As we come to the end of the Lunar New Year festival, a festival which each year, officially ushers in the new annual cycle of life as it is lived within the sphere of Oriental culture and tradition, it never ceases to amaze me upon reflecting throughout this two-week long adventure, how correlative and superlatively connected different respective faith & culture traditions actually are.

But it may well be asked why am I even bothering to share musings on a topic which could seem to some readers, in some ways, to be out of sync here within the environs of a Catholic blog…..The answer invariably lies in the fact that the Church is precisely called “Catholic” because she is “Universal”, and what this essentially means is that she is the ecclesial mother of all nations, all cultures, all tribes, and all tongues under the reign of God, the Supreme Head of All Life since He is the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End of them all. Therefore, it figures rather correlatively then, in light of all nations, tribes and tongues, that the Body of Christ is not an exclusivistic elitist club for those of a singular ethno-cultural narrative. Rather, Christ’s Body here on Earth is a kind of semblance if you like, (although a rather imperfect one due to our motley human weaknesses) of the entire throng of nations, tribes, and tongues extant in Heaven and so it must be reflected as such and as fully as possible here on Earth in spite of the shortcomings since the purpose of our sojourn, our Earthly pilgrimage is to iron-out the shortcomings and strive to attain some kind of perfected and reconciled union with our Creator. It will also do us well at this point to be reminded that indeed God had placed His Hand upon every nation that spread out over the face of the earth from the time of our great collective ancestor Noah. And precisely because of God’s infusion of the entire created order including the various human varieties in ethno-linguistic terms, there can be found in just about every culture on the planet this utterly awesome primordial trace-back to the shared Noahide cultural genepool of Biblical tradition through generational evolution, of our interrelated descendancy from the various branches of that grand Noahide family.

So you may well also be wondering what has all this got to do with the subject of this year’s Lunar New Year? Quite alot actually, as this Biblical collective progenerative  descendancy from Noah and his offspring, of the entire human race ties in with the thematics echoed through Psalm 104 (103) where it is alluded to that God decreed (vs 9.) that the waters that once covered the whole earth, be levelled out so that a impassable frontier seperates the waters from the land and that never again shall the waters completely override that allotted place or broach the frontier between them and the dry land put in place by God at the receding of the Great Flood……Here on the earth, both in the respective domains of land and sea the profusion of the vitality and diversity of life is testament to God’s enduring Love Covenant with His creation, which btw, He saw at its inception as “Very Good”. And within this dynamic cosmological reality orchestrated and put in place by God, everything has its own allocated place in the natural order of things. We read of beautiful symmetry in the dynamism of this order in Psalm 104 (103) and how it all reflects something of God’s own glory.¹ And this Psalm gives too some hints as to the plethora and magnitude of design that God had fashioned into being through the vast array of animal life on land and in the oceans. The Giant Seahorse or Dragon of Chinese legend is hinted at in this same Psalm (vs. 26-27). This creature btw, is NOT the same as that described in Revelation Ch. 12 vs. 3 as a great red dragon. These are antithetical creatures, with the first bearing the primordial perfection of God’s own design while the latter is a perverse disfigurement of something created, resembling nonetheless the brazenly dire consequences of our first parents Fall from Grace in the Garden of Eden. It must be noted that throughout the entire creation after the Fall, the cacophony of antithetical admixtures of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly was a salient and significant feature. Good and evil now must cohabit side by side as it were. The infiltration of the Good Earth with bad spiritual residue from Adam and Eve’s disobedience produced the bad and the ugly, effectively enabling these negatives to clamour for attention amongst all that did remain good. And so the war between the good and evil on land is also replicated in the sea, in the life of the waters. Our biological diversity is threatened not only on land but also in the oceans.

Indeed the Giant Seahorse of Oriental tradition symbolizes the beauty and magnificence of marine life as it is meant to be lived and seen in the kaleidoscopic reef gardens way down under, and as also was once rather prolifically extant right across all seven seas prior to more recent times when pollution and toxicity levels alongside other unsustainable human patterns of marine dependence have wrent asunder the delicate & symbiotic ecological life-net of the oceans and none more pronounced perhaps than the tragedy of miscellaneous human waste littering the waters and releasing toxic fumes into the hearths underneath causing devastation to the entire grid of great barrier reefs. Once upon a time, back when the earth was much younger and less tampered with and spoilt as it is now, intricate coral reefs boasting blazing colour amidst a dazzling diversity of life were the norm. But now they are dying. The vibrant technicolour that is meant to grace the ocean floors of the entire seven seas is turning to mono-tone hues of either beige or red. The Giant Seahorse of legendary fame was once a real player in the deep and would sometimes rise to the surface as whales and dolphins also tend to do. Imagine sea megafauna with the shape of and visual similarity to a miniature seahorse but ten thousand times the size blazing with the vibrancy of colour and physiognomic symmetry of coral, like that seen in the most diverse and enigmatic reefs still existent today! Well that there is your classic Chinese Dragon of old world charm.

