Thoughts for your Consideration:
The sea is an awesome image that reveals the great power of creation. On the one hand the sea is turbulent and destructive. Yet the sea is also life-giving and calming. The early apostles who lived around the Sea of Galilee were very much aware of this awesome power.

I myself live by the Atlantic Ocean. I am privileged to witness the great power of the Sea. In the morning as I head over to work I can see the various shipping boats as they are heading out. As we near the middle of summer most of us become attentive to weather forecasts reporting indications of hurricane patterns. In the two-thousand years that we have progressed from the days of those early fishermen, we still can connect with their ambivalence over the destructive power of the sea.

In the first reading we find God using the image of the sea to humble the arrogance of Job. But in this passage God uses the image of the sea to convey two ideas. First, God affirms the Divine power to control the sea. Secondly, we get a sense that God’s own power is very much like the sea’s. The book of Job is about a human who is trying to comprehend the destructive power of God in allowing a good man like him to suffer. In this light we, like Job, become aware of the fact that we are only one component in a great fabric known as creation. For us to make the attempt to accept the will of God we must place ourselves in a mystical relationship with the rest of this great fabric. Then and only then can we hope to comprehend what St. Paul of the Cross called, “the greater Good.”

In the Gospel reading the disciples become aware of Jesus’ divine essence in that he has some control over the force of the sea. And yet Jesus admonishes his disciples for not having enough faith. What is Jesus calling us to do in this passage? Are we expected to have such power as to control and dominate the sea itself? Or is Jesus challenging us to reconsider our relationship with creation so that, through the prism of faith, we may be able let go of our fear of the sea and begin relating with this awesome power in a way that allows us to coexist. Such a challenge is baffling when we consider our traditional relationship to this force of nature, and yet this is the challenge that Jesus places on us.

In the second reading, St. Paul places this overall invitation to relate with creation in an historical perspective. We are called to be witnesses to Christ who for our sake died and was raised. And now all of creation is asked to be renewed under the transformation that began with Christ. That calls us to a special relationship with all of creation. It calls us to adopt a new vision of solidarity. We are familiar with the need to be sensitive to the global human family and begin to at least attempt to see events from the perspective of others. But today we are called to relate in a new way to the rest of the great fabric known as creation. Fr. Thomas Berry (who died on June 1st, 2009), once said:  “We often marvel at other people, particularly impoverished peoples.  Why are they so happy amid such difficulties of life?  They have developed a way of dealing with life creatively from within the structure of their own inner development.  What do we do?  We decide that we cannot accept the disciplines that strengthen from within.  We want to control the outside, we want to change things.  We want to control the very structure and functioning of the natural world.” (Befriending the Earth, p. 116.)

Today, rather than fearfully oppose the sea, we are invited to extend our empathy towards it.  A couple of Berry’s quips, for which he was famous, might help us with this new challenging perspective: “People say you can’t treat people as things; I say you can’t treat things as things.”   -and- “We are literally cousins to every living being”.  So many of them live in the sea.