The Ocean Declares | Horseshoe Crabs, Hospitality & Creatureliness

Stump: 

[wind] Hey, Michaela. What are we doing here? Can you describe this process?

Stenerson: 

Yeah. So there are horseshoe crabs that spawn in the Indian River Lagoon, so we came at a time when we thought they would be spawning—coming up on shore—because the wind is…[laughter]

Stump: 

We can tell.

Stenerson: 

The wind is coming.

Stump: 

There is wind. [wind fades, [theme song begins] Welcome to Language of God. I’m Jim Stump. 

Hoogerwerf: 

And I’m Colin Hoogerwerf. Our story starts here, with some horseshoe crabs on a very windy beach in early February on the Indian River Lagoon, about an hour straight east of Orlando. 

Stenerson: 

So we counted how many there were, how many pairs plus a couple on the side, trying to fertilize the female’s eggs. And now we’re collecting about ten to tag so we can have some evidence in the future on what the population is like here and how far they are moving around the lagoon. 

Stump: 

The lagoon is the name for the body of water that is between the mainland of Florida and the barrier islands that separate it from the Atlantic Ocean. In this case, the Kennedy Space Center sits on that island between the lagoon and the ocean. 

Hoogerwerf: 

What drew us to that beach were the horseshoe crabs that were spawning. But it’s only one of the reasons we came down out of the cold north to Florida. And in some ways, we didn’t know what we were coming for except that we had an invitation.

Stump: 

That invitation came from Bob. 

Sluka: 

Hi, I’m Bob Sluka. And I work with A Rocha, guiding their Marine Conservation Program.

Hoogerwerf: 

Bob acted as our host and our guide during our couple of days by the beach. We’ll hear more from him about A Rocha and about his work as a marine biologist. But we never would have met Bob without an introduction by another marine biologist, who also joined us for the weekend as a guide.

Miller: 

I’m Margaret Miller. I’m the Research Director for an organization called SECORE International.

Stump: 

Margaret was a guest on our Creation Groans series a while back. She studies and works with corals and has known Bob for decades. 

Hoogerwerf: 

While our story starts with horseshoe crabs, it turned into something that is about a lot more than that. It’s about all the creatures that live around us. 

Stump: 

That includes the non-human creatures, of which we saw many, but it also includes the human variety. 

Hoogerwerf: 

Yeah. You’ve already heard one of their voices, but Bob had three interns who are spending a year working with A Rocha and living with Bob and his wife and his youngest son. We’ll meet the interns properly soon. The interns and the Sluka family have formed a little community there and were gracious enough to invite us in for a few days. 

Stump: 

Hospitality is one of the core values of A Rocha, and it started around the dinner table with Bob and Margaret and the interns but then it spread outward, and it became clear that hospitality to our human neighbors is only the smallest part of what that word means. 

Hoogerwerf: 

And so that’s another part of what this episode is about: about paying attention to those lives that surround us, recognizing our responsibility in supporting the creatureliness of those creatures. 

Stump:

 And maybe even learning from them, even from the ocean itself, about how we might be the best kind of creatures we can be. 

[musical transition]

Hoogerwerf:

We’re going to tell this story in three parts. Part One. The Crabbiest Crab. 

Stump: 

Sounds like it’s time to go back to the beach. [high tempo music starts]

Hoogerwerf: 

Right. And on that beach, crawling up out of the surf and into the sand were a bunch of horseshoe crabs. But before we get too much farther we probably need to say, a horseshoe crab isn’t actually a crab. [music fizzles out]]

Stump: 

Yeah, this was probably the first thing we found out while standing on that beach. If they aren’t crabs, what are they?

Hoogerwerf: 

Well, true crabs are crustaceans, they have five pairs of legs, a pair of antennae and jaws. Horseshoe crabs have an outward appearance similar to crustaceans, but they are actually in a different subphylum—the Chelicerata—which includes spiders, ticks and scorpions. You know, everyone’s favorite group of creatures. 

Stump: 

And actually when I got the chance to pick up one of the horseshoe crabs for tagging and turned it over, after knowing that they are more closely related to spiders and scorpions, that resemblance was a lot more clear. But I have to say, the horseshoe crabs felt a lot more approachable than your neighborhood scorpion.

Hoogerwerf: 

Well, they don’t sting or bite, which I guess gives them an advantage in likeability. And it seems they’ve done just fine without stingers since fossil evidence from 400 million years ago shows that they’ve barely changed at all over that time. There are only four living species of horseshoe crabs, the only species of their order, xiphosura. But enough taxonomy and phylogeny; let’s get back to the beach. 

Stump: 

Right. When we first pulled up, I had pictures in mind from what you see when you Google Image search “horseshoe crab spawning,” which is of a beach so totally full of horseshoe crabs that you can barely see the sand. 

