The Mermaid

I know. This doesn't look like a mermaid. In fact, it's a momma manatee and her baby, floating near the building that my daughter-in-law manages in North Miami, where she snapped this photo. 


Manatees are gentle, slow-moving aquatic giants. How in the world they were ever mistaken for mermaids is confounding. You'd have to be at sea a long, long time in order to mistake this massive, whiskered-face mammal for the beautiful, seductive Little Mermaid of film and literature. However, there's no accounting for a young sailor in love--or at sea.  Legends don't need a whole lot of substance to get started.  It just needs to be a good story.



As with all legends, there is a sliver of truth hiding beneath the surface. Manatees bob upright on the surface of the water cradling their babies, much as a human would, face-to-face, as they suckle their young. Their eerily human-like faces, albeit whiskered and wrinkled, resemble a woman's--OK, not a very pretty woman, but remember--if you're an adventurer out at sea for months on end, you might just be a little desperate. If manatees are startled, they can move surprisingly fast, often slapping their fish-like tails on the water as they submerge. At least one old salt had a mammoth imagination, fell in love, and a legend was born.



Once, as a child, when I was in Sunday school, we were making a mosaic art project, gluing beans and seeds on construction paper to form Noah's Ark.  As I glued, I asked my teacher a question: "Is the story of Noah true?" The answer I got reverberated in my head for years to come. She said that it was a fable, a legend, much like the bedtime stories my parents read to me at night. That, I believe, was the beginning of my spiritual walk out the door of the church. I didn't return until years later, after much soul-searching in other religions, other cultures and alternate lifestyles.


At the heart of the cultural revolution of the 60's and 70's was a search for 'truth, peace, and love' without the trappings of the social mores of the previous generations.  I was one of those seekers, and followed my own path in pursuing truth. Thank God, He spared me the heartache that experimentation with psychedelic drugs and rampant sex left in its wake. Instead, my quest for truth took me through the study the world's great religions, in the awe-inspiring art and architecture of Europe, and in discovering new ways of looking at the world through the eyes of people from other cultures.


When I had exhausted those avenues and came away with more questions than answers, I turned back to my roots. I figured that someone had believed all those stories in the Bible, enough to produce some of the greatest art that the world has ever known (. . .a far cry from my bean mosaic of Noah's Ark).  I decided to give it a second shot.  I was given a Bible and began to read the stories of men and women who were much like me--flawed and broken, but with a kernel of faith.


The stories were thrilling and inspiring--Abraham, Moses, Noah, Jonah, David, Paul, Esther, to name a few. They fought, swore, killed, lied, cheated, you name it. Nothing was sugar-coated. Some of them fell away, some grew like solid oaks.  But they were real and believable. At some point, I began to believe in the truth of what I was reading, and it rocked my world.


Unlike the fables and legends of my childhood, the deeper I dug into the Bible, the more truth I found, and the closer I got to the real treasure: the Author of the Book, the Captain of the Ship--the Way, the Truth, the Life. 


My search was over, my question answered. I had come home to port.
But the adventure had just begun.


 "Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” John 8:32