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Oceans
by Bruce Davis, Summer Minister
First Unitarian Church
Portland, Oregon
Eugene C. Bianchi
These ten commandments of ecological spirituality summon traditional religions to a profound re-interpretation of their doctrines and practices. This task is only starting, but it should be encouraged, because institutional religion can make valuable contributions to the social survival of the planet. Social survival goes beyond just human welfare to encompass the well being and sustainability of all the biotic systems of this beautiful planet.
1. The universe, our solar system and the earth, as well as our human evolutionary emergence from animal ancestors on this planet constitute the primary sources of revelation of the ultimate mystery.
2. The universe is a unity of matter and energy; it is an interacting community of systems; in its earthly dimension, the psychic and the physical are intimately integrated and operate according to laws of differentiation, subjectivity and communion.
3. A main task for humans is to assist the intercommunion of living and non-living components of the earth community. This involves moving from an exclusively anthropocentric to an organic perspective, one that appreciates the intrinsic not just the instrumental value of nonhuman reality. This requires a profound reorientation among people toward an integrated human-earth relationship.
4. The primordial components of earth: land, air and water are sacred.
5. The richness and diversity of all life forms must be preserved in a way that upholds eco-justice; the expansion of human population and its interference in nature is excessive.
6. People must rethink their consumer habits and move toward styles of simpler living to preserve the earth and establish more enhancing forms of community life.
7. Humans need to re-learn ways of communicating with nature via dialogue and not coercion, thus recovering their true relationship with the life of earth.
8. A new ecological ethic needs to be founded on a deep sense of bonding with nature, as a basically aesthetic experience. Ethical principles and applications can be positively influenced by a prior affective knowing of the natural world.
9. Ecofeminism provides a negative critique of patriarchal structures that have oppressed both women and the environment; this movement also offers positive insights from the experiences of women and nature to enhance ecological spirituality.
10. Humans must learn to relate to the animal world in ways that lessen cruelty and violence, while enhancing interspecies relationships with animals that benefit the whole biotic community.
Sermon
I was born with the taste of the salt sea in my mouth. It’s where I learned to swim. It’s where I’ve gone over the years for spiritual sustenance.
From before I can remember my parents took the family to fish the rocky underwater cliffs along the Straits in Washington’s San Juan Islands. We’d spend a week up on Orcas, named for the killer whales that would follow our little motorboat sometimes.
On one particular afternoon when I was about four, we’d dropped our lines in a couple hundred feet of water. Who knew what might be lurking down there in the depths? We fished with halibut cord wrapped around a piece of plywood. It was my Dad’s idea, because we’d always make a mess of fishing reels and rods. Our hooks were baited with chunks of old herring, no longer attractive to the salmon.
My brother, Mac, the real fisherman now at seven, said he had a bite. When my Dad came to check it, his line was stuck. With frustration subdued to some kind of patience, my father took hold of the line. “That wasn’t a bite. You’ve got the bottom.” “No, it was a fish,” my brother insisted. My father pulled hard, trying to break off the hook to spare the two hundred feet of cord. But it wouldn’t break. In fact, it budged a little, but not much. The more he pulled, standing there at the stern of the skiff, the more the bow lifted out of the water. So, my dad told us all to sit in the bow to hold it down. That was my mom, my older sister, my older brother, me, and the baby, Ann. What we won’t do for 200 feet of halibut cord!
Hand over hand, slowly, he retrieved the precious line. “Must be caught on a log,” he announced. After a lot of pulling, suddenly, over the stern of the boat, he saw two great eyes staring back at him. Mac was right. It was a fish. A monster of the deep, more like it. An ancient ling cod, maybe 120 pounds, lay listless just below the surface behind the small boat. It was our version of Hemmingway’s story, “Old Man and the Sea.”
Well, my old man took hold of the gaff hook and tried to secure the beast. But it just opened its massive mouth, as if to laugh at us, and slipped back into the deep. With a lithe swing of its tail, it was off, to ponder this unusual encounter with the surface of the sea and these odd surface creatures with their long strings. But the line still pulled hard. There was a 25-inch rock fish still on it, that had been Mac’s initial bite, soon to become an early dinner for the mother of all ling cod.
This story is never done for me. It comes up in my dreams, as I image this beast of a fish lurking on a rocky shelf at the sea bottom.
***
We live so close to the sea, here in the Pacific Northwest. It is part of our weather, it is a frequented destination for recreation, it is an essential part of our eco-system, it is our food, it is the home of many of our stories, it’s a place of retreat and renewal, and it is the symbol for many of us of a deeper spiritual relationship with our existence. This morning I don’t want to tell you about the ocean. I want to share with you images of the sea that have become central to my life. My hope is that by sharing images, and short readings that associate with them, I might trigger your imaginings—that you may recall ways that ocean is meaningful in your life and your spirituality.
