August's Symbol of the Season: the Octopus (2024)

“The mystery of God holds you in its all-encompassing arms.” - St. Hildegard of Bingen

It’s August. That means the days of summer are drawing to a close and school began this week or begins again next week, much to the dismay of thousands of kids across the land! Before the routines of fall start up in earnest, however, there’s still time to squeeze in one last quick trip to the beach.

Why do we go to the beach? I pondered this question recently. There are the obvious answers, of course. We go for a break or a change of scenery. We go to relax, maybe to spend some days with friends and family, to have a little time not watching the minutes, counting the hours. All of these are true, yes, in fact, maybe we should ask why wouldn’t we go to the beach? But I think there’s actually something more. I think we go seeking an encounter. Let me give you some examples of why I think this.

Years ago, one of my friends was going through a sudden, unexpected tragedy. She was so overwhelmed she couldn’t even think. In a daze, she said that all she could possibly do right then was to “drive to the beach, sit in the sand, and stare at the ocean.” So, that’s what she did. During her trip, there was no mystical encounter. She did not receive any special knowledge or insight. Yet when she returned from her water sabbatical, she had enough wherewithal to begin to attend to the issue at hand. In some way, she had found refreshment.

In college, another couple of friends told me that one night, they looked at each other and were overcome by a strong urge to drive to the coast. They jumped into a car, drove through the night, and arrived in time to watch the sun come up over the sea. They sat and looked at it together for a while, then they turned and made the 10-hour trip back to campus. They chose to make all that effort just to be able to see that huge expanse of water, to look out over the waves and watch the tide come in, even for just a short time.

We go to the beach, for an encounter with a mystery that is far bigger and beyond us. We can’t really name it or put words around it. Yet, we know it’s there. We experience what my friend Terry Glaspey calls “intuitional apologetics.” We know we know something, we’re just not sure exactly what that knowing is. But we know we can find something close to the something we seek when we go to the beach and stare out across the waves. This kind of knowing, it turns out, involves mystery.

How can that be? If we know something, doesn’t that necessarily eliminate any mystery about it? Here’s where learning a little about the remarkable cephalopod commonly known as the octopus can be helpful, because the way that an octopus “knows” something is a mystery in itself.

In his bestselling book Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea and the Deep Origins of Consciousness*1, philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith explains that more than half a billion years ago, the history of animals split. He writes that one path forward led “to our branch of the tree, to vertebrates, mammals and eventually humans. The other pathway led to a great range of invertebrate,” such as crabs and bees and octopuses.2

Unlike crabs and mollusks, the cephalopods developed large central nervous systems, so much so that they are now “an island of mental complexity.”3 They have individual personalities. They have three hearts and bleed blue blood. But perhaps the most fascinating aspect of them is how they understand, how they know.

In fact, an octopus understands in a radically different way than we do. For an octopus, “its arms are partly self - they can be directed and used to manipulate things. But from the central brain’s perspective, they are partly non-self too, partly agents of their own.”4 Let’s try to understand that for a moment. The parts of an octopus’ body are united to each other and at the same time independent, able to move individually. As Sy Montgomery notes in her book The Soul of An Octopus, A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness*, “it’s hard to find an animal more unlike a human than an octopus. Their bodies aren’t organized like ours. We go: head, body, limbs. They go: body, head, limbs. An octopus can pour its baggy, boneless body through an opening the size of an orange. It can change color and shape. It can taste through its skin.”5

They are so different. They are so Not Us. Octopuses “represent the great mystery of the Other.”6

But it’s the eight tentacles of the octopus that are of special interest, because the number eight itself has particular connections. For example, developmental psychologist, Howard Gardner, proposed that there are eight types of human intelligences in his Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Instead of measuring only a person’s cognitive abilities, Garner posited that we all might learn and come to know in various ways. He lists the eight types as:

Linguistic Intelligence (word smart), Logical-Mathematical Intelligence (number/reasoning smart), Spatial Intelligence (picture smart), Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence (body smart), Musical Intelligence (music smart), Interpersonal Intelligence (people smart), Intrapersonal Intelligence (self-smart), and Naturalist intelligence (nature smart)

One intelligence is not “better” than all the others, and each of us lean heavily into two or three of them. Unlike an octopus, whose tentacles are all the same (barring an accident, etc.), we prefer to stand on just a few ways of knowing. But like an octopus, we can know in different ways, not just intellectually.

There’s also a theological component to the number eight, in that it represents the new creation ushered in by Christ. The Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us that “Jesus rose from the dead ‘on the first day of the week.’ Because it is the ‘first day,’ the day of Christ’s resurrection recalls the first creation. Because it is the ‘eighth day’ following the sabbath, it symbolizes the new creation ushered in by Christ’s resurrection. For Christians it has become the first of all days, the first of all feasts, the Lord’s Day — Sunday.” (CCC 2174)

Although we don’t hear the phrase “the Eighth Day” too often, it was quite common in the early days of the infant Church. Even today, the baptismal font in some churches is in an octagonal shape to symbolize the eighth day because through this font, the baptized become a new creation. Passing down through the deep waters of death, we rise to new life in Christ. We remind ourselves of being part of this new creation every time we enter a church and sign ourselves with the Holy Water. In fact, the baptismal font at my own parish church is an octagon, and it even has artwork hanging above it featuring the sea, reminding us of the days of creation, as well as Noah’s journey through the flood. We recall John the Baptist baptizing people and Jesus’ own baptism in the Jordan River before arriving at our own baptisms, in the here and now.

All of these events are represented at the same time as a unified movement of art hanging above the font, because, similarly to way the octopus knows, all of these happenings are tied to together and flow into each other. They are united and yet independent of each other.

Finally, of course, if the number eight is laid on its side, it becomes the symbol of infinity.

So, quite a lot is packed into that small digit that comes after 7 and before 9, as is the way with most things. Just about everything speaks to us about its Creator, revealing the hand who made it. And that’s why we go to the beach, to have an encounter with the Other, to be seen by the One who made us, in some way we only perceive dimly, intuitively, to seek an encounter with the God we know but yet don’t know.

We go to build sandcastles, to laugh and play under the sun, and watch the tide tickle our toes. We go to see the stars moving overhead at night and wonder about that silver path of moonlight shining across the water. If Peter were there, would he run across it to the eternity point, to the place where the sky meets the sea?

Ultimately, it is the contemplative gaze, the resting in God that we all seek, the overwhelming face of beauty that draws us in. The wide expanse of ocean below and the endless sky above is an image of eternity, an image of that beauty. We know, of course, it is not actually eternity, but we also know at the same time, intuitionally, that it represents it, that we are indeed in some sense looking at infinity and eternity. And under that cover of water, down there in the depths of the deep blue sea, there is a very lively little eight-armed fellow who knows in a way we don’t understand, who interacts with the environment in a way that is completely different than our own, who is Other than us. And just like that remarkable cephalopod, we know that “the mystery of God holds us in its all-encompassing arms,”7 because God also knows in a way that we don’t, and he can reach out and know each of us through multiple ways that we just don’t understand, especially when we go to the beach.

*You know the drill: These links go to my Amazon page. If you purchase them, I receive a small commission, and you get a thought-provoking book!

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