ryan kargel

Chapter Two

Chapter 2 – The Big Deal

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book.

“Space,” it says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely

mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road

to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space. Listen…” and so on.

~Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

 

The first book I ever published was about a journey to edge of the universe. It was called “Journey to the Edge of the Universe”. I published it myself even though it was hard lettering a whole book by hand. The pictures were pretty good and Mrs. Barker gave me an “A”. I was the main character and I ingeniously overcame every obstacle. I didn’t have to figure out the relationship dynamics of the crew because I went by myself. Acquiring fuel wasn’t a problem because I used fuel that was completely recyclable. Growing and storing food was irrelevant because I didn’t specifically write anything about eating. I didn’t need to worry about the time requirements for the trip because I hadn’t gotten to that part of math yet. And lastly, I didn’t have to come up with a goal for the mission because when I got to the Edge of the Universe I became a Disembodied Mind (the way this happened was too technical to explain to people who weren’t space explorers so I didn’t bother). I think NASA is incorporating some of my ideas into their programs.

The reality is I had no clue, and the knowledge I have now gives me a clue so small that it can only be called a clue in comparison to my previously possessed no-clue. Sometimes it feels good to be ignorant. It’s easier, because you aren’t aware of potential flaws in your beliefs. You aren’t aware of how relatively small you are, and feeling small is hard to distinguish from feeling unimportant. That may be why it was so difficult in the 17^th century for government and church to accept the Copernican astronomical model, which placed the earth in orbit around the sun. Surely God made the universe at human scale, right? We were meant to subdue it. It says so in Genesis. If the earth isn’t the center of the universe and if the universe is much larger than we thought, maybe we ourselves are less central than we thought. Hard truths for people used to feeling significant. In 1632 Galileo Galilei was arrested for telling those truths. I know if you’d pointed out the distance and time underestimations of my plotline back in third grade I’d have felt pretty stupid, and then I’d have tried to argue with you. “Nuh-uh.” “Yeah-huh.” To this day I’d like the stars to circle around me in their crystal spheres. I’d like to scoop some up in a satchel and bring them back for show-and-tell.

What would it take to go on that trip for real? Well, you can’t. It’s too far and you would die. Depending on how you identify and measure distance in space-time, the edge of the visible universe is as little as 3 billion light years away (Angular Diameter Distance, which measures how far away the furthest visible galaxies were when they emitted the light we see) and as much as 47 billion light years away (Comoving Distance, which tells you how far the furthest visible galaxies are right now if you had a measuring tape hooked on their outer edge). Don’t get me started on Luminosity Distance and Light Travel Time Distance. If space-time stopped expanding the day you left and if you could somehow move at the speed of light it would take 47 billion years to reach the edge of the universe – if the universe actually has an edge, which it probably doesn’t. Got that?

I know. It hurts. Think God’s out there? Let’s go.

 

Journey to the Edge of the Universe (Revised)

Almost there. Forty seven billion years ago the governments of Earth pooled their money. Propulsion engineers worked out light-speed travel. Astronomers picked out the furthest visible object, took aim and sent us off on a mission they would never hear back about¹. I say they sent “us” off, though I really mean they sent our ancestors, four billion generations past. Instruments say we have now travelled 276,289,491,070,000,000,000,000 miles. Just 16,094,799,100 miles to go. At light speed we can reach the edge of the universe by this time tomorrow. Bring your camera.

You and I were born after the last stop on solid ground. We don’t know life off of this ship first-hand, just what we learned in school from the old books. The air everywhere smells of machinery lubricant and compost, filtered by atmospheric processors and the vegetation in the greenhouses. We don’t notice; we breathe in and out and it is as it always has been. The hum of the engines never stops except in our sound-proof sleeping modules. It is the white noise of mission. While air quality and background buzz remain constant in our artificial biosphere, the temperature fluctuates. Men turn the thermostat down to 64 and women turn it back up to 74. Even after 47 billion years of isolated human evolution there are some things which remain inherent in the species.

