I was in a city I'd never visited before on a Sunday, and looking for a place to worship. I found one, too - but not by Googling "churches + seattle". Instead I worshipped at the aquarium on Pier 59.

On this morning, it was filled with strolling couples whose children ran from tank to tank and tidal pool to tidal pool, squealing with delight. Spiny starfish in low pools nearly begged to be touched and slithering, uninviting eels glided through encased water and between rocks. A tiny school of fingerling salmon congregated tightly in an overhead tank, and nearby a mixed neighborhood of saltwater fish shared a room-sized pool with clinging coral of all kinds.

Small sharks grazed the glass just inches from my nose, their skin like smooth, grey satin. Just down the way huge black seals swam underwater, broke the surface then submerged again. One showed off with a perpendicular "nose stand", half in and half out of water, the way a kid would execute a handstand in the shallow end of a swimming pool.

After wandering for nearly a half hour, I watched four otters play for an even longer time, and laughed out loud more than once as they floated belly-up, rubbing their eyes and whiskers in small circles like old men waking from sweet dreams. When they bored of doing the back float they chased one another, twirling through the churning water like a load of "darks" in a slow wash cycle.

I saw winged birds not just dive underwater, but "fly" in it - submerging and gliding to chase their fish of choice. It was joy so pure it almost hurt.

There were no hymns on Pier 59. There was no sermon. The price of admission was $12 that I paid at a cash register near the door. No one passed a plate once I was inside, but if they had I would have given more.

The heavens tell of the glory of God - and a small sample of the sea does, too. Everything in it shouts "Hosanna!" What kind of Maker would craft such an odd and awesome assortment of life and command it to share space on this planet not just with its own kind, but with us? The text for the morning came not from the prophets or the psalmists or the gospel writers, but from memory  - and it came unbidden in an instant:

GLORY be to God for dappled things -

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced - fold, fallow, and plough;

And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems. London: Humphrey Milford, 1918.