Hoogerwerf: 

And from the parking area where we pulled in, you couldn’t see any crabs.

Stump: 

We weren’t even sure if the crabs were going to be there. But Bob had received a tip from someone in Titusville—a citizen scientist who helps out with the crab surveys—that the crabs were in. 

Hoogerwerf: 

And sure enough, when we got down to the beach, they were there!

Stump: 

Not quite in the amount I had imagined, but still a good amount.

 Nick, you got a number yet?

Davis:

 I do not have a number yet. I will definitely give it to you when we’re all done. 

Stenerson: 

There were a lot. 

Davis: 

I’m just filling out this tagging sheet. So once we tag them, we’ll write down what tag numbers we used. We’re gonna write down some information about the crab, whether they’re young, old or kind of a medium stage…

Hoogerwerf: 

I think it’s time to introduce the interns. 

Davis: 

My name is Nick Davis. I’m from a small town in northeast Indiana called Pleasant Lake.

Stenerson: 

My name is Makayla Stenerson. I’m from Grove City, Ohio, which is just south of Columbus.

Cutting: 

My name is Alli Cutting. I am from Sequim, Washington, a small town on the Olympic Peninsula.

Hoogerwerf: 

Alli, Nick and Michaela had been preparing for the horseshoe crabs to arrive. And we got to be there for the first of what will be many surveys to complete. 

Stump: 

The idea here is to walk a stretch of beach and count the crabs. 

Hoogerwerf: 

Field biologists call this a transect, which is often kind of a base for field biology. You walk a predetermined line, take observations along the way, and often repeat the same transect many times to compare. 

Stump: 

After walking and counting, we picked up about ten to carry back to the trunk of Bob’s car. These were the lucky ten to get tagged. Here’s more correction of my assumptions about what we’d see: I was imagining some high-tech electronic gadget that would get attached to be able to track them or something on a computer screen, a blinking dot out in the ocean somewhere. But this was much simpler. Just a white plastic disc with a number on it. 

Hoogerwerf:

Right. So after they took down some data about the age, sex, and size of the crab, they used a little tool to poke a hole in the side of the shell and then pushed the disk, which had a little stem at the back, through the hole and it snapped in place, laying flat against the shell. 

Sluka:

So does somebody want to try? I would put it right here. So you want to hold him down. Then you use this.  So I would say like about right there.

Stump: 

During our survey we didn’t find any crabs that had been previously tagged, but the hope is that eventually they’ll start to see some of these. And based on how many you tag and how many you find again, you can do some math to estimate the whole population size. 

Hoogerwerf: 

And then you can do some other statistics to figure out things like which crabs come back to the same beach, and how long they live. 

Stump: 

You and I, and I would guess that a lot of our listeners, are probably pretty happy to seek knowledge just for the sake of having knowledge, but most science does have some application and motivation. So maybe we’d better talk about what makes horseshoe crabs important. 

Hoogerwerf:

Yeah. So, we said earlier there are four species of horseshoe crabs. The one that we saw, and the one that comes to beaches in North America, is the Atlantic horseshoe crab, or American horseshoe crab – limulus polyphemus, for those who care. So we’ll talk specifically about that species. And Florida is about the farthest South of the species range. In places like Delaware, there can be tens of thousands of horseshoe crabs when they are spawning. 

And they are an important species for several reasons. The horseshoe crab eggs are an important food source for shore birds, including the red knot, which is a migrating bird and one that we featured on the podcast in our lent series from Gayle Boss’ book Wild Hope. A subspecies of the red knot in North America is severely threatened because they haven’t been able to rely on the horseshoe crab eggs as food along their migration route. And for many other reasons, and like so many other creatures, horseshoe crabs just play an important role in the ecosystems where they live. 

Stump: 

They’re also used as fishing bait, right? But it turns out that horseshoe crabs have another very special and particular importance to humans. 

Hoogerwerf: 

Yeah, unlike a lot of creatures, it’s not their meat we want, but their blood—which has an important feature for the pharmaceutical industry. And there’s a good chance, most listeners have been positively impacted by horseshoe crab blood. 

Stump: 

The way Bob described a horseshoe crab to us is that instead of having vessels to contain everything, it’s just a big soup: organs, blood, all floating around underneath their shell. Because of that, a horseshoe crab has developed ways to keep infections from spreading around in the soup. 

Hoogerwerf: 

It’s from that soup that we get something called limulus amebocyte lysate—LAL. In the horseshoe crab this substance detects endotoxins. And it also detects endotoxins in anything else it’s in…vaccines and other injectable drugs, replacement joints, and other implantable materials. Because of the horseshoe crab blood, we can be assured that the things we put into our bodies are safe and sterile. 

Stump: 

So each year, pharmaceutical companies round up millions of horseshoe crabs, usually in places like Delaware where they are more numerous. They bleed the crabs and then release them back into the ocean. 