The crew consists of [note: Look up number of people necessary to avoid genetic bottlenecks in a human population while also accounting for losses to disease, rebellion and conflict in a closed environment]. Each person on board was trained from childhood to perform a necessary function in the community. We have been powering our ship with [note: Identify fuel which is abundant enough along the flight path to guarantee successful periodic refueling during the journey. note 2: Fuel must be easily extractable. note 3: Gaps between galaxies will regularly be 2,000,000 light years – stock up when you can.] The food stores look good. We have been thriving on a diet of [note: Determine which foods can provide all essential nutrition and can be grown in interstellar space while also accounting for losses to disease and competition in a closed environment. Maybe quinoa and blueberries.]²

The sun Sol is long gone. About five billion years after we left, it became a red giant and incinerated the Earth. Then it collapsed into a white dwarf and is still slowly cooling. For a while back then “Sol” was a popular name for kids born on the ship, but we got over it. While the Earth was dying out on the Orion-Cygnus Arm of our native galaxy, the Milky Way collided with the Andromeda Galaxy and merged with it. Maybe mankind survived even that and everyone moved on to other home worlds, but we can’t know. Moving at light speed means communication travels the same speed we do. If a message was sent after the collision telling us we aren’t the only humans left, it may be billions of years before we hear it. In the meantime, we can use our own telescopes and look behind us to see (more and more faintly) a long-extinct version of the Milky Way. Ironically, the distant galaxies our ancestors took aim at were non-existent by the time they could be seen from Earth. They were already burned out, fused and dispersed. That means points A and B for this venture - both origin and destination – cannot and could not be seen as they really are, only as they were.

And there was evening and there was morning, the last day. It’s time.

The ship draws to a halt. The entire population of our ship/colony/biosphere gathers at the windows and looks out. We see stars and galaxies in every direction, moving away from us at speeds proportional to their distance, just like we saw from Earth, or so the old books tell us. It is magnificent. Aside from the invention of Tabasco it’s the greatest human accomplishment ever, but reaching this point in space is an ironic anticlimax. We have known for a long time what we would see when we got here; after all, we had windows and telescopes yesterday, a million years ago and forty seven billion years ago, so we could look ahead to where we were going. As we moved, the horizon moved. We are not at a magical margin in space; there is no barrier to push through. From what we can tell, the universe doesn’t have an edge. We take a vote and it’s unanimous. Everyone says it’s time to quit flying around and find a nice, habitable planet where we can settle down, plant trees to hang hammocks on and watch these “sunsets” we’ve read so much about.

I hope there are theologians on this ship, because I have some questions. Why should the universe appear to end when it doesn’t? Why would God restrict what we can see? And do I understand the creator more or less when parts of creation are shut off from observation?

 

 

Know What? No, What?

We have a long history of thinking the horizon was the edge of the world. Yet, every

horizon we’ve ever reached - physically or intellectually – only revealed another

horizon in the distance. Just because we can’t see over the mountain

doesn’t mean there’s nothing there.

~philhellenes, “This Remarkable Thing”, YouTube

 

There are things that can be known, things that can’t be known right now and things that presumably can’t be known at all, at least by us. That’s incredibly frustrating. God made my brain – and your brain – curious. Having a curb on how much I can satisfy that curiosity just kills me. The universe provides us an objective tool (the speed of light in a vacuum) with which it can be measured. It also resists measurement by expanding too quickly for that tool to be useful over distances greater than 47 billion light years. The universe may be a specific size, but we lack the means to know. Basically, we’re too slow. By seeking God in nature we are assuming that God makes himself available for inspection through nature. The obvious implication of a really big universe like the one we just flew across is that God is even bigger.

God’s big. That’s it?

Actually that’s not it, which is too bad because “God’s big” is at least simple. We can use lasers to see how far the moon is from Earth. It’s far. We can use the red-shift of light arriving from stars to see how quickly they are receding from Earth. Some are near light speed. But the speed of light breaks down as a tool when objects are moving away from us more quickly than that. This determines how far we can see into space from our current position - the “edge” of the universe. If Pluto suddenly exploded, we would see the flash after about five-and-a-half hours. That’s fast, but not infinitely fast. Because light is limited, we are limited. I think God uses that. My guess is that any God worth bothering with would not be restricted by anything; God would be the source of limits. The real takeaway about God isn’t his size per se, but that there is more to God than we can see from any one vantage point. God may not change, but what we can know of him depends on where we are. When we move, the horizon moves.