And so indeed The Year of the Giant Seahorse is a Psalm 104 (103) year, a Laudato Si year in which we are to be heartfeltedly mindful of our role in being good stewards of the wonderful earth God had given to us. It is a year in which we are reminded to cultivate a conscientious concern for the importance of acting to regenerate our ailing and dying world by putting into practice in our own small but collective cumulatively significant steps towards creating environments where the vitality present in the Psalm 104 (103) thematics are able to either continue and thrive or where they have tragically diminished and degenerated, to be healed and regenerated. And this indeed corresponds to the traditional Hebraic notion of Tikkun Olam, which is basically translated as Restoring Our World. According to Hebrew tradition, we humans are co-creators with God in the worlds around us. This means that God has delegated a share of participation in His creative design of the universe  to us and is evident from God’s exhortation to Adam (prior to the creation of Eve), to go around and give name to all the different animals and that whatever Adam named each of them would be a tribute to their own unique graces and characteristics. The resonance of names spoken into the creation after it had been formed with love by Our Maker has a ripple-on effect of giving life in a charismatic sense to each of those who are named. Hence the divine power of the spoken word is also made manifest through Adam as he faithfully carries out God’s holy will through the naming process. This is generative naming and needs to be reconfigured in our time through the way we use our words in daily life. We need to be conscientious of using our words in constructive alignment with developing a tender conscience regarding the sacred duty of ours in the respecting and protecting of life. There is often this misconception that pragmatism is more important than words and it stems from a misrendering of the legitimate call for one’s daily activity to align with one’s way of speaking into life. God gives due direction to the importance of this alignment of our choice with His holy law of love and life in how we live our daily life in Deuteronomy 30 :19 where He says ardently:

“Today I have given you the choice between life and death, between blessings and curses. Now I call on heaven and earth to witness the choice you make. Oh, that you would choose life, so that you and your descendants might live!”

Such a beautiful exhortation is meant to be correctively liberating rather than condemnatory and such is the qualitative nature of what this year has laid out before us, and hence bears upon us the moral duty to accept God’s call to choose life. After all, this exemplary is meant to remind us that our words are the progenitors of our actions and so we need to be careful how we deliver those words. God exhorts us always to be life-affirming in the way we use words. This means that even when and where we are challenged to respond in a direct manner with corrective reproof, we need to diligently do so with a spirit of robust Christ-centred dignity, which btw, is another way of saying to act from a standpoint of righteous anger if it is a moral outrage that incenses us but without the sin of either going too far or becoming reckless in expressing our displeasure.

And so, the cultivation of personal virtue in these areas can contribute towards the regeneration of a sound world-wide environmental stability, along the lines of Laudato Si even if it seems that one’s effort is very small in comparison to the gratuitous extent of need for restoration faced by our world at large. There is a wonderful story which can illustrate the cumulative immensity that small seemingly insignificant steps can infuse or impart to the larger context or bigger picture. It is a story about starfish. One day, a boy was walking along the seashore and he noticed that at the evening tide, huge numbers of starfish were being washed up onto the shore where they would eventually die if not returned to the water in due time. The thought of all these starfish senselessly dying like that upset the boy and his heart was filled with sadness as he thought about the needlessly wasted lives of these beached starfish. As he was moved with pity for their lives he started to pick them up, and one by one, cast them back into the sea. As he was doing this, along came a vacationing businessman on his evening stroll and he asked the boy what he was doing. Hoping to teach him what he thought was nothing but common sense, the man remarked “I have been watching what you are doing, son. You have a good heart, and I know you mean well, but do you realize how many beaches there are around here and how many starfish are dying on every beach every day? Surely such an industrious and kind hearted boy such as yourself could find something better to do with your time. Do you really think that what you are doing is going to make a difference?” The boy then glanced up at the man and then looked down at a starfish beside his feet and as he bent down, picked it up and tossed it with great care back into the ocean, he said in earnest reply “It sure makes a difference to that one !” ²

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that one earnest moral lesson of this Lunar New Year is this: the big things (a Giant Seahorse for instance) can sometimes point us to the small things (like blue starfish) which bear to us the weight of an importance that is beyond measure. This also ought to bring home to our hearts the real reason for St Therese of Lisieux’s emphasis on cultivating joy and meaning from “the small things of life”. It is so that we can develop hearts which relish the God-given beauty of life in those small things since through such endeavours, an authentic humility coupled with an enduring sense of heartfelt compassion is born.

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References:

1. See video by Fr Chad Ripperger, The Offense God is Taking Today, https://youtu.be/EaIEJvEwuM4?si=aqN1MLwUqXrsSCo9
This video underscores the ins and outs of how our sin affects our relationship with God. It also seeks to help listeners understand the means we can pro-actively use in our own lives to help us purify & regenerate our wholesome relationship with God so that the effects of past sins don’t continue to hold us back from growing in the spiritual life and from successfully infusing our lives with virtue in light of the desire for holiness. It also explores how our personal actions actually impact the cosmological order around us.

2. See article from the following URL https://radgiving.weebly.com/blog/starfish-story

Photo Credits:

Pic 1. Collage of oceanography taken from Google Images

Pic 2. Courtesy of Getty Images

Pic 3. https://www.discovery.com/nature/10-most-stunning-coral-reefs-in-the-world-pictures