What More Might We Worship?
Ecology, Cosmology, Theology: The Creation Story 3.0
December, southern tip of the Sangre de Cristos
Curve-billed Thrasher reappeared in the yard today, orange-eyed, alert, dashing away jays that deigned to also seek out some of the seed scattered there on the path. The entire yard is aflutter with winged ones, steadily stoking their inner fires at the feeders, here in the midst of what will likely be a full week of below-freezing days with several sub-zero nights. The valley is blanketed by six inches of snow—settled from the fluffy foot that fell two days ago—and the hillsides all around are a speckling of pine-green branches mottled with snowy white mounds.
This activity outside my door is but the local embodiment of a hemispherical pulse as our planet slides its way toward the point in its annual ring-around-the-sun in which we in the north find ourselves leaning far back, away from the Solar Heart, now skimming low and briefly over the southern horizon, unable to fully warm our days. And the nights, ever longer, so deeply chilled: stepping outside, we are—instantly, intently—aware of our skin, the insides of our nostrils, our eyes, these tender edges of our bodies through which we meet the world, now in a palpable, vulnerable relationship with the very air. No longer a benign emptiness, the air takes on a physical presence, a sharpness, a density, actively reaching into us through these permeable boundaries, the heat of our bodies seeping out into the dark night. Ah, the vividness of deep cold!
And that’s not all. These long nights are aglitter again with the glorious starscape that we revisit at this time each year. As the deeply tilted Earth spins this valley into and through the sunset band of color, and our one most sacred star is shadowed by the rocky water-world beneath our feet, the sky opens wide into the larger local surroundings that spread away from Sol on the winter side of our orbit. . . Orion bright, spread wide around his belt and sword. . . the V of the bull’s face (red eye aglow). . . seven Pleiades sisters splattered high in the sky. . . while Sirius gleams low over the hills, sparkling magenta-now-teal-now-golden-now-white, following close behind our sun as both are swept along in the great currents of the Milky Way’s slow turning. Joining the wintry delight this year is mighty Jupiter, king of our planetary brethren, outshining everything: so big, so near.
All this—pecking juncoes, snowy junipers, sun low over the shoulder of the valley, nights frigid and fragile and brilliant and vast, our own eyes and hearts taking it all in—is this not God made manifest? What more might we worship than the dance of life (co-evolution of a planet), within the miracle of the seasons (solar pulses spurring that dance into Earth), embedded in a galactic home that dazzles us with its expansive spiral embrace, itself a remote condensation of matter within a vastness of energy surging forth from a source beyond understanding? To see, and feel, and honor this dynamic and incomprehensible power and beauty—and intelligence, and yes, design—that pulses across these nested scales of creation’s eternal embodiment; to walk a path through this world that acknowledges such grandeur while seeking simply to be a vessel by which it may live within our hearts and actions; what else does anyone’s God ask of us than this?
We are living beings within a living world in a living cosmos, a cosmos whose dynamism and beauty reveals patterns we recognize also in wave-lapped shorelines, wind rippling through woods, the slow surging forth of dawn across drifting clouds, and our own churning feelings, questing souls, and deepest longings. As has ever been the way, to see our small lives—giving and receiving, breath by breath and touch by touch—as expressions of forces and creativity so much larger than us is to bow before that mystery, our purpose becoming one of service, and care, and reverence.
Around thirty years ago, a new story began to be told, a story both eternal and of our time. In this story, science’s ever-emerging understanding and our own direct experiences of life on this planet come alive with wonder, infused with a sacred breath. In books by many different authors, several films, and conversations in churches, wilderness retreats, and living rooms, this new story continues to take shape, and becomes richer, deeper, truer with each passing year and each added voice. It weaves together reason and religion, history and today, our human bodies with the starry depths, and it’s built quite an audience among leading environmental and religious thinkers.
It’s a Creation Story—the first such epic tale to emerge from diverse voices around the planet, rather than within a particular local tribe or regional culture. For millennia, primal peoples the world over spoke of mythic beings and forces taking shape as sky, earth, humans, animals: Creation Story 1.0. Later, organized religions emerged and spread, with Asians honoring a pantheon of Gods while the three cultures of the Middle East each revered a single God: Creation Stories 2.0. Today, both animism and deism remain potent belief systems, while science stands apart, examining the matter and energy that give rise to our world. It’s time for a story that can embrace each of these mighty threads of human inquiry: Creation Story 3.0.
This new creation story draws on what we’ve learned in recent decades about the formation of the cosmos and our solar system, the evolution of biological life, and the emergence of human society and consciousness, yet it retains an allegiance to the sacred—the fathomless power and intention within the very essence of all creation. This new story doesn’t aim to replace anyone’s God or faith. It easily fits with any of humanity’s diverse ways of understanding this world. . . and can be a doorway to know one’s God more intimately and more fully. Still, the story leaves room for all ways of seeing, feeling, knowing, and understanding the deeper source of the the beauty we see around us: a creator-being, complexity driving emergent properties and symbiosis, the spark of love, concentrated activity within “dark” energy, blind chance (though this last one tends to be a bit frowned upon in these circles!). All that the story asks is that we know ourselves as part of this world, rather than somehow separate from or inherently different than it, and that we acknowledge that there is something more than what we can see: a set of connective and creative principles and energies that underly and flow through all we know. The more spiritually inclined among us look beyond the principles, yearning toward their source: an unfathomable mystery and aspiration. Many know this as God. At the same time, the story does not require any sort of metaphysical faith; it can also be appreciated simply for the ways it adds an appealing depth and cross-disciplinary integration to the modern secular worldview.
At its fullest, this new creation story is rooted in profound personal experience of—and relationship with—the world around us, and an equally profound openness to the divine or the foundations of our reality, however we may each see it. The story, while enlivened by our direct, lived experience, is expanded and informed by an ever-richer understanding of the synergies that drive growth and change within physics, biology, and culture—recognizing especially the ways in which science’s understandings are yet still laced with unreachable Mystery. The wonder within all life grounds the story, while the eternal desire to know the world and our place in it is the breath that gives it voice.
Thomas Berry is a lodestar for this story, as is Joanna Macy. Many others have informed its heart and its tendriled edges: Gary Snyder and bioregionalism; E.O. Wilson, Lynn Margulis, Stuart Kauffman, and other integrative scientists; poets of intimate and expansive embodiment like Mary Oliver, Pattiann Rogers, and Jim Harrison; the list goes on, with multiple strands back in time to Whitman, Emerson, Goethe, Rilke, and so many more. The Big History Project has emerged as its clearest fully secular face. Each of us has our own litany of others upon whose shoulders we dance, and ponder, and dream. This new creation story need not replace our many local and cultural stories, with their established foundations of purpose and meaning. But it would serve us well—in this time when modern communications and global challenges are inexorably pulling us closer together as a planetary culture—to also weave a larger story that can hold all of humanity’s rich histories and cherished beliefs within its embrace.
Originally published on Bright Blue Ball, these musings are bits of my own ways of hearing and telling this new global creation story; my particular fascination has to do with becoming more concretely attuned to the nested physical scales within which we live, and to the relationships within and between scales. These few paragraphs, more specifically, bubbled forth after listening to an hour-long talk by Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow, which is one of the best and most concise distillations I’ve heard of this thirty-year collaborative global endeavor; this little essay borrows part of its title from one Michael’s themes.
