On Frolicking
I used to think Psalm 104 was an existential nightmare. It’s a psalm of praise for the works of God, specifically how the creation provides for the creatures, from humans, to lions, to hyraxes. One line always haunted me. It still does, in a way. I think about it more than most psalms combined. Verse 26: There go the ships, and Leviathan which you formed to play in it. If possible, it’s worse in the NIV: which you formed to frolic there.
Imagine a whale, (Whale is what Leviathan likely means in the context of this verse. I take Leviathan to be used like leprosy in the sense that the words apply to a collection of creatures and skin diseases that we now have individual names for.) Imagine a whale, in a moment of desperate prayer, asking God to know its purpose in life. And the whale hears back from God that it is the purpose of whales to frolic and play in the sea! Neither mighty deeds nor glory are the whale’s destiny, only frolicking.
And what of Man? And forget humanity, what of me? Suppose, I go to God and ask why my purpose is and hear something as vacant as frolicking! Of course, I have the doctrine of Imago Dei to bolster my hopes of a grand destiny, but there are many animals far less capable than whales. Whales are intelligent, social, and communicative. Leave frolicking to worms or armadillos if it must be done, and let whales deal with prodigious matters, progress, and mystery. If something as noble as whales can be formed to frolic, my purpose might be something as small as walking in the woods!
I was unbearably severe when I found this to be existentially horrifying. Even now, I occasionally lean on the serious side, so imagine how bad it must have been! If seriousness was the measure of all things, then nothing could be more ghastly than being created to play. It was a worse fate, one immediately doomed to triviality, than to never exist at all.
A few weeks ago, I was in Newfoundland, an island province of Canada which has stayed remote after all this time. There I saw humpback whales. The first was at Cape Spear, the easternmost tip of Canada. Two lighthouses stand on the cape, one decommissioned, one constantly scanning its great eye of a Fresnel lens over the water. It was the kind of unexpectedly hot and humid day that sends people digging through their storage to get their window unit air conditioners, except Newfoundland is so far north there are no air conditioners in storage. But that didn’t matter much standing on the cliffs and looking out on the waves. The blue sky began to come into view between Cape Spear and the fortified harbor of Saint John’s, the capital and only city on the island. Northern gannets, long and angular seabirds, wheeled through the sky, peering through the surface to the fish below. Then, they’d fold their bodies into arrows and plunge at full speed out of the sky and beneath the waves. I’d read that they dive ‘torpedo-like’ to catch fish, but I was unprepared for the spectacular experience. All the while, I looked for Atlantic puffins.
If you look out on the east coast of Newfoundland, you can almost always see puffins, as long as you know how to look. They’ll be tiny, black spots wildly flapping their wings just above the water. Gulls and gannets can soar effortlessly on thermals. Puffins fly like I swim: it’s possible, but they clearly prefer doing anything else. When they fly, they’re leaving their handful of nesting sights and searching for small silver fish called caplins. They’re hard to recognize at first. Tiny black dots don’t look very different from the dark waves, but once you see them the first time, the brain quickly learns to distinguish between bird and ocean, and you suddenly spot dozens of them.
As I was scanning the waters for puffins, the huge body of a humpback whale burst through the surface, hung briefly in the air, and crashed into the water, tossing up white spray. For about fifteen minutes, the whale dove and breached and dove again. Everything slappable was slapped against the sea: one flipper, the other flipper, both flippers while laying on its back, its enormous tail. From the tall cliffs, we basked in the glory of the ocean and the whale which frolicked there.
I know now there is nothing better for a whale than to frolic. Having seen it first hand, I can scarcely think of anything greater for myself. Play requires a delight with what we are. Sport expresses and explores the fullness of what we can do as bodies. How would we ever know the wonders humans can produce with legs and feet if not for soccer or ballet? What better way than play to display the enchanting mechanics of skeleton, muscles, and tendons. Playing the trombone delights in all the peculiarities of just so much brass, oil, breath, meter, harmony, and rest. Bird watching is a sort of frolicking through the world, excited for puffins to be just puffins, gannets to be just gannets, and song sparrows to be just sparrows. When a whale frolics it shows just what it is to be a whale, reveling in its movement, environment, and the interplay between the two. Play is joy in being. It is looking at creation, our own being and the being of specific others, and declaring with God that it is good.