Hoogerwerf: 

Now, this is all pretty amazing to me, for a lot of reasons. First, like so many of our modern technologies, that we ever stumbled across this use is just a statement to human curiosity. And I actually read about how it came to be. A pathologist named Fredrick Bang, who was interested in their ancient immune systems, was the first to do experiments with horseshoe crab blood. 

Stump: 

And then there’s the fact that we are pretty much entirely reliant on horseshoe crabs for this important medical need. 

Hoogerwerf: 

There’s another interesting story here. There are actually some synthetic alternatives available, and they have been around for a while but haven’t been widely adopted for a number of complicated reasons having to do with economics and medical regulations. We won’t go down this rabbit hole right now, but we have a link to some articles about this and some other interesting journalism having to do with horseshoe crabs in the shownotes. 

Stump: 

Back to the blood. Right now, horseshoe crab blood is very valuable. I saw that it can go for something like $60,000 per gallon. And because of that, the horseshoe crab sits in a kind of unusual place. There’s a pretty big economic and medical driver to keep the horseshoe crab numbers up. But the bleeding process can take about a soda can’s volume of blood out of each crab, and this ends up killing about 10% of them. And we do all this without knowing a whole lot about the species. 

Hoogerwerf: 

Add in some other factors like, as you mentioned before, the fact that they are used as fishing bait. And because of the destruction of habitat and spawning sites the IUCN Red List lists the American horseshoe crabs as vulnerable. And so this scientific research we got to be a part of is an attempt to better understand this species, knowledge which hopefully can be applied to future decisions that could affect horseshoe crabs.

Stump: 

As we were sitting there watching them tag and measure, it struck me that I think most people don’t appreciate how science is actually done. 

…the actual science of work of what science is like. Collecting these things, measuring em, weighing em, tagging em…

Hoogerwerf: 

When people think of science, they probably think of the big, flashy headlines and the conclusions drawn from what is often a long period of research, data collection, and analysis. But seeing the process brings out a different side. 

Stump: 

So much of it was so mundane—walking the transect on the beach and just counting. The tagging at the car was all these measurements that were being recorded. 

Sluka:

…alright so on the data sheet, the first thing we’re going to do, is this a male or a female? We got a male so put an ‘M’. So the age, what do you think, is he pretty scarred up?

Stump:

I was impressed by the thoroughness and, honestly, by the boring and repetitive nature of what the interns were doing. But I guess all of that is necessary data that needs to be collected in order to do the higher-level, more exciting, and glamorous parts of science that we hear more about.

Hoogerwerf: 

There’s another thing we did while we walked the beach besides just counting the horseshoe crabs. A lot of times when the horseshoe crabs are coming up on the beach, they’ll get jostled and tipped over by waves coming in. And so as we walked along, we righted any of the flipped horseshoe crabs. 

Stump: 

This little action, which might seem like it’s not even worth mentioning, is actually really interesting and will lead us into part two and part three of this episode. 

Hoogerwerf: 

There’s a pretty long standing kind of ethic in conservation that says humans should just stay out of things. And it’s true that horseshoe crabs do have a long tail called a telson which, I guess, is meant to help flip them over if they get tipped, though I couldn’t find any anatomical research on horseshoe crabs to say that this was its exact function.  

Stump: 

Well, either way it didn’t seem all that effective, if that’s what it was designed for. 

Hoogerwerf:

Part of me wonders how a creature that is 400 million years old would have such an obvious limitation. I mean, a lot of crabs really do die this way, stranded with their legs scuttling in the air. And it’s worth noting that we are not the first people to right horseshoe crabs. There have been significant efforts to have beach walkers right them. A big campaign called “Just Flip ‘Em,” for example, was aimed at getting people to help stranded horseshoe crabs. 

Stump: 

The strict, hands-off conservationist has a problem with this kind of thing, right? He wants to see nature work itself out. He might point out that the crabs have survived for 400 million years and that our interference might actually harm their ability to survive. Maybe, for example, those crabs who can’t flip themselves shouldn’t be the ones passing on their genes. 

Hoogerwerf: 

And your hypothetical conservationist might have a point. But he’s also ignoring the fact that there has already been interference. There’s no such thing as “hands-off” anymore. 

Stump: 

And our non-hypothetical conservationist said just this. Margaret Miller didn’t make it to Titusville in time for the horseshoe crab survey but joined us just afterward. And the next morning, Margaret and Bob woke up early and went back down to the beach, not to do any science at all, but merely to do the morally charged work of flipping over the stranded horseshoe crabs.

