Maelstrom staff poe4/8/2023 ![]() The boat is approaching entropy, degrading in its swirling so that it will eventually be destroyed. ![]() It can lead to fear, but it can also lead to faith and creativity.īack to the story. We know well that there’s a difference between your church enduring for a season and, as the season drags on, feeling like the foundation that keeps your church standing is slowly being chipped away. Having made up my mind to hope no more, I got rid of a great deal of that terror which unmanned me at first.” It stood like a huge writhing wall between us and the horizon…It may appear strange, but now, when we were in the very jaws of the gulf, I felt more composed than when we were only approaching it. “The boat did not seem to sink into the water at all, but to skim like an air-bubble upon the surface of the surge. Poe writes about the moment of change for the fisherman when he realized they were just swirling and he could let go of his fear and start to live into the moment: If they keep their hand steady on the steering wheel, they won’t sink or escape.ĭoes that sound familiar to anyone? Anyone else spiraling in this season at times, feeling like we are in over our heads or in too deep, or other metaphors? Stuck sheltering in place while the world turns around us? Parents of young children just barely surviving online school while it seems neighboring singles or couples are thriving in isolation? Bueller?īut all was not lost for those stuck in the maelstrom. His fishing boat is stuck in it, and for hours on end, they circle this whirlpool. Typical of Poe, the story “ A Descent into the Maelstrom” has a lot of build-up, but in the closing pages, the fisherman and two others are in a boat that gets sucked into a maelstrom–a whirlpool, a devastating vortex in the ocean deep. The story is a good metaphor for the Church as it tries to find its way out of the 2020s’ swirling pandemics. In 1841, Edgar Allan Poe, who is known for writing about birds who are just always so negative, wrote a short story called “ A Descent into the Maelstrom” about a fisherman stuck in an ocean whirlpool.
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