The intimacy of the air we breathe

I was raised in a Christian home. I was also raised to value education and I received a good education in the public schools of St. Louis, MO. My parents valued that education, until they gravitated back to a more biblically literal approach to their faith.  Then they questioned whether they had provided me and my siblings the proper education or had corrupted us with one too secular.

 

But I have always appreciated my education, especially my exposure to and training in the sciences. My love for science was midwifed in me by my 5^th grade teacher who shared with us her own love for science and experimentation. That love was nurtured all through High School and into my early years of college. I was a good student in my science classes and I was on a track to become a scientist; until I felt a call to become a minister.

 

While my education in the sciences ceased at that point, my love and appreciation for science never waned. I never felt a dichotomy or adversarial relationship between my faith-based approach to life and the scientific explanations for life. Science explained the world and life. Religious faith provided meaning and purpose to the world and life. They were complementary views and understandings, not contradictory or competing systems of meaning.

 

All of which is preface to the statement that I am befuddled by the current antagonism toward science in our nation! Johannes Kepler, a 17^th century mathematician and astronomer once wrote about his own work: “I was merely thinking God’s thoughts after him.” And Albert Einstein said: “All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.”

 

Both Religion and Science seek to provide a cosmology: an understanding of the origin of life in the universe. For religion that cosmology is informed by creation stories and holy writings. For Science it is informed by scientific observation and tested theories. Whether that story is about a Big Bang, or God speaking creation into being out of nothing, or thinking creation into being, or bringing creation into being out of some cosmic battle or struggle, all the stories are trying to offer an understanding of the beginning of the universe as well as teach us something about current life and reality.

 

What current scientific understanding teaches us about origins and life today through the theories of the Big Bang and Evolution is that everything in the universe – and I do mean EVERY. SINGLE. THING. – is intimately connected.

 

Canadian blogger, Jim Taylor, once shared a reflection inspired by watching the bubbles in his glass of Guinness separate into foam and dark beer. He recalled how one cosmologist, Angela Tilby, in her book Science and the Soul, poetically described the evolutionary process of the Universe as “spacetime foam”. Out of the explosive beginning, as that foam of energy particles expanded it began creating space and time. Eventually the foam began settling into its components.  Sub-atomic particles coalesced into atoms, into molecules. Gravity began pulling molecules together. Crushed closely, they generated heat; compressed, they began fusing into more complex molecules. The fusion created more heat. In the fullness of time, it blew some of those new starts apart and blasted heavier molecules out into space.

 

Gravity clumped some of those heavier molecules together, and formed rocky planets, like ours. On these planets some complex carbon-based molecules continued fusing.  But instead of creating heat, they created life – plants – which exhaled oxygen as a waste product. The oxygen levels of this planet increased from zero to around 20 per cent. New forms of life emerged from the seething stew to make use of this un-utilized raw material – animals – us.

 

 Everything that exists today derives from that original “foam.” Everything, alive or dead; everything that was, or is, or will be – we are all related by our common origins. But not just by our origins. Jim Taylor also shared how Bob Sandford, chair of the United Nation’s Water for Life Decade, started one of his speeches by saying, “Every time you take a breath, you inhale the exhalation of every living thing on this planet since the beginning of life.”

 

We are all intimately related. By our breath, by the elements that make up our bodies, and by the fact that every molecule, every atom, can trace its origins back to that original foam.

 

But now, in the age of COVID, by our breath is the key learning here. When we breathe we are breathing in common air. You don’t have your own private bubble of air, nor do I. It is the same air which has existed on this planet since the dawn of plant life which began exhaling oxygen until it gave life to us. The oxygen on this planet – the air we breathe – is a shared resource. It gives us all life. It also can carry illness and death. Let us use the resource wisely and share as we were taught to do in Pre-school and Kindergarten.  And the way to wisely share is by wearing a mask when I am close to you and intimately sharing that air with you.

 

 

A New Start for Sabbath Tango

(It has been over two years since I last posted to this blog.  I don't know why I let my sharing in this space lapse.  I have enjoyed travels during that time.  I have written in my journal - but not as frequently as I would like.  Anyway, I have been journaling more lately and I have had some travels recently that I want to share with the wider world.  So I am reviving this blog beginnign with this reflection I wrote on August 31, 2012 while Dianne and I were visiting family in Vermillion, Ohio over Labor Day Weekend.)

Sitting on the south shore of Lake Erie in the shade of two maple trees the horizon appears to stretch to eternity before me.  I know Canada is across the lake, but only because I have been told so, not by any proof to my eyes.  This Great Lake is not the ocean and yet, to my visual senses it appears the same as when I stand on the shore of Biscayne Bay and stare off toward Africa beyond the Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.

Moments such as these remind me how vast and huge is our world.  Yet, place our globe in the perspective of our galaxy, the Milky Way, and we are a minor planet circling a minor star, on the very fringe of the galaxy composed of hundreds of millions of stars and planets.  Then place our Milky Way galaxy in the perspective of the universe where it is one of thousands of galaxies and the scale of size moves way beyond what my mind can grasp.

On such a scale how do we ever begin to imagine that any of our actions or lives every truly matter beyond our own limited sphere of influence?  Yet we have a tendency as human beings to inflate our actions and lives to the point we believe they and we are the ONLY thing that matters.  We nurse and harbor grudges to the point that we believe a hurt to us strikes at the heart of reality and the universe.  We have trouble accepting apologies, offering forgiveness, and realizing and accepting that most of the time behavior from others that may hurt us has more to do with them, what is going on with them, what hurts and pain and wounds they are carrying around and trying to deal with far more than it has anything to do with us.

But inflating ourselves and our lives to the center and focus of the universe does not really shift or change the scale of reality at all.  We are still momentary, minor moments of carbon elements and gases congealing to experience a brief flash of time and space on the continuum of eternity and infinity.

The Good News from Jesus though is that God loves us.  God created us for these momentary experiences and God loves us through each breath and God will continue to love us when our little speck of time on this globe has passed.  We are infinitely and eternally important to God and beloved by God whatever we do or do not do. 

So why don’t we embrace our brief time to enjoy it fully?  Why don’t we let go of the anxiety and worry that clouds our actions?  Why don’t we let go of hurts and grudges and embrace our fellow travelers in love?  It is a grand, glorious, beautiful world in which God has placed us.  It would be a shame to waste our brief opportunity to enjoy it!