God at the Beach (Mid-week Message)

God at the Beach

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

January 9, 2019 

“For what can be known of God is plain… Ever since the creation of the world, his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and known through the things He made” (Rom. 1:19-20). 

Earlier generations, based on this passage, used what they saw as the rationality and economical ordering of nature as an argument for a powerful, rational, and providential Deity.  After Darwin and the discoveries of modern geology and paleo-biology, theologians have increasingly shied away from such “natural theology” because of what they see as the randomness of genetic drift and the great wastefulness of natural selection and mass extinctions.  But both the earlier use of Romans to seek attributes of God from nature and the later denial of God from nature miss the key bit in Romans:  it is about awe at the beauty, complexity, and utter strangeness of nature. 

I have three experiences where nature up close totally left me speechless and in awe. All happened at the beach. 

  

When we were living in Beijing the first time, the family and I a couple times a year would make the four hour drive to the beach at Beidaihe, on the Bohai, a large inlet of the Pacific Ocena north of the Shandong Peninsula and west of Korea.  One year, we were snorkeling with masks in the cold, somewhat murky algae-filled waters.  I saw on the bottom a clamshell the size of my palm. I picked it up to inspect it more closely.  Though closed, it had little tentacles peaking out.  When I put it back in the water, it relaxed, and I could see that inside, a small octopus had taken up housing in the shell, holding it together with her arms.   

Then it relaxed more, and I noticed it was embracing a cluster of small pearl-like pear shaped eggs—dozens of them.  And then the translucent eggs began wiggle and then to burst: tiny fully formed octopodes began to swim into the water about my hand.  I showed Elena and the children.  We were witnessing an octopus birthing.  The amazing process lasted about a half hour.  It was jaw-droppingly awesome!  I was stunned at the unlikelihood of finding an octopus in these shallow and crowded waters, let alone witnessing the hatching of octopus eggs.  I later learned that this was a fully grown female Octopus Minor, held as a great delicacy in Japanese and Korean cuisine.  They often seek refuge in such clamshells, and barricade themselves there to protect their eggs as they mature and hatch, often starving themselves to death in the process. 

Another year, Elena and I were on vacation at Hilton Head SC.  On an early morning run on the beach, we looked down randomly, and about us saw dozens of little tiny sea turtles breaking out of half-buried leathery eggs and then crawling, flopping on tiny flippers, to the water.  We stopped and watched for an hour, again in awe.  The profligacy of nature astounded us: a wider view saw hundreds of these little babies, only a few of which would reach adulthood, surrounding us.  I learned that the beach area where we were was later declared off-limit for a week or two each year to protect the hatchlings. 

Another time, when we were living in West Africa, Elena and I would regularly run on the beach early Saturday and Sunday mornings.  One Sunday, on a particularly drastic low tide, we came around a corner.  The beach was covered with at least a thousand gulls and terns, all ravenously devouring the shellfish and kelp beds so rarely exposed.  When they sensed us, they all rose up, as one, and took to the air.  The bright morning equatorial sun, the mists and splashes of seawater, and the light breeze all worked to make the scene magical, if not downright mystic.  The birds were massed, and their undulating movement as a single body looked almost like murmurations of starlings or swifts.  They swept back and forth a few meters above the beach, unwilling to abandon their rare feast, and then settled back down immediately after we had passed.  Elena and I paused, looking up at such beauty, and wept. 

We may want to impose our human percepts and values on such scenes, be they rational order or violent chaos.  But we are so made that we invariably react to them in awe.  And I think that is where the heart of a true natural theology lies. 

Grace and peace,  Fr. Tony+