February 14, 2010

Out of the Stars Have We Come

The Rev. Mark Ward, Minister
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

SERMON  

In the beginning, says a story from China in the 6th century BCE, the space of the universe was in the shape of a hen’s egg. And inside the egg was a great mass called no thing, and inside no thing was something that had yet to be born. Finally, the time came that the egg burst, and out came Phan Ku, the Great Creator.

Phan Ku was a giant with hair all over him and horns curving out of his head, and in his hand he held a chisel with which he carved out the world. He separated sky from earth: The light pure sky was yang, and the dark weight of earth was yin. He chiseled out river channels, piled high mountains, then placed the stars and moon in the night sky and the sun in the day.

When Phan Ku died, the world was complete. His skull became the dome of sky, soil was formed from his body, rocks were made from his bones, rivers and seas from his blood. Plant life came from his hair, winds and clouds were his breath, and lightning and thunder his voice, and from the fleas that lived in the hair that covered him came all of humankind.

In the beginning . . . those words set the stage for what many argue was the beginning of religion: the narratives that people over time have told to explain who they were, how they got there and where the world around them came from. These were the stories that, in keeping with the origin of the word – religion, re-ligare – tied them fast to the world around them, that put the world in a context that they felt made sense, that laid out how they were connected to each other and all things and even their rights and duties in the larger world.

To imagine humankind as having evolved from fleas covering the body of their creator is a very different picture from the story with which we in the West are most familiar: the narrative of Genesis from the Hebrew scriptures. Actually, it is often overlooked that there are really two creation stories in the Bible. The first, which opens the text, is the one we know best, full of poetic imagery about the earth being “a formless void” (not unlike the imagery in the Chinese story) and “darkness covering the face of the deep.” Then God, in his first act, declares, “Let there be light,” and goes on over the next six days to create the world, ending with both man and woman.

A less dramatic story follows in the second chapter. It compresses creation to a single day and declares that God created man (but not woman) and then planted a garden in Eden for his benefit and then all the rest of the plants and animals. It is only after God was done and noticed that man was lonely that he decided to bring woman into the picture, creating her from one of Adam’s ribs.

Scholars now believe that these texts represent the works of two very different communities, the second one much older than the first, that were patched together over the years. I’m not going to spend time today on the implications of these different tellings, but it doesn’t take much thought to sort out the ways that they have influenced our culture. And, indeed, that is how these stories operate. They not only offer a context for the world in which we live, they also shape how we organize our lives, how we regard each other and earth.

Long after the story of Genesis was accorded any historical accuracy, Western culture still largely favors men over women in positions of authority and treats the Earth as a gift created for the benefit of humankind. This is the power of myth. We humans organize our lives as narratives, stories that guide us, sometimes without our even realizing it, in our decision-making. We may not agree with where the prevailing narrative is taking us, but lacking an alternative we end up being carried along in the flow.

I raise this point on Stewardship Sunday as a way of reminding us of the precious gift of being a part of this free church community. We gather here no longer beholden to the prevailing myths of our culture, open to all that human inquiry can teach. This makes us well positioned to be about the work of reshaping the guiding narrative in a way that frees us of ancient misconceptions and invites all humankind into a healing and creative future.

We insist that what we are about is, in fact, religious work. We seek to take what we learn and tie it back to who we are and where we fit in the chain of being, how we are connected and how we understand our duties to each other and the Earth. As the writer Karen Armstrong puts it, speaking of the role of myth, we seek eventually to establish a program of action that puts us in the spiritual posture that prepares us to take the next step of making the truths we affirm a reality in our own lives.

I recognize that there may be something a little disorienting in my suggesting that we consider engaging in the process of myth making. We live at a time when in most people’s minds the word “myth” equals “falsehood.” I want to be clear that I am not suggesting that we think up a story that will take the place of what we know to be true in the world. Rather, that we reflect on creating a narrative that will help us accept, celebrate and act on what we know to be true in the world.

Part of what this implies is that we dismiss the vaunted battle of science and religion. The biologist Stephen Jay Gould had the right idea more than a decade ago when he declared the two disciplines to be, in his words, “non-overlapping magisteria.” That is, each embodies a certain “teaching authority” over issues that do not belong to the other. The way Gould put it was, “The net of science covers the empirical universe: what is it made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value.”

These two magisteria, he said, “do not overlap,” and when one makes claims about the other it is leaving its true sphere of inquiry.

Fundamentalists may fervently insist that the words of Genesis describe the actual course of history, but their claim is vain. It is not a statement of provable fact, but simply a demand that their view be privileged. Similarly when scientists insist out of hand that all religion is malarkey, they are evincing a shallow prejudice, not a considered assessment. Religion, it’s true, can be manifested in some bizarre ways, but the subject it treats – let’s use Gould’s words: “moral meaning and value” – is central to our lives. Individual religions may be wrong-headed, even oppressive – and let’s face it, science, too, has made some monumental gaffs – but the endeavor that religion is about, the questions it seeks to answer remain relevant and important.

Still, while I agree in principle with Gould, I’m not entirely satisfied with this image of détente that he projects. My own experience as a science reporter for a newspaper is that I found what science taught about the world to be profoundly inspirational. As the astronomer Carl Sagan put it, “science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.”