The first image for me is ocean as place. It’s a place of romance and recreation. There’s always so much going on. The family I grew up in was always at the sea, it seemed, and my children have also come to love time together at the water’s edge. Our happiest memories as a family have come up in our relationship with the sea. Boats and fish and clams and the salt-sea air and ropes and anchors and crab pots….
The sea as a place, as a destination for happy times together, is imaged beautifully in the poem “Sea Fever,” by John Masefield. I think its images of the sea as place are particularly important to me because it’s one of my father’s favorite poems. He shared it with us at a birthday party recently.
I MUST down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking.
I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
I must down to the seas again to the vagrant gypsy life.
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.
One day at the beach, Mary, our three children, and I decided to build a sand sculpture. We sorted through a variety of possible things to make, and we landed on my older daughter’s idea. She’s into Ford Mustangs, you see, and thought a Mustang sedan would be just the thing. We shoveled and carved for hours, and as the sun began to dip to the horizon, we were done. A passerby said, “Hey, it’s a ’67 Mustang!” My daughter countered, “Nope. It’s a’68.”
So the first image of ocean I want to share with you is just us playing on the sea or at the seashore in whatever ways move us. It’s about messing around with boats on sunny days. It’s about rediscovering a mothering place, where we are held in loving relationship with one another. It’s children and their sand pails, fishermen and their nets, sailors and their breezes. It is the romance, recreation, and lore of the sea.
My second image is the teaming life and biodiversity in earth’s salt seas. Nowhere is the interconnected web of life as clear to our observation as in the ocean and along the seashore. The dependencies and interdependencies in the life of the sea are delicate. One life form depends on another, depends on another, in complex and endless chains of connection. The destruction of one species has an impact on all species, as harm to any part of the interconnected web of life brings adversity to all.
Particularly at the edge of the ocean, where the watery world comes upon the solidity of land, there is greater variety of life than in any other ecosystem of the world. This place where sea touches land is the inter-tidal zone, its unique environment itself depending on our moon’s dance with earth. It challenges the creatures of the sea to find ways to live an airy land-life when the tide is in its ebb. It challenges the creatures of the land to live a sea-life, as the tide rises again in its flood.
The delicate patterns of life in the sea must in our time be associated with images of harm that we humans are causing in the sea. It is an image of destruction of life and the systems upon which life in the sea depends. The Environmental Protection Agency, itself somewhat conservative in environmental advocacy, especially under the current administration in Washington D.C., has published a document called the National Coastal Condition Report. The details need not be recounted here, and they are available at the EPA’s website. Though some successes are named in this report, it presents a broad baseline picture of the overall condition of our seas as fair to poor. The assaults from environmental pollution, over-fishing, and global warming continue to threaten the delicate balances of our oceans.
For me this image of threat to the ecosystem of the sea is captured in a powerful poem by Pablo Neruda.
You ask me what the lobster is weaving
Down there with its golden feet.
The ocean knows this.
You say, who is the asidia waiting for in its transparent bell?
I tell you it’s waiting for time.
You say, who does the macrocystis algae hug in its arms?
Study it.
Study at a certain hour in a certain sea I know.
You question me about the wicked tusk of the narwhale,
And I respond by describing to you
How the sea unicorn, with a harpoon in it,
Dies.
Inquire about the king fishers feathers,
Which tremble in the pure springs of the southern shores.
I want to tell you that the ocean knows this.
That life in its jewel boxes is endless as the sand,
Impossible to count, pure,
And that time among the blood-colored grapes
Has made the petal hard and shiny,
Filled the jellyfish with light, untied its knot,
Letting its musical threads fall
From a horn of plenty made of infinite mother of pearl.
I’m nothing but the empty net
Which has gone on ahead of human eyes
Dead in the darknesses,
Fingers accustomed to the triangle,
Longitudes on the timid globe of an orange.
I walked around like you investigating the endless star
And in my net during the night I woke up naked.
The only thing I caught? A fish.
Trapped inside the wind.
The images here are of the incredible inter-being of life, offset by dark prophecy, should we fail to alter our ways. We can become part of sustainable ocean systems, but to do so, I believe we must build a relational or spiritual ecology, not only a scientific one. Such an eco-spirituality is offered in our reading today, and I have made refrigerator copies for you. Not because in itself it should become a creed or litany. Rather, as an example for us to begin to form our own ten commandments of relationship with the interconnected web, of which the ocean is such a prime opportunity.
The third image of oceans for me has to do with journey, especially the spiritual journey that each of us is on, to find truth and meaning freely and responsibly, as our fourth UU principle asserts. The cycles of life in the sea are like the cycles of life on land and in the air, where birth leads to journey, leads to growth and maturity, leads to homecoming, finally leads to death, but with the promise always of rebirth and continuance in some form.