Miller: 

It’s difficult at this stage of things, because humans have intervened in such detrimental ways everywhere, as we were describing. Many of those are unintended consequences. But the fact is that the environment that many creatures exist in, doesn’t fulfill their needs anymore the way it should, because of changes that humans have made. And so, much of my career and my vocational work is intervening in the life history of organisms, because they’re not able to fulfill that entire life history on their own anymore. So I think that that is an act of worship. It’s sort of a depressing one, right? It’s sort of like, not what we should have to be doing. But our world is in a state now that, I think, it is what we need to be doing in order to, again, provide some capacity for those creatures to be able to persist and behave as they are intended.

Stump: 

Margaret makes a good point here that our intervention in flipping the crab over is not the first intervention we have made. But Margaret also helps to steer us back to the role of faith in all of this. 

Hoogerwerf: 

And that’s a good place to lead us back to A Rocha, the organization that Bob works for. 

Sluka: 

So A Rocha is a medium-size, Christian conservation nonprofit that focuses on biodiversity conservation across 20 plus countries around the world, and now another 10 plus friends of A Rocha. So we have a great group of national organizations that are working to care for God’s world, particularly place-based conservation, where we focus on species habitats, and trying to understand the best science that allows us to care for those in a way that will lead to their success and their survival and populations. We also engage with churches around the world. We have a Theology and Churches program that is developing and are trying to help Christians really engage with Bible and good thinking about why we should care about God’s world.

Stump: 

One of the things I noticed while spending this time with the A Rocha crew in Titusville is that they have done a really great job of doing the science and being Christians at the same time. 

Hoogerwerf: 

Which is not always as easy as it sounds. But they think about the science as a kind of worship. We asked the interns how faith plays into their work with horseshoe crabs. Here’s Alli. 

Cutting: 

One of the big focuses of A Rocha is really focused on being place-based and, in a sense, heeding attention and care and knowing your creaturely neighbors—not just your human neighbors, but your non-human neighbors as well. And in terms of the horseshoe crabs where faith comes into that, I would say, that is a form of trying to know and care for your neighbor, our neighbors. And with that, the very science fact of it, of how you know something, is giving time and attention to it. And then the really big faith component of that, I guess, is seeing that in studying and knowing the creation, you also get to know the Creator.

Stump: 

And when we pay attention, we begin to hear the ways in which the creation sings out the praise of its Creator. 

Hoogerwerf: 

“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.”

Stump: 

“All the earth worships you and sings praises to you; they sing praises to your name.”

Hoogerwerf: 

“Let the earth rejoice; let the sea roar, and all that fills it; let the field exult, and everything in it! Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy.”

Cutting:

Creation is already doing that by it being as God intended, and it being the most mountainous mountain it can be, or the crabbiest crab it can be. So that’s something that I think was really emphasized, in the first bit of our internship, for me at least was learning like, okay, yeah, that’s kind of where this notion of environmental care conservation comes in is like, trying to foster these other beings, other animals and plants, to be able to be as they were intended. And so I guess where that is, it’s like, okay, then what? In our human existence, where have we inhibited them from being able to be their full, crabbiest crab? And in that sense, where have we inhibited that crab’s ability to give full praise to its Creator? In a sense, something you know, is that through pollution? Microplastics? Yeah, where are we kind of cutting off that relationship between the creature and its Creator?

[musical interlude]

Hoogerwerf: 

Part Two. A Place at the Table

Stump: 

After the horseshoe crab survey, we headed back to Bob’s place. 

Hoogerwerf: 

And that’s where we met up with Margaret as well. 

Stump: 

Bob and his family live not too far from the beach in a house that has become a kind of A Rocha field station in Titusville. 

Hoogerwerf: 

When Bob started the internship program last year, they decided to invite the interns to live there in the house with them. Hospitality was already a core value of A Rocha, and the community building aspect of living and working together seems like it has become an integral part of the internship. 

Stump: 

And our invitation to join with the A Rocha Titusville crew for the weekend also included the invitation to stay at Bob’s house, which we accepted. 

Hoogerwerf: 

We spent many hours over the weekend sitting around the table, eating, talking, laughing, and telling stories. 

Stump: 

And one of the things that was clear from so many of those conversations was that these were people who are deeply committed to science being an avenue for worship. But it didn’t end at the knowledge and wonderment gained from science, which are definitely parts of the worship experience, but it also led to a new kind of attention and to a new kind of behavior, which all seemed to come back to this idea of hospitality.

Hoogerwerf: 

The hospitality that we experienced at the Sluka house and throughout the weekend was a human-to-human hospitality. And that’s probably the way most of us think about hospitality. 

Stump: 

But it doesn’t need to end at the human. Hospitality can extend to other creatures, maybe even to non-living things. 

