The ocean is a great mystery. About 80% of it is still unexplored. All oceans are connected, though we call them by different names. It’s all just one body of salt water. Maybe we can call it ‘ world ocean’ as well.
The deepest ocean point is about 11 km deep, in the Mariana trench in the Pacific Ocean . If You place Mount Everest at this point, its peak will still be 2 km underwater.( Everest’s height is 8848.86 m)
We differentiate between a sea and an ocean, but the difference is only a matter of size and partial enclosure by land. Example: the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean.
The adventure of setting sail to cross the ocean by Christopher Columbus (1492), and then by Vasco da Gama in (1497) shaped all the geopolitical, religious-cultural landscape of the present world we inhabit. Although we have deep and bitter disagreements with the colonial- missionary movement of the European powers initiated by Columbus and da Gama, we should acknowledge the great adventure they dared.
I remember visiting the port Restelo in Lisbon, Portugal, where Vasco da Gama and his large crew prayed the whole night in the chapel of Restelo before sailing to India. We heard stories about a huge crowd of mothers, wives, and children gathering there and bitterly wailing as their men left for unknown lands over dangerous oceans. No expectations for their safe return. But that European adventure changed the history of the world up to now in the 21st century. Both Columbus and Gama planned to reach India though they had only heard about a legendary India.
It is strange India is surrounded by the ocean/ sea on all three sides, but Indians never ventured into the Ocean. In fact it was taboo to cross the sea, even at the time of Mahatma Gandhi in the late 19th century. We do not know if it was out of respect for the boundless ocean or just out of laziness or lack of imagination..
We are familiar with the expression “ oceanic feeling” introduced by the French writer Romain Rolland in a letter to Sigmund Freud,.. It has mystical- philosophical undertones, and denotes the psychic-spiritual experience of losing oneself into infinite vastness and being deeply connected with the world. Oceanic feeling transcends the separate identity of the ego that dissolves into the total reality.
Some of the philosophically inclined early Fathers of Church compares God’s Being to an “ocean without shores”- an amazing imagery! They also say that human sin is just like drop of dirt in the infinitely vast ocean of God’s compassion.
In a saying attributed to Christopher Columbus he says “You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.”
Without ever caring for such philosophical rumination and the experience of the infinity of the ocean, our modern civilization seems to be interested only in exploiting the enormous marine wealth of oil and natural gas, of fish and seafood, of minerals and pearls. In return we pollute it with all the fatal waste of our consumerist life, and our wars and violence.
We will certainly be confronted by the Creator of the oceans with that decisive question faced by Job : “ Where were you when I laid the foundation of the Earth? ( Job 38:4).
(Kmg, 17 March 2026)