When I was young, my brother and I would watch the salmon at different points of their cycle. We’d watch the little ones shining like quicksilver in the streams. And when we were lucky, we might catch one from time to time on its return from the ocean. I remember being in a small open boat in a calm ocean off Vancouver Island, watching the salmon form schools in preparation for re-entering their rivers. It does not surprise me that the salmon, with its bright, muscular form, became a central spiritual symbol of our Coastal Indian Nations. One of my most recurrent dreams has me in a boat, watching salmon swim by, just below the water’s surface. I don’t interpret this dream; I just enjoy it whenever it shows up.
David Whyte from Whidbey Island is another one who dreams about salmon. Whyte’s image of the salmon speaks about his own spiritual journey. We must all begin somewhere, when the time is right.
“Song for the Salmon” by David Whyte
For too many days now,
I have not written of the sea,
Nor the rivers, nor the shifting currents
We find between the islands.
For too many nights now
I have not imagined the salmon,
Threading the dark streams of reflected stars,
Nor have I dreamt of his longing
Nor the lithe swing of his tail toward dawn.
I have not given myself to the depth to which he goes,
To the cargoes of crystal water, cold with salt,
Nor the enormous plains of ocean
Swaying beneath the moon.
I have not felt the lifted arms of the ocean
Opening its white hands on the seashore,
Nor the salted wind, whole and healthy,
Filling the chest with living air.
I have not heard those waves,
Fallen out of heaven onto earth,
Nor the tumult of sound and the satisfaction
Of a thousand miles of ocean
Giving up its strength on the sand.
But now, I have spoken of that great sea,
The ocean of longing shifts through me,
The blessed inner star of navigation
Moves in the dark sky above,
And I am ready, like the young salmon,
To leave his river, blessed with hunger,
For a great journey on the drawing tide.
If we follow Whyte’s symbol of the sea, here, where are we pulled by the drawing tide? I think we get a clue of how he uses this symbol when we sit quietly on the sand dunes, looking out at the ocean where it touches the horizon. We settle into the stillness of an ocean moment. Our imaginations stretch out over the ocean to farther than we can see, and yet we continue to gaze. Our imaginations plunge to the deep bottom of the sea, to where primordial creatures lurk in darkness. We ponder a breadth and depth, in that moment sitting there on the dune, that are at the very limits of our pondering.
Philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich takes this image of ocean a step further. For Tillich, an image like the ocean is not only about what it is in itself. We are moved deeply in our reflective encounter with the sea because it implies something to us that is even deeper and broader than the sea. Tillich suggests that images like that of the ocean become symbols for us, pointing to a deeper reality, while at the same time participating in that deeper reality. By encountering the symbol in a reflective moment, we also begin to encounter the mystery that is beyond the symbol.
Tillich shares with us the experience of sitting on the ocean shore, gazing out over the seemingly infinite expanse and depth of the sea. For him the view that he perceives is a symbol for the Infinite, for Spirit in the broadest and fullest sense, for that which is ultimately beyond our knowing. The ocean hints at a reality of Spirit that is deeper than our surface perceptions. From where we sit on the seashore, we are caught in what Tillich would refer to as the finite. Sitting there, where the infinite borders the finite, an intertidal zone of Spirit, if you will, we as finite creatures can sense the infinite, the “God beyond God.”
The Hindu scriptures revel in this image, and the Unitarian transcendentalist philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, was greatly moved by it. Using Emerson’s language, the expanse of the sea represents all being, the soul that is over all souls. Each individual wave, forming up in its unique way, symbolizes the individual being or soul. The relationship of soul to Oversoul for Emerson is that they are the same thing. That their differentiation is an illusion. That they are always one. A mystic, Emerson did not only conceptualize this transcendental relationship between soul and Oversoul—he also experienced it.
If we imagine for a moment that a wave in the ocean were self-conscious, it would know itself as unique and different from all other waves. It might even forget its fundamental connection to the sea at its base and believe that it is differentiated from the ocean itself. And yet, an observer of the wave would know that this wave, like all other waves, is just the same water as the ocean itself. It will eventually be absorbed beyond all individual recognition into the greatness of the sea again. According to this ancient teaching, death is not an ending but a shift in form, in the context of enduring being.
This language is inadequate to say what we sometimes feel when we look out over the expanse of the ocean. The language is of course secondary. Build your own model of Spirit, as your life brings it to you. Then, let’s compare notes and learn from each other.
What I invite you to this morning are your images of the ocean and the seashore. I invite you to the meanings and remembrances that the sea holds for you.
May it always be so. Amen.
Great Spirit,
When we look to the horizon of our experience,
Across the ocean of our awareness,
What we encounter is deep mystery.
We ask not so much that we learn to make comprehensible
That which is beyond our understanding.
Instead we ask that we may learn to live in
And be held by that presence of mysterious Spirit,
Whom we know you to be.
Amen.
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Copyright 2004, Bruce Davis. All rights reserved.
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