God on the Seas (Mid-week Message)

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

God on the Seas

January 23, 2019

Yahweh, how many are your deeds!
    All of them you do in wisdom. 
    All the earth is full of your wealth. 
 This ocean, vast and wide,
    Teems with countless creatures,
    Life both great and small. 
 Among them sail ships,
    And this Leviathan you formed for the sheer joy of it. 

These all look to you
    To give them food in due season;
When you give to them, they gather it up;
    When you open your hand, they are filled with good.
When you hide your face, they panic;
    When you take away their breath, they die
    and to dust they return. 
When you send forth your breath, they are created;
    and you renew the face of the earth. (Psalm 104:24-30 TAB)

In addition to moments of awe and mystery at the beach and in the mountains (shared in the last two midweek messages), I have had moments of real awe actually out on the water.  

The one time I got really seasick was when I was in high school.  My father and I were fishing for salmon in a 17-foot Boston Whaler in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.  The sea rose with waves higher than the boat was long.  I started vomiting with the buffeting, lay down in the stern and closed my eyes, and, exhausted from a long day, I fell asleep.  When I woke later, the sea had calmed to absolute stillness and fog had come in on the glass-like water.  My father put his finger to his lips and shushed me, and then pointed to starboard.  There was a huge swooshing noise.  I could smell a large mammal, something like cows. Suddenly, an orca—what we then called a killer whale—surfaced just a few feet from the boat.  It was longer than the boat itself.  Then for 30 minutes or so, we sat quietly, in awe but also a little scared, as a pod of about 5 of the huge beasts, including a calf, played around our boat. 

Another time, Elena and I were on a day cruise out of Lahaina, Maui.  We ended up close to a large pod of humpback whales.  They were immense, even the one calf, who, though dwarfed by its mother and aunts, still was larger than our catamaran!  They surfaced and spouted, and three or four breached, jumping completely out of the water to a height of 3-4 meters before splashing back in with a thunderous WHHHHOOOF. 

Just a few years ago, Elena and I were on a cruise ship skirting North-eastern Australia and the Southern islands of Indonesia.  One afternoon, we were surrounded by a school of flying fish.    I had always thought that flying fish just leapt out of the water and skittered shortly on the surface before falling back in.  But here were hundreds of them, clearly aloft, flying about a foot or two above the waves for extended periods, using their wing-like fins for lift and guidance.   The spectacle lasted about an hour before the school turned aside and stopped following our ship. 

We also were blessed about 10 years ago to see a dozen or so pink dolphins in the waters north of Hong Kong.  These endangered marine mammals are actually white dolphins that get flushed in the warm waters of the South China Sea, and present as a brilliant bubble-gum or hot Pepto-Bismol pink.    Again, the pod was at play, and gave us a show of exuberant joy for about an hour. 

Such surface wonders complement the many beauties I have seen beneath the waters: the jewel-like flowering corals and clown, parrot, and trigger fish of Hanauma Bay, a color-shifting Chameleon Rockfish in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and the immense scope of the Great Barrier Reef. 

Many of these wonders, unhappily, are now at risk and endangered due to overfishing and climate change.  But they are signs of God’s joy, and we must try to correct our ways before they pass from the scene forever. 

Grace and Peace, 

Fr. Tony+