While singing Melita (also known as the “Navy” hymn #608) this past Sunday I was so choked up with emotion I could hardly get the words out. Over the years I have sung this hymn time and again, but I never really felt the words. I guess I heard it as a militaristic sort of thing. Indeed we pray for our Navy sailors…but this Sunday it was different, larger. Jim Von Dreele had just spoken to us about his mission work in the port of Philadelphia and South Jersey. He told us about the hard lives of seafarers: The many months at sea away from home; the cramped quarters aboard ship; the extremely dangerous work; gales and the ever present possibility of fire aboard; the isolation and emotional stress; the lack of advocacy and the indignity that comes with that; and that 95% of what we consume comes via the shipping industry, and yet they are invisible to us.
He was describing yet another manifestation of the marginalized in our world; the invisible ones just beyond the periphery. In the gospel of Matthew the writer tells us that it is at the margins of existence where God is on the move: among the sick, the poor, the imprisoned, the unbefriended stranger, the dispossessed. It is amid the perilous climes of existence that the Spirit afire saves and dignifies. So we must constantly attend to our peripheral vision. Until the marginalized are brought into view and given the privilege of standing with dignity, the creation entire is a broken sacrament, an obfuscated outward and visible sign of what God imagines the world to be. I hear the words of the Navy hymn now as a prayer for the marginalized of our world; a poem about the Creation, the Cosmos growing into its perfection; an ambiguous process, as ambiguous as the sea…at once the source of life and at once a profound danger….but a process of mysterious beauty; a process within which we apprehend the primordial beauty of creation….beauty the DNA of the universe…..beauty that will find its way into the perilous dark corners of our world…until dignity and peace, healing and wholeness are at last upon the earth.
This is the watery, ambiguous and perilous life of Baptism, and we are all in it together bearing up the invisible ones of our world. It is a life perilous and a life that is life-giving. This is the very process of consecrating our world, making holy that which God calls very good. “O hear us as we cry to thee, for those in peril on the sea.”
