Divers in Fiordland found a black coral four meters tall and four centuries old, white and alive in dark water no one had charted.
How many are your works! … There is the sea, great and wide, in which are innumerable living things.
Psalm 104:24-25
Off Fiordland, where the fjord walls drop into water too deep for light, divers found a black coral the size of a small tree. It stands four meters tall. By the best estimate it has been standing there for four hundred years, alive before these coasts were charted, growing by slow increments in a dark no human was meant to enter.
The name misleads. Living black coral is white, a pale fan of polyps; only the skeleton beneath runs black. So for four centuries something white and breathing has been spreading in the cold, witnessed by nothing, counted by no one.
The psalm that praises a sea great and wide, teeming with things past counting, is the language of worship, sung toward a maker whose attention reaches places ours will never follow. Some of what God delights in, we were simply never going to see.