The Great EYE

Pemaquid Lighthouse
Maine
What do you really see? 



Do you see the face in the top of the lighthouse?  That’s my son looking down at me.  What a view that is from that point—more than 15 miles out to sea. 


The lighthouse stands more than 100 feet above the crashing surf of Pemaquid Point. John Quincy Adams commissioned the lighthouse in 1827 which was later fitted for a rare Frensel lens—one of six still used in Maine.   By popular vote, Maine citizens voted this lighthouse, with the windjammer Victory Chimes, for its quarter.  

What always strikes me as I stand on that point is the real vision into the nature of things.  It takes me back to the original settlers, to the shipwrecks on those rocks, and to march of civilization over the years.  A few lines came to me which later penned this poem. 

Pemaquid Sightseer

Look through the eye of the lighthouse atop Pemaquid,

hundreds of feet above surf that pounds those cliffs 

and see more than fourteen miles of tide and time that 

stretches a two hundred year canvass of the past and 

those who first landed here.  Only the great Eye of God 

alone looks beyond what we see to the heart of people

tossed through generations upon wild seas, denying

Light for light.

What do terns know above the lighthouse, seeing

where the wind comes from and how to rest on its arms,

Or the hermit crab that sees home and how it to wear it,

With starfish grace of one movement that walks its legs?

This vision sees more than the past, but into the present

nature of things God gives to see with Seeing, sentinels

perched in hearts to light divinity and enlighten the Way.