Hoogerwerf: 

Of course there’s an opposite to hospitality, which is something like hostility or maybe complete indifference, both of which have led to the biodiversity crisis that we are now facing. Our species, homo sapiens, has not done a great job at extending the idea of hospitality to those outside our own kind. And when our own lack of hospitality leads to the loss of species, it’s like tearing out a page of God’s book of nature. Or another metaphor:

Sluka: 

So it’s like a symphony. [orchestral music] You know, you start taking out a few violins, you start taking out a cello. It might sound okay for a little while to the untrained ear. So I think a lot of people have gotten used to the symphony of God’s world and it’s been diminishing and diminishing. [orchestra music with instruments taken away] And over time, you get used to what things are like. You know, our kids have dove in the Florida Keys; they won’t know what it’s like, when Margaret and I were young, diving in the Florida Keys. And even we don’t understand what it was like, you know, when great-grandparents, whoever, were in the keys. So there’s a shifting baseline of expectation about what things should be like.

Stump: 

This symphony that is the diversity of life on Earth is much more beautiful when all the pieces are present and healthy and contributing. But beauty isn’t the only thing at stake here. 

Miller:

God’s commandment to His creation is for the whole of creation to be fruitful and multiply in the whole of creation and the whole of creation to glorify Him. And it’s so clear to me that so many of human actions are what are impairing the capacity of creation to fulfill that mandate to glorify God and to be fruitful. And so that’s kind of where my conservation ethic comes from, is, you know, humans are really impairing the God-given commandment to creation, and that we need to not be. You know, it’s one thing for humans not to glorify God, but impairing all of the rest of creation from glorifying God is sort of a much worse situation.

Stump: 

There’s a quibble that can be made here.

Hoogerwerf: 

I’d expect nothing less. 

Stump: 

Which is that extinctions have always happened. And to stay within the metaphor, the symphony has always been changing and losing instruments, right?

Hoogerwerf: 

Right, but I think those historical changes are more like the musical style changed from baroque to classical – a few different instruments played in some different ways. But now there’s like a massive strike on the part of musicians… okay, maybe the metaphor is getting away from me.

Stump: 

Right. But I do think it’s important to note the difference between change and diminishment. The goal of conservation isn’t to freeze everything exactly where it is now. 

Miller: 

If that was the goal, we missed that train a long time ago, I mean natural systems do change and evolve. But if the environment changes faster than those adaptive capacities of the natural system, the natural system collapses. And again, part of the entire sort of provisional system that God created us in this planet has to do with functions of a lot of that biodiversity that Bob was describing. Like, yeah, it goes along okay for a little while. And that’s part of this function that we understand that biodiversity has. It provides some buffer in these planetary systems that support all sorts of life, that give us oxygen to breathe and, you know, maintain clean water systems, and our atmosphere. I mean our atmosphere is one of those amazing gifts and things about our planet that God created that enables any of us to live or any of the systems that we know. I mean, none of the other planets have an atmosphere like Earth does. And that’s the reason it’s our own.

Hoogerwerf: 

This brings us to familiar territory. We’ve talked a lot about what it means to have hope in the face of these rapid changes in climate and biodiversity. And here we had three interns at the beginning of careers in this field of conservation, and coming to conservation through the lens of Christian faith. So we wanted to hear from them what their experience has been and how they are finding their way to hope. Here’s Michaela.

Stenerson: 

So I’d say I personally have hope, but…yeah, unfortunately, just in talking with my grandparents about how much the world has changed since they were my age. I definitely think there will be less wild spaces by the time we are our grandparents’ age. And…yeah, I don’t know. It’s sad. Honestly, I would say I don’t think about that too much. I don’t think about what it will be like then. I just think more about what we’re doing now, and how to encourage kind of a mindset shift and a different way of relating with creation, so that we don’t continue down this path that we seem to be going in.

Stump: 

And here’s Nick. 

Davis: 

For me, this is always a sort of loaded question, because there’s so many things that kind of race through my mind. And typically, I like to be very optimistic. I think there are a lot of amazing efforts around the world. I think there’s a lot more people nowadays that are kind of aware of the situation that is going on. But also just seeing everything that has already, all the damage that has already been done, like coral reefs, like, for example, the Florida Reef Tract, how imperiled it is. I remember the first time snorkeling in one of the fringe reefs out on the Florida Reef Tract. I remember when I saw it I thought it was so amazingly beautiful. And then hearing this man who has been diving there for over 50 years tell us how degraded it was. And it’s just like, you just kind of take a step back and think about that, and like, Oh my goodness, like yeah, it’s just crazy to think about all the damage that has been done. And the Indian River Lagoon, for example, hearing people who have lived here for so long to hear about how the waters were clear, how they saw seahorses in there, or flourishing oyster reefs. And now we have to help the Brevard Zoo kind of restore those oyster reefs and help them monitor those restoration efforts, which is amazing, but it’s also a shame that that has to be done as well.  

Stump: 

So Michaela says she’s hopeful. And Nick says he wants to be optimistic, but he’s not terribly optimistic. And I think it’s probably the case that both of these can be true at the same time. 

