REsources for Living

2013-05-01

It seems that for as long as we’ve had people, we’ve had stories of creation. As human beings we like to have an explanation of where we come from and why things are the way they are.

The world is created through the splitting of a great cosmic egg, or a great cosmic monster. People are called up through song, or created from mud. Suffering comes into the world through the shenanigans of a trickster god, or through opening a box that shouldn’t be opened. The stories are all different, but they all speak to our need to know who we are, how we got here, how we belong to the creatures around us, why life is the way it is (and, often, why life has to be so darned difficult).

As Unitarian Universalists, we, too, have a creation story. No doubt, it’s familiar to you:

In the beginning there was The One, all of everything packed together into an unimaginably dense Core of the Universe, the Seed of Everything. No one knows how long it was there, or how to describe the Nothing that surrounded it. It was before time, before Something and Nothing.

And then, in an instant shorter than an instant, The One exploded out into the Many, crossing what could now be called space at unthinkable speed. And there was the beginning of atoms. And across the unimaginable stretches of what would now be called time, new elements formed, the building blocks of existence.

And those elements became gas clouds that gave birth to stars, and the stars lived and died, giving birth to new clouds, new elements, black holes, galaxies, planets. And eventually, eventually, a medium-sized rocky planet came to dwell at a medium distance from a medium-sized star. Rain came to this planet in vast storms, creating oceans, and somehow in the oceans and the lightning and the elements a spark of life arose.

Across the unthinkable numbers of millennia, that spark of life learned to divide in half and make new life. And as the years wore on and on, cells learned to share themselves with other cells, and eventually there were plants and animals in a profusion that will never stop shifting and transforming and adapting so long as life exists.

That’s our creation myth, a story that is no less beautiful or powerful for the fact that it actually happened. I call it a myth rather than a scientific account because this story of creation holds religious weight and meaning for us. It isn’t just a set of facts, it’s a story about who we are, where we belong, what it means to be human.

What does the story say? Well, no good story has a single, “and the moral of the story is…” revealed meaning. But here’s a few of the things our story of creation means to me:

• The universe is creative and values diversity. Physics tells us that entropy always wins, that energy disperses and things fall apart. But our story takes us from the singularity to a vast range of galaxies and nebulae and stars and planets and plants and fish and birds and mammals, each unlike the rest. Diversity is a core part of who we are. Might as well enjoy it.

• Death and struggle did not enter the equation through some kind of misdeed or mistake. The only way to have creativity and diversity is for things to die, while at the same time new things are being born. Evolution happens through the survival of the fittest, which only happens through beings failing to survive. If you’re going to have the possibility of change and growth then you have to accept struggle and death as an intrinsic part of the package. It might not be fun, but it’s true.

• There is no such thing as perfect. Evolution is possible because DNA regularly goes off track. Most of these flaws have little effect. Some are deadly. Some few make it possible to live in new ways that an earlier generation could not have imagined. And you don’t know right away which change is going to be which. Desiring perfection is a failure to imagine that something different than what you expected could be wonderful.

• We’re all in this together. We all—and by “all” I mean not just all people or all animals, but all of everything—came from the same place. But more than that, we became who we are together. Evolution always happens in a context. A being doesn’t evolve toward some divinely-decreed ideal, it evolves to fit in better in the place that it lives. Who we are is quite literally determined by the community of life that surrounds us. It might be a good idea to live in a way that honors that reality.

We live in a universe that mysteriously decided that it would be better to be a whole bunch of things rather than just one thing. In this universe, matter and energy (which turn out to be the same) can never be created or destroyed, but neither can they stay the same for very long at a time. We live in a universe that we have the power to shape, and which has the power to shape us, in each and every moment of our lives. Creation is not, and never was, a one-time thing accomplished by a god or gods. Creation is a story that has been unfolding for billions of years, and we have the immense privilege of making a few marks in this particular chapter. That’s our story, and we’re sticking to it.