As only one example, it was while I was reporting that biologists had their first successes decoding genomes. First announced were a few key bacteria, and there was something magical about seeing the functions of a living thing converted to a string of As, Ts, Cs and Gs. But then came higher creatures, and finally humans. I know of no more powerful affirmation of our 7th principle, the interconnection of all things in the web of life than this advance. The adenine, cytosine, thymine and guanine in my cells are no different from that in E. coli.

 In that knowledge, I lose the possibility of any claim that humankind is somehow removed or superior. I am merely one manifestation of life’s astounding creative process. When I walk along a mountain stream, I see myself as part of that flow, part of what Rabindranath Tagore calls “the stream of life” that “runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.”

If we were to construct a myth based on what science tells us we could do well to begin with the words from Unitarian Universalist minister Robert Weston that we read earlier in our affirmation. In poetic cadence similar in tone to the opening lines of Genesis, he begins with dust from the first stars spun out of space that in time congeal in this planet, out of which arose seas in which life somehow arose and made its way onto land. But then he takes an interesting turn. Growing in complexity, he writes, beings arose not only with eyes to see and throats to sing but also the capacity to love.

“This is the wonder of time; this is the marvel of space; out of the stars swung the earth; life upon Earth rose to love.”

It is an intriguing thought. Narratives of our evolution tend to hold up human intelligence as the crowning glory of our species. The story emerging from Weston’s narrative is different: it is not so much our braininess as our heart that is cause for celebration. Let’s imagine what this myth might look like.

We begin with a picture not unlike Genesis, or for that matter the myth of Phan Ku, with existence as nothing but a froth of possibility – timeless, without form or void, holding both all things and “no thing” – when a ripple suddenly erupts. From it emerges a sea of energy containing all that will ever be. As the sea cools, out drop the component parts of existence. Photons decouple from the rest – Let there be light! – and in a cloud of speeding particles, two contrasting principles come into play – one draws things together in clumps, another pushes them apart. The two forces contend but in the end the clumping tendency, let’s call it the affiliative principle, wins an edge.

And so there are quarks, and then hydrogen atoms, and then larger stuff, finally stars clumping together until – boom! – they ignite. Some explode into oblivion, but others endure and in their explosions more complex molecules form, and then bigger stars, gathering into galaxies, and then in time different clumps – systems of planets.

And then on those planets – let’s begin with this planet – the clumping continues in greater complexity until, to use Weston’s phrase – “rising from the rocks and the sea, kindled by sunlight on earth, arose life.” Whether this was a process unique to this place or whether it has been, is being repeated across the uncountable planetary systems strewn across the universe we do not yet know.

What we do know is that here among those humble organisms patiently dividing something happened. Somehow aware of each other two tiny bits of protoplasm elected to share of themselves, one to the other. And in that moment love was born: in Muriel Rukeyser’s words, “the conjugation of the paramecium.”

Creatures found not only Darwinian success but some measure of satisfaction in this new form of shared destiny. And so we go up the chain of life to multi-celled animal, fish, reptile, mammal, primate, and then, there we are.

One can count the neurons in our brains – said to exceed the number of stars in the Milky Way – or marvel at our accomplishments – cities, dams, mortgage derivatives, I-pods. Instead, appropriately for Valentine’s Day, our myth insists, as wondrous as all that is, it is love that is our glory.

Oh, it is not ours alone. From elephants to dolphins to wolves to bonobos and more we find evidence of something that looks a lot like love at play. But we have found that as humans at our best we are capable of a dimension of love that reaches to a deeper level.

We are capable of love that reaches beyond our family, beyond our partners, beyond our clans, beyond our nations. We are capable of love that embraces not only our kind but other species as well, that can even embrace this vast Earth and its complex web of ecological systems: as far as we know putting us at the pinnacle of the affiliative principle as it has manifested itself in the universe so far.

So, is this our happy ending? It’s really too soon to say, for that tendency that pushes us apart that our myth suggests was also born with the universe is with us still. There are all sorts of ways that we could do ourselves in – fouling our climate with our own filth, irradiating all life with a series of nuclear exchanges. The history of the universe is full of failed experiments. There’s nothing to say we won’t be one of them. But – and here’s where the mythic narrative steps in again – we need not be.

Wendy Doniger, the comparative religions scholar, argues that what gives rise to the creation of myths is, in her words, “a tension arising from the conflicting demands of our lives ranging from the intimate details of our lives to the strife and cruelties of the world.”

There is no lack of such tension in our lives today, and the myths that have dominated our culture have proven ineffective if not downright dangerous in addressing them. The door is open to reframe the narrative in a way that shifts our focus and renews our hope.

It may well be, as Steven Weinberg wrote, that the universe itself has no point to it. It was not created for our benefit or any particular purpose. Instead of projecting our wishes on it, as our forebears did, we are, as Ursula Goodenough suggests, better served accepting it as a strange but wondrous given.

“This is the marvel of life, rising to see and to know.” In that seeing and knowing we are given the grounding to make our own meaning, to discover that “spiritual posture that prepares us to take the next step of making the truths we affirm a reality in our own lives.”

One of those truths is plain to us now. “Life upon earth rose to love” and with it emerged the saving grace of our species and perhaps the universe itself, the affiliative principle written into our DNA, into the star dust that composes our bones. But how we might make that understanding a reality remains to be seen.

It is a joy to be part of a community that can make room for such a task, for the search for meaning, covenanted in hope and in love.

“Out of your heart cry wonder: sing that we live.”