Cutting: 

Just thinking of many different stories in the Bible where I think in the moment, yes, probably looked incredibly dismal, of “Where the heck is this going?” And being, you know, in the state of things, looking pretty gloom. But then I think, from a faith perspective—at least this is where I’ve kind of landed on things—is you can have a deeper sense of hope of knowing that what’s immediately around you might not make sense, or it might look like it’s heading in one particular direction. But I think knowing that not all that we see is all that there is. I think. And knowing that, I guess, again, from my perspective of trusting that there is a Creator who has created with love, and a knowingness of where things are going. There, I think, is a sense of hope, in that, at least for myself. That’s where I draw a sense of hope. I don’t think that means that you can’t lament what’s happening, you can’t take a good look and be realistic of, like, okay, this we’ve got work to do, there’s things to be done, things that we have attributed to that are having negative effects on other humans and other creatures. And I think there’s a responsibility there that we have to take a good, hard look at the way that we’re living with each other, and with the resources that God has provided us with, and the other creatures that we’re coexisting with. But I don’t think that taking a clearer look at that with a realistic perspective means that you have to have a lack of hope.

Hoogerwerf: 

I’ve often thought—and we’ve talked about before on the podcast—that drawing on the deep tradition of Christian hope could be really helpful for so many of us that are struggling with what the scientific evidence shows us about what is happening on our planet. But Bob pointed out that this goes in the other direction too.

Sluka: 

I think maybe one interesting thing is, this is where science helps us to love God and love our neighbor better, including our non-human neighbors. Because we see there, there are hopeful solutions. You know, when you set aside an area when you care for it, when you remove the fishing pressure from it, life flourishes. And it’s not the only solution to the problem. But what it shows is that the science is pointing to hopeful solutions that we can implement. There is actually practical ways in which we can make these changes. And so it’s not like, “It’s hopeless; it’s over; it’s gonna happen regardless.” There are things that we can do. And Margaret’s work is about that as well, I would say. that they’re doing what they’ve seen the science, this works, and we need to scale it up. But it is actually a science-based hopeful solution that we can implement.

Miller: 

And I guess I’d echo that too. It’s like most of the environmental problems, we know how to solve them, right? It’s not that complicated! If you don’t go out and fish the sharks, the sharks will flourish. If we don’t spit so much greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, the atmosphere supports this planet in a way that all of the life that we know does flourish. So you know, there are certain problems that are intractable and science hasn’t, you know, a lot of diseases, are mysterious, and they’re really intractable problems and how you solve them. But most of the environmental problems, we know how to solve them. And the solutions, in some sense, are quite simple. They’re not simple in the sense that they require humans to change the way they live. And our idols of comfort and of luxury and greed and things like that, don’t enable us very easily to exercise those changes. But the solutions are really not difficult, in one sense.

Stump: 

And this is where we can bring everything back to hospitality. Because hospitality requires us to confront those idols that Margaret mentions. It asks us to put aside those desires of comfort and luxury and actually pay attention to our neighbors.

Hoogerwerf: 

In the case of our non-human neighbors, we may not share a meal, but hospitality does mean paying attention and listening to what it is those neighbors are telling us. 

[musical interlude]

Hoogerwerf: 

Part Three. Let The Sea Resound.

Stump: 

There are a lot of different ways to pay attention to the non-human world. Last summer I decided it was time to start learning the names of trees. And what that did was to refocus my attention in ways that it hadn’t been focused before. I started to look for things like leaf shape and bark texture. And all of a sudden, when walking my normal path through the woods, or even around the neighborhood, it felt like there were all these friends around that had always been there, but I hadn’t noticed them. I guess that’s a kind of hospitality too. 

Hoogerwerf: 

Yeah, I’m really taken by this idea that we don’t all see the same world and that we are all trained to notice different things, and it ends up creating a totally different visual landscape for every one of us. That goes for sound too—probably all the senses. When you invite another human to sit at a table with you and listen to what they have to say, you will often end up learning something from the story you hear. The same is true when you open your senses and attention to the non-human world, though the story isn’t told in English.

Stump: 

And maybe because of that, there’s even more of an opportunity to learn. 

Sluka: 

You’ve been here now just over a day, and I’ve learned a lot from you as a fellow follower of Christ. And the ocean, the crabs aren’t following Christ in the same way we are. It seems that we have a different type of relationship with God, but they’re meant to praise God. They do praise God. The Bible declares that, you know, in fact, if we don’t, you know, the rocks are, and so the ocean is declaring God’s praise. The animals there are praising God. So can we listen to them? Can we, together, experience God’s goodness and in his world, and think about each other as fellow neighbors in this world of trying to understand how to be part of that orchestra.

Hoogerwerf: 

This was something we actually tried to put into practice, with Bob’s guidance.

Stump: 

Our stay with Bob ended Sunday afternoon. And instead of going to a church building with our new friends that morning, we piled in the cars and drove out to the Atlantic Ocean to join a different congregation.

