I STRUGGLE to write 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 am half lifted off my seat. I am in the middle of the Greenland Sea. We have run into an unexpected — and big — storm.
It is Trinity: that time of year when we start on another sort of journey, perhaps even into some measure of apprehension of the great Mystery that that summer festival celebrates. But, while that exploration is unfinishable, this physical and rather wet one is not; and we shall, we hope, if we hold our course, safe 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 was hardly more than a lad, working as a half-deckhand on the little trawlers out of Fleetwood: youth on the prow, indeed, and every day was summer, and summer was unending. I can remember the frisson of fear in my first real storm, even though I have been to these high latitudes many times since and seen worse. Now, I am old, and my weatherbeaten sail is making towards the shore.
But I can also remember the life-changing experience of wonder that those early voyages gave me — wonder at the beauty 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, as the Psalmist says, “They that go down to the sea in ships, and have their business in great waters, they shall see the wonderful works of the Lord.” (Psalm 107 adds, “They reel to and fro, 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 great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both 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 did not have my convenience or pleasure in mind (like Montaigne saying, “I play with my cat, but perhaps she thinks she plays with me”).
Yet are not the very facts that I could be there, that I even exist, and that human ingenuity has found out ways of going upon great waters also among the wonderful works?
THE first disciples were fishermen on the sea of Galilee, where sudden violent squalls can be both deadly and brief: “Be still.” Biblical references to the sea and its turbulence are generally not very complimentary. Revelation promises that in the new creation “there shall be no more sea.” I can’t help thinking that that might be a pity.
This present journey of mine (and why I am doing it) started many years ago, when chance (what is chance?) led me to a friend’s bookshelves and Alister Hardy’s wonderful book, Great Waters: A voyage of natural history to study whales, plankton and the waters of the Southern Ocean (1967). Hardy was a fine scientist and a man profoundly “spiritual” (as they say now). His book describes the mechanisms, relationships, interactions in the sea, on which we, land creatures, who, aeons back in our evolution, left the sea behind, unwittingly rely.
On this trip, we have 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 in their plankton stage (when you can see that they are clearly related to crabs) — these myriad, minuscule creatures are food to make the stupendous muscles of the great whales.
But the evidence is all too clear that our cultural and personal selfishness — historic as well as 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 in the phytoplankton, which produce 50 per cent of the earth’s oxygen.
The evidence of damage has been all around me on this trip to waters that I first knew half a century ago, and it is hard not to be afraid: afraid for our world, for ourselves, for our loved ones in it. Any fool can see that storms are on the horizon.
BUT, just as 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 light beyond our ceiling, but we are unable to see into it. There is a reality beyond any we can know. St Paul reminds us that some things exist beyond human speech or understanding. I sometimes think that trust is the key thing that the Lord asks of us.
Meanwhile, we endure tempests of fear, storms of doubt; we can be wrecked on despair. But, at 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 end 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 joys 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 raise my sprite to Thee!
If this be a dream to comfort us as the wind howls and the journey seems fruitless, it is better than any “reality” that we know — perhaps a glimpse of that Reality that our submarine gaze can never see, just as the longed-for fish cannot comprehend the life in air which the Fisherman lives, and to which, with his skill, he brings those who take his offered food.
Dr Charles Moseley is a Life Fellow of Hughes Hall, Cambridge. charlesmoseley.com