I am only a beachcomber, rather than a writer. That is, I do not build conceptual castles—even of sand—or sail on visionary voyages. Instead, I merely pick up and display attractive things fallen from great enterprises floated by the great.

There is nowhere like the wide-open, breath-giving feel of a seemingly endless salty, sandy beach. On my beach today—and I shall leave you to guess, for the moment, whether my beach is a real one or just wherever I happen to walk—on my beach today, I found something unsavoury. It was not carelessly jettisoned jetsam, nor lost flotsam. It was not a gluey mass of decomposing oil lying on the sand, nor a stinking avian corpse, nor—perish the thought!—was it a plastic bottle. It was something much more destructive than any of these. Something alive.

I didn’t realise just what it was, at first. It appeared to be a normal sort of thing that you would find on a beach. It looked clean washed, and lay above the tideline just where you would expect to find something well-travelled. When I bent down to it, it smelt fresh, as of the sea. It did not move, and it should have been moribund or dead; but when I picked it up, it stung me, for it was all too alive—and had no intention of dying, either.

It did not have tentacles like a jellyfish—or at least, it had none that you could see; but it still contained poison. Real poison? Yes, even though my beach may not be a real beach and the things I find on it may have travelled on an imaginary sea. This apparently normal thing should not have been on my beach: it was alien, evil and an invader.

How did I know it was an invader? How did I know that it should not have been part of the ocean? My sea—I think I had better tell you this now—my sea is not part of the world, it is the world. It is the human ocean. The things that I find upon its beach are whatever the human ocean has tossed aside, or shattered in one of its storms, or spat out, or spread as thickly as oil from a real slick onto sands that should have been white or golden, receiving the waves of progress. The sea ejects anything that should not be in it; but once ejected, the detritus is dead or dies or rots. Or it should do, in the great cycle of life and in the economy of Nature. It should not lie vigorously alive and waiting, still full of poison, forever.

Yet the unsavoury thing that I found in my metaphorical beachcombing that day came up from that human ocean; and it was one of the worst and most destructive things that I could have come across, as it was lying on the beach. Why? What was it? It was that most horribly piercing of things, of human and inhuman inventions: it was a single, deadly untruth. It was a lie.

Lie, on the beach? A single lie can destroy nearly everything. The poison from it would be with me as I left my beach, would stay with me wherever I went, whoever I met, until or unless I could find healing.

Imagine standing upon an idyllic, perfect beach. Or, even, say, in a garden. The scene is stunning, almost beyond compare. Almost; but in one corner of the vista is a blot on the wonderful landscape. That must have been how God felt, walking in His Garden in the cool of the day. Oh, why does it have to be there? You can almost hear Him asking: that wound, that germ, that thorn, that omen of ruin, of pain and of the need for judgement.

‘I didn’t do it.’ Mea non culpa. It wasn’t me, it was them! It was him! It was her! Get away, escape the blame so far as you can, never admit it honestly. Start an avalanche of blame that will cascade in any direction, as long as it is away from you. Adam, Adam! Pass it on. Tell the story a different way, pretend that the shadows fall in different places, pretend that the dull, dirty reflection is the real light source. The modern era has coined a new term for an old, old dirtiness: fake truth. The word ‘lie’ is shorter.

It was, for me, the most evil thing I could have found on my beach. Lie on the beach? It did, and looked innocent; but it stung me. I wept even to see it. Let such a thing never float into the lives of others because of me. Let me follow, along my beach, only the footsteps of the One who is the Truth. In Him is no lie.

Beware, if you are tempted to lie on my beach.

[George B. Hill (2019)]