Sluka: 

One of the things that we’re really experimenting with—and it is experimenting, trying to understand how to do it—is what does it look like, not to have church on the beach, so that the beach, so to speak, is a platform for doing the same thing you might do in a building? But what does it mean then for the beach itself, the ocean itself, to be a participant in that service, if you want to call it that, an act of worship. So we’re going to head out to the beach, we’re going to spend time using our senses. We’re going to symbolically walk into the ocean, invite the ocean to be a part of what we’re doing. And we’ll take some time to be quiet and sit with the ocean as a fellow traveler along the path, a fellow creature.

Hoogerwerf: 

If this sounds a little new-agey, pantheistic, or you’re worried that we’re verging on paganism or something, there’s an important distinction to make here. 

Sluka: 

So it’s not—unless you’re already throwing me out of the family faith here—but you know, we’re not talking about worshiping the ocean, we’re talking about taking seriously the biblical claim that the ocean is praising God. How do we hear it? How do we listen to it? You know, it’s been praising God for longer than we’ve been around, so how do we understand what it’s saying? What can we learn the same way you would learn from a different person? So that’s the theory. We’re in? I don’t know exactly how to do that. But we’re experimenting with that. As a fellow creature.

Stump: 

This experience was very meaningful, really cool. 

Hoogerwerf: 

It was also literally cold. I’d been looking forward to this part all weekend, and so I was a little worried when the weather called for consistent drizzle and temperature in the high 50s. And sure enough, the drizzle started as we were driving. 

Stump: 

We drove out to a remote beach, and when we got there we all huddled under the raised boardwalk, and Bob laid out a kind of liturgy for us, starting by walking out from under the shelter of the boardwalk, down to the shore where we put our feet in the ocean. Then we read Psalm 104. 

Stenerson: 

[reading with sounds of waves behind]
There is the sea, vast and spacious,
    teeming with creatures beyond number—
    living things both large and small.
There the ships go to and fro,
    and Leviathan, which you formed to frolic there.

Hoogerwerf: 

After the psalm we all went off to walk by ourselves to listen, to look, to find something to bring back with us. 

Stump: 

We were also supposed to make an attempt not just to listen but to converse with the ocean and the beach. 

Hoogerwerf: 

Yeah, what does that mean exactly? 

Stump: 

I guess I’m not mystical enough to think that the ocean was really talking to me, but in opening myself up to this, I certainly heard what could have been the ocean, if it used language and English.

Hoogerwerf: 

So what was it saying?

Stump: 

Well, I picked up a piece of shell, from a long line of broken shells that had washed up on the beach, and my first thought was that this was evidence of a lot of creatures that had died. I looked at that and said to the beach, “I’m very sorry for your loss.” And the beach said back to me, “No need to apologize. That’s the way things work here.” Then walking a little further, I picked up a piece of plastic that looked almost identical to the piece of shell I had picked up. This time the ocean said, “Yes, you can apologize for that one.”

Of course, the responses that I got here are highly dependent on knowing something about the histories of these objects I picked up. They looked almost identical, but because I knew something about how they got there, they evoked very different responses in me, and in the ocean.

Hoogerwerf: 

I really wanted to hear, in English, some wisdom about God from the ocean. I didn’t hear that, but I did try to quiet the buzz in my own head and see if some ocean wisdom might become apparent. Having grown up by Lake Michigan – another body of water you can’t see across – that blank, watery horizon wasn’t a shock, like I know it is for some people. But I knew that there was a vastness out there much bigger than Lake Michigan. And I’ve been reading a lot about the deep ocean, and so I know that it’s not only a huge distance across but a vastness that is also deep. And so I spent some time looking into that. And then as I was walking, I picked up a little piece of sargassum that had washed up. Sargassum is a kind of floating seaweed with tiny, gas-filled balls that make it buoyant. But sargassum also hosts tiny animals – bryozoans and hydroids, which live together with the plant in complex relationships. Holding this small plant with even tinier animals was a clue to the wild complexity held within the vastness of the ocean. And so if the ocean had a voice, it might have told me something that morning about how God is also vast and yet interested in unfathomable complexity. 

Stump: 

Each of our group shared reflections like these. Then for the last part of our service, we walked back down to the shoreline, right where the waves were crashing, and we prayed the Lord’s Prayer responsively with the ocean. [clip] We said a line, then paused for the ocean to respond. If the psalmist can say “The heavens declare the glory of God,” I think we might equally say the oceans also declare the glory of God. They have no speech, but their voice is heard; their words go out to the ends of the world.

Hoogerwerf: 

During that prayer I had the feeling that if the ocean did respond in language, it would be like one of Tolkien’s ents. It would take decades for the ocean to say one line of the Lord’s Prayer, and that maybe we didn’t give long enough in our pauses. 

