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I’ve been reflecting, meditating, prayerfully musing on the six days of creation in Genesis, chapter one–taking one day each day every day for three weeks now. Letting the words exert themselves on me. What powerful words they are. Like Day Five, using the Robert Alter translation: “And God said, ‘Let the waters swarm with the swarm of living creatures and let fowl fly over the earth across the vault of the heavens.’ And God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that crawls, which the water had swarmed forth of each kind and the winged fowl of each kind, and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them saying, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the water in the seas and let the fowl multiply in the earth.’ And it was evening and it was morning, fifth day.”

Genesis, chapter one, is the Spirit’s way of orienting us to our surroundings–to ourselves in our surroundings. Orienting us to God, to the earth, to the waters, to time, to the other living things, and to the other living creatures, to our reason for being and to our task, and to our relationship with all of these. Orienting us, that is, at the deepest level of our being, as only the Spirit can do. And as these words exert themselves on me thus, I find that I have been disoriented, and am being realigned by them.

God blessed them first. The swarming creatures of the ocean, that is, and the fowl flying across the heavens. He blessed them first. Before he blessed us, or anything actually, he blessed them first. And his blessing was that they would multiply and FILL their given surroundings, the seas, and the skies.

But we have been disoriented, haven’t we? We humans that is. The great sea monsters known as the sharks have been prohibited from filling the oceans by us. They are not multiplying, or even adding. They are declining in number–some declining by 90% in our lifetime. Because they are caught, their fins lopped off, and their living bodies thrown back into the sea to drown (which fish can do when they cannot swim through the water). This happens at a grand scale, not because their fins have any nutritional value, but because they are thought to have a male potency enhancement value. This suffering is induced, this blessing stolen from them, this violent opposition to the will of God for them visited upon them, so that middle aged men mainly, can feel better about their sexual vigor as they ingest their nutritionally useless shark fin soup.

Many of the great sea monsters and living creatures swarming in the oceans are in trouble. The cod population has collapsed from overfishing. The coral reefs are in terrible shape because people use explosives to fish them–detonate little explosive devices in them and collect the stunned fish while destroying the coral reefs that allow the fish to multiply and fill the seas according to God’s will and in keeping with his blessing extended toward them. And because the ocean temperatures are increasing, and the ocean is getting more acidic as a result and the acid is bleaching the coral reefs. And….well, we don’t have time to multiply examples, do we?

Why have we been told that God blessed them first and that his blessing them was to be worked out in their multiplying so as to fill the seas? I think we have been told because we are meant to care.

True religion humbles us. False religion inflates us. True religion softens us.  False religion hardens us. True religion makes us care more. False religion makes us care less. True religion makes us care about many things without fearing that our caring about one thing will leave us less room to care about another. False religion makes us stingy and selective in our caring because it fears there is no inexhaustible source of caring.

God blessed them first, the swarming creatures of the sea and the flying fowl of the air. When we think of them or see them or hear of them, knowing that they received this blessing first, before we did, is meant to humble us. I’ve got a bird feeder attached to my window next to the praying chair in my office. And sometimes a bird appears at the feeder while I’m praying. The next time I see one, I want to think, “God blessed them first.” And then I would like to let that thought exert itself over me and over my tendency toward self importance, self absorption, self interest, self assertion, self centeredness.

And I also want to remember that the people who taught me to care about the sharks and the turtles and the albatrosses, and the coral reefs, were the people of the Blue Ocean Institute. I noticed their caring before I noticed God’s caring, perhaps because God delights in speaking through flesh and blood. The people I’ve met from the Blue Ocean Institute read their Bibles less than many people I know. It’s humbling to me that their witness to me is God speaking to me to listen more closely, with a softer heart, when I read mine. It makes me wonder, what else am I missing?

Tags: blue ocean, false religion, fifth day, genesis, robert alter, sharks, true religion

This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 at 6:19 am and is filed under environment, lectio (meditative prayer). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.