the moment. Conscious of and rejoicing at the incarnation of it all. The stuff-ness of life. The this-ness of it. Its particularity. Its physicality. Skin, rocks, shells, water, salt, heat, cold, wet, dry, bones. Teeth. And part of the joy, the delight in it, is the very waste of it. The excess. Its non-utilitarian function. I mean, who really needs several hundred fossilized shark teeth (and we met folks who had collected thousands)? But this was surely part of its charm. Part of the fun. Its gratuitousness. Unnecessary. A gift. The gift of the present suddenly appearing out of the fog in clarity, goodness, and glory.

And yet.

A large portion of the joy and charm of the experience was the awareness that somehow we were touching – communicating with? – the ancient past. Pre-history. These fossils were tens of millions of years old. Unfathomable lengths of times. Not seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, years, decades, centuries, or even millennia. But millions of years. What is man that thou art mindful of him? The span of man, 70 years. Eighty for those who are strong.

In the face of the immense mystery of eternity, creation, the unfolding of time, God’s salvific plan, God’s building of a New Heaven and a New Earth, my present fears, anxieties, worries, hopes, and dreams seem slight. Laughable almost. But not mine only. The whole world’s, a world in one sense rapidly changing – but also remaining ever the same. Wars and rumors of war; disease and pandemics; natural disasters; rebellion; climate catastrophe; the apocalypse. All of it seems strangely petty when placed next to the reality of this tiny shark tooth, which fell out of a living hammerhead some ten million years ago, and through an incredibly slow process turned from bone to stone. Then over millions of years made the painfully slow trek to this beach, washed ashore at this moment, now lying at my feet at this second in time, a gift, for me to find, marvel at, and wonder: God, you who see all, know all, and love all, what are you doing? What are you up to?

But my question receives no answer. God doesn’t speak like the sea speaks, singing perpetually. Or does he? Does he speak in and through the created world? Through enormous almost infinite oceans? And blue cloudless skies? And rough sand on soft flesh? And even through tiny shark teeth, from mouths which could never speak, but which now seem to say: I’ve got this; I was there, I am here, and I will be then.

"Ancestral Great White Shark Teeth" by Ryan Somma is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.