Stump: 

That was the end of the planned liturgy. Instead of cookies and coffee in the narthex, we did a quick nurdle hunt on the beach. I didn’t know what that was, so I’m guessing many of our listeners don’t either. You should explain. 

Hoogerwerf: 

Yeah, nurdles are tiny plastic pellets and are the first step in making anything out of plastic. They get shipped around the world and many of them get spilled during transport, and they end up on beaches and in rivers and lakes. You can find them in just about any water source. And there are a bunch of citizen science projects that are trying to figure out where nurdles are showing up and coming from. So we all did another transect, walked the beach for a specific amount of time hunting for nurdles. We counted them, and that data was submitted later to a website. If any of our listeners want to do their own nurdle hunt, we put a link to that in the shownotes. 

Stump: 

Listening to the natural world and learning from it some new form of worship doesn’t have to happen at the beach or on Sunday morning, and it doesn’t have to be planned either. When we asked about some favorite moments of the internship so far, Alli told this story:

Cutting:

It was in the first few weeks that we showed up here. And I recently finished my master’s thesis, which is like, you know, productivity and trying to drive things forward. And we were having a book discussion. And there was anole, a local reptile here, that emerged from under the couch. And we just paused the discussion and watched this anole for a good, like, seven minutes. Time went very slowly for me in that moment. And it was this interesting, like, pull that I felt from this desire to be productive of like, oh my gosh, can we just move forward with the discussion, the productivity? What are we making? What are we doing? And then, like, getting shifted into, like, no, this is, what a part of the work is actually about, is learning to observe and understand and take time and give attention to these creatures, which had been there in my past, but had kind of gotten drowned out in the course of working in the environmental space.

Hoogerwerf: 

Bob and his interns have really intentionally done the work to prepare themselves for moments like this. There’s a kind of priming that makes it more likely that these moments of worship will arrive. And paying attention takes some practice. 

Stump: 

But even in our short time with them, we found this working on us. On Saturday evening, the night before we went out to the beach to see what we could learn from the ocean and its creatures, we loaded up some kayaks, and Bob and Margaret took us out on the Indian River Lagoon around sunset. We paddled out around a little point, in no particular direction, chatting and waiting for the sun to go down. Before it went down, we paddled back around the point. The wind was coming from behind us. And as soon as we came around the point, it became calm and quiet with the sunset ahead of us. Without any of us planning it or directing it, we all became silent. 

Hoogerwerf: 

And, of course, silence is never actually silent. In this case there was the occasional sound of water; of a paddle correcting course; of a fish jumping; of the gulls, terns, and spoonbills calling overhead. 

Stump: 

Floating just above water level, it’s easier to feel like you’re part of nature, that you’re inhabiting the same neighborhood as these creatures I learned to know better that weekend. Even though unseen, I knew there were thousands upon thousands of horseshoe crabs in the water of this lagoon beneath me, glorifying God in their crabby way. The birds overhead called out in literal songs that sounded as liturgical as any pipe organ can. Even the almost-full moon rose up opposite the setting sun and seemed to inhabit this same space, declaring the glory of God along with the great cloud of witnesses all around us. So often we use the natural world as a prop for our own worship—we say the words thinking it sits there mute. But in that setting it seemed reversed: we were the silent scenery, while “all nature in manifold witness” spoke of God’s “faithfulness, mercy, and love.” It was as holy a time as I have ever been a part of.

Hoogerwerf:

The four of us drifted there, watching the sun as it sank behind a thin layer of cloud perched just above the horizon. The light came out above and below the cloud in distinct rays, and I wondered if it was maybe the most beautiful sunset I have ever seen—or if maybe every sunset is just as beautiful, and here I had just primed myself for it, cultivating an attention that allowed me to see the beauty and the detail. And if that was the case, how much beauty might there be and what might I be missing when I don’t give the time to learn, to worship, don’t give the effort of learning from all of my neighbors how to pay attention, and then extend some hospitality. 

Stump:

Thanks to Bob Sluka and A Rocha for the invitation, for letting us become part of the fieldstation for a few days, for the hospitality extended to us, and for teaching us the extended and more holistic meaning of hospitality.

Hoogerwerf:

And to Margaret Miller for connecting us to Bob, for the knowledge she shared and for spending her time with us. 

Stump:

And thanks to Nick, Michaela, and Alli, the interns, for their curiosity and eagerness, and sharing their time and stories with us. 

Hoogerwerf:

Language of God is produced by BioLogos. It has been funded in part by the Fetzer Institute, the John Templeton Foundation, and by individual donors and listeners who contribute to BioLogos. Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf. That’s me. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. 

BioLogos offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Grand River watershed. If you have questions or want to join in a conversation about this episode find a link in the show notes for the BioLogos forum or visit our website, biologos.org, where you will find articles, videos and other resources on faith and science. Thanks for listening.