With apologies to both Fulton Oursler’s novel and the movie based on it, for borrowing their title, that story is a single episode in the greater story of all of us. Maybe it’s time to revisit the biblical story of creation, movingit out of misplaced nostalgia for a golden past to a more realistic tale of growth and change.
In the beginning, there was nothing. Not even darkness.
And then, amazingly, out of nothing, a drop of energy formed.
As it splashed, space and time were born; dimensions emerged.
The energy made light. The energy made heat.
Balls of energy melted together, building bigger balls of energy,
until those balls could no longer contain all that compressed energy.
They exploded
and seeded the new universe with the physical elements that still form everything.
Our bodies consist of the atoms created by exploding stars;
we are stardust.
The echoes of that ancient explosion still ring through the universe;
they echo within every cell in every living being.
With matter came gravity, the attraction of all things to all things.
Free-floating molecules clung together.
The stardust formed gas clouds, galaxies, and stars.
One of those stars became our sun.
Some of the stardust attracted towards that sun started swirling around it.
The dust and debris formed a solar system, with planets.
One of those planets, we call our earth.
It began as an utterly inhospitable place, a seething sphere of molten rock.
It was not paradise.
But as it cooled, some of the gases circulating in its atmosphere
blended into something new: water vapour.
The vapour condensed into liquid.
It fell onto the earth.
It ran down over hot rocks and formed streams and rivers, lakes, seas, and oceans.
In that mineral-rich chemical broth, life emerged.
We don’t know how it happened, but we know it did, because we’re here.
Those first plants, still single cells, absorbed energy streaming from the sun,
converted it into chemicals necessary for life.
The plant cells grew, and multiplied, and died.
When their waste product, free oxygen, threatened to poison life on earth, new life emerged --
animals, who used that oxygen to feed themselves.
Each form of life enabled other forms of life.
In time, plants and animals both ventured from water onto dry land.
Trees and grasses, frogs and lizards, bugs and insects, furry creatures and feathered creatures,
grew, and multiplied, and died,
and made room for new plants and animals.
In time, we became one of those animals.
We call ourselves “humans.”
This is our story.
We call ourselves intelligent beings, but if there is intelligence,
it exists in the collective sentience of all living things.
It draws us together, connects us, cautions us, points us into the future.
In this great story, we realize we were not created uniquely, distinctly.
We are not the goal of creation; we are a part of its evolving story.
We are all related. To each other. To all animals.
And to all plants, and to the waters where life began,
and to the blue planet spinning in the vast network of space,
and to the star dust from which we all came.
We are children of the universe, and parents to the universe that will succeed us.
We are not alone. We are but a moment, the boundary between what has been and what will be.
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Copyright © 2016 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups, and links from other blogs, welcomed; all other rights reserved.
To comment on this column, write jimt@quixotic.ca
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YOUR TURN
Last week, I explored the connections of thunderstorms and the gods, including God.
John Hatchard reminded me that, “God also spoke to Moses from a burning bush, (Exodus 3:13-15) He was giving Moses the job of going to the Pharaoh to release His people from their slavery. Moses naturally asked who should he say sent him and God revealed his name for the first and last time, ‘I AM THAT I AM. Say that I AM has sent you.’
“My attention was recently drawn to the frequency with which the words 'I am...' are used in daily conversation and … that what follows those two small words is more likely than not going to be negative or ego-tistic -- 'I am a miserable sinner', 'I am the greatest Olympic athlete since…', etc.
“It was then pointed out to me that God can never be these; God it always positive, forgiving, the Source of unconditional love. Negativity, like sickness or disease, cannot exist in God's presence because, as one of my spiritual teachers once told me, 'God is a being who can recognise Good without Evil as a point of reference'. It is this that makes prayer effective and spiritual healing possible.”
John didn’t give the source for this quote:
”I am a thought of God:
All thoughts of God are infinite:
They are not measured up by time
For things that are concerned with time
Begin and end.”
Frank Martens commented, “Having lived the early part of my life on the prairies (Alberta) I can guarantee you that the thunder storms we have here in the Okanagan are pussycats compared to the storms we had back there. Because of our location in the valley, we only see a small portion of any storm. On the prairie with its tremendous skyline, when a storm hits there it is like the whole world is on fire with lightning strikes and the roar of the thunder.”
