December 8, 2015 | II Advent, Tuesday

Ps 26, 28, 36, 39; Amos 7:10-17, Rev. 1:9-16, Matt. 22:34-46

A native of the southeast coast of Virginia, I come from a family with a rich maritime history. My Dad and my grandfather both served in the U.S. Coast Guard, and several of my uncles worked in the shipyard as welders or engineers; some of my cousins still do.

At about the age of 14, I followed my Dad's suggestion and picked up where dozens of men in my family left off. I started racing sailboats and eventually found a job through some friends on the team as a deckhand on a topsail schooner. The boat had big red sails and the captain I worked for made money taking tourists out for quick excursions along the lower half of the Chesapeake Bay.

While I didn't follow this tradition all the way to the Coast Guard Academy like my Dad may have hoped, I did discover a deep love for sailing and any excuse to be on the water. Coming out of the grocery store my Dad would point to flags flying in front of the bank across the street. A litany of questions would follow: "What's the breeze like today? What direction is it coming from? Do you think there'll be whitecaps on the water?" Flags can tell you a lot about the wind and my Dad was all too excited to teach me. "Be alert!" he would say.

My new friends on the sailing team taught me much as well. The kind of racing we did requires extraordinary attention to detail because everyone uses boats that look exactly the same. Cautiously adjusting the tension of your sails, controlling your body weight to keep the boat level sailing upwind, these are all things you need to stay attuned to if you want to go faster.

However, sailing also requires a certain comfort with waiting. A race course is like a chessboard on the water; you must constantly reexamine how the pieces have moved before making your move. You have to watch the water itself and notice how the colors shift, an old trick for following the wind.

The more I look back on it, the more I wish I could make decisions now as I did then -- with patience, my senses finely tuned to the details of this world. Thankfully, Advent is an invitation to be alert, to wait and watch more closely. As the sailors in my life taught me then and still teach me today, sometimes waiting can make all the difference.

James Morton

Advent at St. Stephen's

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