鲍鱼tv

Good morning.

For all that this blue planet gains its colour from its vast seas, they remain a mystery to most of us.

This week, I鈥檝e been reflecting on verses from a great psalm of creation, Psalm 104, to mark this month鈥檚 season of creation leading up to the feast of St Francis.

Today the psalm invites us to take a plunge into the sea:

Vast and wide is the span of the sea,
with its teeming things past counting,
living things great and small.
The ships are moving there,
and Leviathan you made to play with.

Growing up by the sea, I was always captivated by the strange visitors from the deep that would, from time to time, breach the boundary of the shore:聽 mysterious forms washed up on the beach, the catches of local fishermen, fragments of wood or glass from who knows where. But the deepest recesses of the ocean floor are accessible to us only through the breath-taking journeys of deep sea explorers. The view over the North Sea from my bedroom window gave me a sense of the smallness of human beings in relation to a horizon that seemed infinitely far away. And yet, as the psalm notices, ships move over an expanse that has been a highway for travellers from earliest times.

In recent years we鈥檝e become much more aware of the damage we are doing to the oceans.
Perhaps through a rediscovery of the seas in their awesome vastness and their hidden wonders, we will nurture an attitude of respect and care for them.

O God, creator of so many things that we have never seen,
deepen in us a love for the seas and a respect for their power,
that we may rejoice in the diversity of life beneath the waves
and care for the delicate balance of life.聽 Amen.