Judyth Mermelstein: “A couple of things occur to me in response to John Shaffer's comment (last week’s mail):
1) We Jews are quite divided on the question of an afterlife. The fundamentalists take the few mentions of Sheol (Hell) in the scriptures as literally true, along with a Heaven populated by God and his angels, etc. The more liberal see such things as a product of the time of writing and are at least agnostic about the afterlife. But the vast majority do believe in survival in memory, and follow the tradition of naming children for deceased relatives to carry those memories forward.
“Oddly, a very religious cousin had a new son the day my father died and named him Uriel ‘for him’ ... though Dad's Hebrew name was Shmuel, his Hungarian one was Ödön and his English one was Edmund. Still, everyone considers he was named for Dad, who will thus be remembered for at least a generation after I and my siblings are gone. Dad wouldn't have cared, I suspect: he was not a believer even before WWII and named none of us for the family he lost in the war. In fact, we only learned the names of our grandparents as young adults and not from him; it took half a century for most of my parents' generation to be able to talk freely about those who died in the Holocaust.
2) I wonder if the Chinese tradition alluded to was the millennia-old practice of having a family ancestral shrine with a tablet for each departed patriarch. Like so many things, the rules were hierarchical: an aristocratic family might keep five or seven tablets there, depending on rank, while commoners were allowed only three. Thus, with each new generation, an older ancestor was consigned to the shadows, though still venerated as part of the collective past.
“It's perhaps ironic that the situation is reversed for my family and probably other Jewish families. We remembered the collective ancestry, knowing little or nothing of the individuals until somebody took on the task of constructing a family tree from what anecdotes and documents were available.
“Personally, I don't care much how long I'll be remembered -- but I do hope the memories will be pleasant while they last. If there were to be an afterlife, I'd rather come back as a squirrel or gull than sing Hallelujah in perpetuity.”
Margaret Carr wrote, “I always read your Psalm as well as your blog, and it struck me that this 71st Psalm is like talking to your Mother rather than to God. However as I believe that God is inside every one of us, it still works for me. It does describe my late Mother and I hope it describes me. My usual Grace which I say before meals seems to fit in too as I say---‘For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful and ever mindful of the needs of others’ and that kind of fits my way of life as I try to ‘Love Wastefully’.”
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PSALM PARAPHRASES
The selected verses from Psalm 81 sound as if they have a mixed message. Verses 1 and 10 sound like a proud parent (or, in the context of the recent Olympic games, like a proud coach); verses 11-16 sound a little peevish, as if the protégé has strayed from the mentor’s program.
1 My heart is so full, I cannot make a sound.
10 I am the one who has watched over you.
I am the one who sustained you through the tough times.
I fed you and nurtured you and kept you going.
I am the one; I am God.
11 But you were obsessed by your own concerns.
12 So I left you alone, to do it your way.
I did not interfere.
13 If only you had paid as much attention to me as to your goals.
14 I would have given you many more times to rejoice along the way.
15 It would have been much less of a struggle.
16 This moment would be just as sweet, with no trace of bitterness.
For paraphrases of most of the psalms used by the Revised Common Lectionary, you can order my book Everyday Psalms from Wood Lake Publishing, info@woodlake.com.
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YOU SCRATCH MY BACK…
Ralph Milton has a new project, called Sing Hallelujah -- the world’s first video hymnal. It consists of 100 popular hymns, both new and old, on five DVDs that can be played using a standard DVD player and TV screen, for use in congregations who lack skilled musicians to play piano or organ. More details at www.singhallelujah.ca
Isabel Gibson's thoughtful and well-written blog, www.traditionaliconoclast.com
Wayne Irwin's "Churchweb Canada," an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. <http://www.churchwebcanada.ca>
Alva Wood's satiric stories about incompetent bureaucrats and prejudiced attitudes in a small town are not particularly religious, but they are fun; write alvawood@gmail.com to get onto her mailing list.
Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” – ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at twatson@sentex.net
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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