Lateral Line

Lateral Line

“A cool way to look at this school of sardines is to lie down here on the floor and just look up,” I said to the group of rowdy teenagers, on a mission trip with our church’s Blue Theology Mission Station program, as we entered the Aquarium’s fish roundabout exhibit. 

Leading “spiritual tours” of the Aquarium, we try to encourage some silent time. “For the next few minutes let’s just look and listen.”  This can be hard for these eager, gabby adolescents. (Actually, on our adult retreats it’s not much easier.)  Now she wants us to lie down quietly in the middle of a noisy crowd?

But as the fish silently schooled round and round, the teens seemed to sink into the carpet, and sort of lined up themselves like a little fishy school, together in their own silence and awe, eyes and mouths wide open following round and round the silver circle.

“How do they stay together in the school, how do they know which direction to go, is there a leader?”

No, it’s their lateral line.  All fish have it, along their side, a line of open nerve endings extending head to tail.  It can sense the smallest of motions from the fish beside them.  A tiny wisp of water displacement may signal the approach of a predator, and every fish will instantaneously flick with its school in a different safe direction. Likewise, the motion of possible incoming food – everyone turns and hunts together. 

And for finding a mate?  Let’s just say the lateral line is very sensitive.

The Aquarium’s staff newsletter is called The Lateral Line, good group communication.

I said to one of the adult leaders, “Can you imagine if people were that sensitive, could feel immediately what was going on with everyone around them?”  And she said, “Well actually, lots of people, especially kids, are extremely sensitive to the moods and actions of others.  That can be very emotional for them, but also it means they care.  Sometimes I think we try too much to harden those feelings out of our kids,” she said. “We tell them - don’t you worry so much about other people, only take care of yourself.  To their loss.”

I’m trying to pay more attention to my lateral line.  And to my silvery comrades.

(I’m reposting this from a Wednesday in   May 9 we will host church educators and clergy for a special Blue Theology Day in Pacific Grove, including a visit to the Aquarium.  Be in touch – use your lateral line!  Bluetheology.com)

2015, but the sardines are still there!

Ocean Presidents

Ocean Presidents

I want to thank Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Richard Nixon for having been such great Ocean Presidents.

 

I mean it.

Barack Obama and George W. Bush both changed the face of ocean conservation with bold executive acts.  They created over a million square miles of marine protected areas in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, formed new ocean protection agencies, brought ocean scientists to the White House, and insisted of good funding for science in the study of oceans.

But we should go back to Richard Nixon and give him a big thank you also.  We forget that the citizen activism in the 60’s and the first Earth Day, 1970, inspired (and pressured) him and Congress to establish the EPA and NOAA, and to pass the Clean Water and Air Acts, the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act.  Nixon signed all those bills.

Presidents can do a lot to help the oceans.

Near the end of his presidency George W. Bush, who grew up swimming off Maine and in the Gulf, invited ocean science giants Jean-Michel Cousteau and Sylvia Earle for dinner, because he wanted to leave a legacy in ocean conservation.    (He said Earle “gave me a pretty good lecture about life.”)  Not long after, he established the then largest US marine protected area, the huge Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument west of Hawaii (named for a Hawaiian creation goddess.)

Like Bush, Barack Obama grew up swimming.  (The pic is of him snorkeling in Hawaii.)  He established the first Ocean Policy Council, supported using science in the study of ocean protection and climate change, and added more protected areas.  He is reported to have successfully pressured China’s leaders to join 23 other nations to create the largest international marine protected area in the Ross Sea off Antarctic.  The latest issue of the Atlantic has a good summary of his many ocean actions.

There is no one Ocean Department in our government.   It can be hard and confusing to track government ocean policy and actions, or to influence them, because so many different agencies address the oceans, and not always consistently.  NOAA (which includes oceans, fisheries, weather, surveys, all science based) is part of the much larger Department of Commerce.  The EPA is a separate agency but not cabinet level, and addresses land more than ocean issues.  The Dept. of the Interior manages federal lands, and has empowered presidents since Teddy Roosevelt to authorize permanent Monument status for areas on land and sea. 

Maybe this is a good thing.  Oceans aren’t just isolated entities that can be confined to one department – they affect and are affected by security, weather, commerce, environment, shipping, tourism, fisheries, mining, oil and gas, aquaculture, water quality, climate change.  Almost every government agency should ask itself, “What about the oceans?”  And I’m just talking federal.  States and local communities have ocean policies also, and are sometimes easier to influence.  But it’s a big ocean. 

For now, in our transition to a new president, if you love the oceans, pay attention to what’s happening at NOAA and the EPA and the Dept. of the Interior, and to executive actions.  And writing a thank you note to Bush and Obama would be a nice thing to do also.

_______

Photo: National Geographic

I write these “Blue Theology Tide-ings” every Wednesday.  Bluetheology.com.  May 9 – Blue Theology Retreat and Resource Day for Religious Leaders.

Oceanique

Oceanique

“I agree with you,” said one prominent but dispirited author to another in 1927, “Religion is an illusion.

“But I do experience ‘religious feelings,’ as do millions of others, and I wish you would study those.  By this I mean, not religious institutions, but that deep sense of the eternal, a feeling as of something limitless, an indissoluble bond to all that is. 

“I would call that feeling ‘oceanic.’”

Actually, he wrote “oceanique,” because this was French 1915 Nobel Literature prizewinner Romain Rolland, writing Sigmund Freud about the “oceanique” feeling of awe, that he called religious.

Another Blue Theologian! Rolland knew that the ocean is “awe-some” and that awe is “oceanique,” a feeling of connection, no limits, the eternal. We at the Blue Theology Mission Station will add Rolland to our pantheon of ocean saints, along with Francis of Assisi, Rachel Carson, Jacques Cousteau and Sylvia Earle, spiritual lovers of the sea, lovers of the spirit of the sea.

In Freud’s response he, of course, dismisses not only religion, but this feeling of awe, telling Rolland it was but a vestige of childhood undifferentiated ego, which people should just grow out of.   But Rolland, like William James, appreciated that religion is not just institutions and doctrine, but about experiences and feelings, like awe.

(I call these men dispirited because they say religion is an illusion, but Rolland was actually a pacifist who refused to fight in WWI and whose books on Gandhi helped spread the Indian leader’s reputation.  I first learned about him in Vezelay, the French “thin place” where I go on retreat.  He loved that village also, and you can visit his home there, and his grave.)

Freud may have dismissed the psychological value of awe, but nearly a century later (this month) naturalist author Terry Tempest Williams (now there’s a highly spirited woman, and another BT saint!) writes in the Atlantic in praise of awe, quoting psych studies: 

“As vastness expands our worldview, it shrinks our ego. Awe makes spiritual and religious people feel a greater sense of oneness with others. And this oneness can make us nicer: Researchers found that inducing awe—say, by having people stand in a grove of tall trees—increased generosity, in part by stoking ‘feelings of a small self.’ 

“Awe also shapes our sense of time. One series of studies found that awe made time feel more plentiful, which increased life satisfaction, willingness to donate time to charity, and preferences for experiences over material products.”

If you spend time by the ocean, and if you are “oceanique,” you will be nicer, more satisfied, and generous.  Our Blue Theology Mission Station can help that happen.  Be in touch. Get wet, and connect with the eternal.

___________

I write these Blue Theology “Tide-ings” every Wednesday.  Please share.  We are booking retreats and mission trips for this spring and summer.  We are also planning a Blue Theology Day in Pacific Grove for clergy/religious educators on May 9, 2017.   Bluetheology.com

Photo: NOAA, Becky Stamski, north of Santa Cruz