Welcome to Tuesday and our feature on nature as a window into the divine with a reflection based on the writing of Carl Safina in Beyond Words: How Animals Think and Feel.

God be in my head—and in my understanding

“Hagar gave this name to the LORD who spoke to her, “You are the God who sees me.” (Genesis 16: 13)

Hagar, the mother of Ishmael, driven out of her community by Abraham and Sarah experienced the gaze of another intelligence in her exile, an intelligence related to but different than her own, and called it El-Roi, Hebrew for “You are the God who sees me.”

In Beyond Words, Carl Safina writes of the powerful effect the gaze of another intelligence has on humans—the gaze of a whale. Safina quotes a researcher who has spent years studying whales (and being studied by them in turn): “When you lock eyes with them, you get the sense that they’re looking at you. It’s a steady gaze. And you feel it. Much more powerful than a dog looking at you. A dog might want your attention. The whales, it’s a different feeling. It’s more like they’re searching inside you. There’s a personal relationship that they set up with eye contact. A lot transmits in a very brief time about the intent of both sides.” Carl Safina later writes, “Other animals seem to recognize in us a kind of kindred consciousness that we often fail to recognize in them.”

Perhaps we could pay more attention to our own cravings. Don’t we actually crave the gaze of another intelligence than our own? Don’t we sense that our own form of intelligence is limited, and we seek release into a wider, a different intelligence than our own? One wonders if this isn’t the intuition toward the gaze of a divine intelligence such as Hagar experienced, cast out from her community, only to be embraced by, but more to the point, seen by God, whom she then named, “The God who sees me.”

Back to our whales, though: “And God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that crawls, which the water had swarmed forth of each kind…and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the water in the seas”

As Carl Safina says, “sea monsters” is a fair translation of the Latin, cetacea, the biological order that includes whales, porpoises, and dolphins, creatures of extraordinary intelligence.

Perhaps the whales crave another intelligence than their own when they gaze at us.

Perhaps this is as good a call to prayer as any, the last sentence in Beyond Words: How Animals Think and Feel, “There is no better prayer to morning than to feel glad to know: the greatest story is that all life is one.”

As we attend again to the song of the humpback whale in our prayers today, remember the words of the prophet Zephaniah concerning God, who “will rejoice over you with song”—surely the song of another intelligence than our own, perhaps coming to us many different ways, through many different voices than our own.

O Divine Wisdom, who dwells within the holy of holies, and whose light shines through all things created, fill our hearts, O blessed One, with the hope of a blessed future. Make all things new, return wrong to right, and cause us to walk in the ways of justice without which there can be no peace. Amen.

Over the next minute simply name your loved ones, calling each to mind in love, lifting each in the embrace of remembered love, to the God who is the source of all being.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

So have a blessed day, go in peace, wash your hands, love your neighbor: you are not alone.