I STRUGGLE to put in writing this; for the wind is wild, the water is white with spume, and the air is thick with spindrift that stings the face and blinds the eyes. With each wave, I’m half lifted off my seat. I’m in the course of the Greenland Sea. We have run into an unexpected — and massive — storm.
It is Trinity: that point of yr once we start on one other type of journey, maybe even into some measure of apprehension of the good Mystery that that summer festival celebrates. But, while that exploration is unfinishable, this physical and slightly wet one isn’t; and we will, we hope, if we hold our course, protected into the haven glide when the storm is past. It is wholly fitting that an earworm, Wesley’s “Jesu, lover of my soul”, is sounding in my head. Peace, be still.
WHEN I first knew these waters, I used to be hardly greater than a lad, working as a half-deckhand on the little trawlers out of Fleetwood: youth on the prow, indeed, and on daily basis was summer, and summer was unending. I can remember the frisson of fear in my first real storm, regardless that I even have been to those high latitudes again and again since and seen worse. Now, I’m old, and my weatherbeaten sail is making towards the shore.
But I may remember the life-changing experience of wonder that those early voyages gave me — wonder at the wonder and richness of the north: fearsome grace of fishing gannet, unhurried soar and glide of fulmar over wave crest and wave trough, and creatures that the trawl drew up from the weightless deep into the heaviness of air. Indeed, because the Psalmist says, “They that go right down to the ocean in ships, and have their business in great waters, they shall see the wonderful works of the Lord.” (Psalm 107 adds, “They reel from side to side, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wit’s end.” True enough.)
Psalm 104’s great hymn about creation’s richness speaks of “the good and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, each small and great beasts”, the place of monsters like that Leviathan whom the Lord “hath made to play therein”. Well, Lord, while it was relatively calm, I spent fruitless hours on deck with binoculars, and waited patiently to see those wonderful works and that Leviathan and his tribe — but they were busy at their appointed business, and didn’t have my convenience or pleasure in mind (like Montaigne saying, “I play with my cat, but perhaps she thinks she plays with me”).
Yet usually are not the very facts that I could be there, that I even exist, and that human ingenuity has discovered ways of going upon great waters also among the many wonderful works?
THE first disciples were fishermen on the ocean of Galilee, where sudden violent squalls could be each deadly and transient: “Be still.” Biblical references to the ocean and its turbulence are generally not very complimentary. Revelation guarantees that in the brand new creation “there shall be no more sea.” I can’t help considering that that could be a pity.
This present journey of mine (and why I’m doing it) began a few years ago, when likelihood (what’s likelihood?) led me to a friend’s bookshelves and Alister Hardy’s wonderful book, Great Waters: A voyage of natural history to review whales, plankton and the waters of the Southern Ocean (1967). Hardy was a fantastic scientist and a person profoundly “spiritual” (as they are saying now). His book describes the mechanisms, relationships, interactions in the ocean, on which we, land creatures, who, aeons back in our evolution, left the ocean behind, unwittingly rely.
On this trip, we have now glimpsed that first-hand: when it was calm enough to get a sample, we marvelled when the microscope revealed the abundance of life in a single litre of water. The tiniest diatoms and phytoplankton living on elements and sunlight, the darting copepods, acorn barnacles of their plankton stage (when you’ll be able to see that they’re clearly related to crabs) — these myriad, minuscule creatures are food to make the stupendous muscles of the good whales.
But the evidence is all too clear that our cultural and private selfishness — historic in addition to current; for we inherit our forebears’ sins of omission and commission — is destroying that intricate web of life: some things have already gone for ever. Our careless, polluting selfishness is already affecting photosynthesis within the phytoplankton, which produce 50 per cent of the earth’s oxygen.
The evidence of harm has been throughout me on this trip to waters that I first knew half a century ago, and it is tough to not be afraid: afraid for our world, for ourselves, for our family members in it. Any idiot can see that storms are on the horizon.
BUT, just because the creatures of the deep cannot, without refraction, see beyond that frontier where their element meets air, so our gaze, too, is submarine. Just as sea creatures cannot live in air, so we cannot live beyond the human. We are aware of sunshine beyond our ceiling, but we’re unable to see into it. There is a reality beyond any we are able to know. St Paul reminds us that some things exist beyond human speech or understanding. I sometimes think that trust is the important thing thing that the Lord asks of us.
Meanwhile, we endure tempests of fear, storms of doubt; we could be wrecked on despair. But, on the last, as we come to shore, we scramble to the prow of the boat, jump off into the shallows, pull our battered craft up out of reach of the last waves of the spent storm, and are greeted, one hopes, by a smell of cooking — a welcome at the tip of all our journeying: “Take, eat.” Sometimes, the poet sees what the materialist can only measure. Thomas Campion put it well:
Ever blooming are the thrill of Heaven’s high Paradise.
Cold age deafs not there our ears nor vapour dims our eyes:
Glory there the sun outshines; whose beams the Blessed only see:
O come quickly, glorious Lord, and lift my sprite to Thee!
If this be a dream to comfort us because the wind howls and the journey seems fruitless, it is healthier than any “reality” that we all know — perhaps a glimpse of that Reality that our submarine gaze can never see, just because the longed-for fish cannot comprehend the life in air which the Fisherman lives, and to which, along with his skill, he brings those that take his offered food.
Dr Charles Moseley is a Life Fellow of Hughes Hall, Cambridge. charlesmoseley.com
