We had had a fun day driving on Route One, up the Maine seacoast, but it was getting late and most restaurants were soon to be closing. We knew that the chain restaurants in the larger communities would still be open, but we wished to eat at one of the small mom and pop places. Chains have their place: they are usually dependable, you know what to expect, and when we had children with us we depended on them. With the mom and pop places, you never know how the meal will turn out, and most children when hungry like certainty and have little tolerance dealing with the different and unexpected. Then we saw a small lettered sign, pointing down a road, saying “Harbor View Restaurant.” It wasn’t in any of the guidebooks or advertised in any of the color brochures available at the regional visitor’s bureau, but we made a sharp left turn and went down a side road towards the water. At an intersection bounded by warehouses and the abandoned ruins of a former gas station, we saw a second sign, and we made another left turn, and followed the road curving down to the waterfront. There, next to the public boat landing, was the Harbor View. Its dusty gravel parking lot would have been much too small for a tour bus to turn around, and there were no lighted signs, save one stuck in the window advertising Moosehead beer and saying open. We entered, and were greeted by a pleasant waitress who appeared to have weathered many a Maine winter. “Sit anywhere you want”, she said, so we went through the bar and went out to the dining room on the porch. There was a children’s birthday party just finishing up and about two other couples across the room. We sat down at a corner table. Yes we had a harbor view, the water mark of high tide not more than 10 feet away, overlooking a small harbor. There were no kiosks offering to sell you whale watching cruises or souvenir shops advertising lobster trap tables or plastic buoy lamps. All was quiet; the few fishermen had long since tied up their boats.
The menu was plain, no pictures of prepared appetizers shipped in by a refrigerated Sysco tractor-trailer, no fancy drinks with small umbrellas or fancy mermaid swizzle sticks. Just entrées like fresh Maine scallops, haddock and shrimp, and a chicken and a beef dish. We ordered seafood and were not disappointed. It was definitely not fast food. But after the birthday cake from the party at the next table was boxed up and all the children had left, it was refreshingly quiet, as the shadows fell on the harbor and the tide crept out. After we gave our order the waitress never said, “Do you want fries with that?” or “Do you want to super size it?” It was a gentle place of hospitality and not simply a way station to maximize an economic transaction; it also became a genuine sharing of a special grace.
On vacation we tend to search out such places because they convey a genuine flavor of the place, they lock in a memory that one does not obtain any other way. The Harbor View Restaurant at Thomaston harbor is not going to appear on many maps, but for us it provided an opportunity where we, as visitors, could glimpse an honest sense of a village harbor at dusk. We paid attention to the signs that really mattered, rather than whizzing by on Route One, rushing towards a sterile destination that could have been anywhere.
In the Gospel today, Jesus warns about not paying heed to what the signs say about our lives, cautioning us to seek and be open to what we need to hear, not simply what we want to hear. Jesus stands in the great tradition of the prophets, who were not fortunetellers, but rather critics of their contemporary culture, opening people to the possible consequences of their actions to be sure, but directing people to perceive what was going on right before them. Later the Gospel writers, reflecting on the signs of their time, would sometimes refer to the prophets, and observing that what the prophets had warned about was very much like situations in their generation, that in some ways there was not much folly that was new under the sun. I even wonder if Jesus’ analogy of weather signs isn’t pretty relevant to how modern society treats the earth today. Tendencies to squeeze every opportunity to one’s advantage, intimidating others to wish for more than is healthy for them, wishing our portion to always be super sized andpresenting tempting and highly processed photo-shopped pictures that may be highly flattering of ourselves, but have little to do with reality, may all, in some way, reflect signs to which we might be wise to pay attention.
The lesson I drew from that evening of our vacation, when we tuned off Route One and went down a side road involves recognizing that often we let very lesser concerns and arguments obscure our understanding of a greater reality. Our spiritual energy becomes short circuited and drained. We pass up investigating the small signs, and going down the side roads where people live. We are mesmerized by large billboards with the flash of superficiality, but of no substance behind them. Yet often it is by paying heed to the small signs and slowing down from highway speed, that we discover the truly important, what is fresh and real, what is life-giving and deeply nourishing. And that is why, I suspect, as in the small unpretentious villages along the coast of Maine, there likely are few big chain or fast food places in the commonwealth of God.
And I offer this to you in the name of the Living God, Amen.