Pushing Limits

And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.
~ Dogen

The ideas that got Galileo in so much trouble in the 17^th century were objectionable because they contradicted what authorities thought must be true – that the sun, moon, stars and planets crossed the sky while embedded in solid, crystalline “celestial spheres”. Pythagoras proposed this concept of concentric heavenly spheres moving in harmony about the same time the prophet Zechariah was writing his part of the Hebrew Bible. Pythagoras was spectacularly wrong about the spheres of course, though he was quite good with triangles. These days we think of celestial spheres as beautiful metaphors and we sing about Pythagoras in church - This is my Father's world, and to my listening ears all nature sings and round me rings the music of the spheres.

Spheres pop up as metaphors in old hymns and poems, serving as poetic boundaries where God crosses into human experience; spheres and domes are still used as fun literary devices, showing how people react when their perspective is contained. You see them in Twilight Zone episodes, Stephen King’s novel Under the Dome, and in films like Logan’s Run, Bio-Dome and The Simpsons Movie. The year my first son was born, Jim Carrey put out a movie called the Truman Show. Jim is Truman, a baby adopted by a media conglomerate and plunked into a giant dome with fake family, fake sky and fake weather so the company can film it all and show it on television. The only real things in the movie are Truman and how he reacts to his experiences. The trick is keeping Truman just content enough and just scared enough that he won’t try to reach the edge of the dome. In the end it doesn’t work. He sails a boat to the edge of the dome and sticks the prow right through it. Truman locates a door, and although the producer uses Voice of God speakers to convince him to stay inside, Truman – True Man, get it? - walks through the door into the real world. Everybody watching at home cheers and cries.

Humans have collectively lived in a series of Truman domes – knowledge boundaries that hem us in every direction. First there were mountains and rivers we couldn’t cross, so the universe consisted of only the habitable land patch we were on plus scary rumors about what might be on the other side. We mastered mountains and rivers, and there were oceans we couldn’t cross. The universe was only our land mass and out there be dragons. We realized the Earth was round and we crossed the oceans, so the universe was Earth with the stars, sun and other planets circling it suspended in what the King James Bible calls the “firmament”. Then the Earth was a relatively small planet going round the sun. Then the solar system was part of the Milky Way. Then many of the stars we thought we could see were actually entire galaxies, and then they were moving away from us at incredible speeds, going literally only God-knows-where. The barriers to knowledge were sometimes physical and sometimes a result of not knowing how to interpret what we were seeing, but each time we were fooled by the painted edge of an imaginary limit. There isn’t any God-like producer tricking us, though. The reality of God’s creation is always there. We trick ourselves. Thankfully, just like Truman, we always seem to break through the façade.

Give people smarter than me enough time and technology and we may someday travel to the furthest reaches of the visible universe. In all likelihood what we’ll find is continuing space in perpetual expansion. But what if we didn’t? What if when we got there the universe ended like the painted sky in the movie? If we were able to see and measure the ends of the universe, what would that tell us about God? An endless universe teaches us there are always new things to know about the nature of God and that our physical perspective determines what we can know of him. A measurable universe might imply the opposite – God goes this far and no further. Sure, God could still be infinite even if space was only yea big, but space without end makes it clear. It is frustrating that we can’t see all of creation, but it’s a fair trade-off. It means we can keep being curious forever. We can change perspectives and push out beyond the imaginary dome.

God in a Little Wooden Box

Although God works at scales beyond our ability to observe, our ability to observe keeps growing. Used to be when we found a new land mass in a daring ocean voyage we would immediately build a better ship for an even more daring voyage. We found most of the land, so we built undersea rovers, rockets for manned moon-shots and probes that have gone beyond Pluto. Telescopes now give us a 47 billion-light-year window to look through. Our view of God gets bigger by the day because our view of creation gets bigger.

On the other hand, sometimes curiosity and history conspire to show us how tiny God is.

When I was very young – way before I went to the Edge of the Universe and became a disembodied mind - I got my first microscope. My parents kept it in the closet in a rectangular wooden case. It smelled like grandma’s old console stereo - dust and shellac. There were slots for the slides and a small packet of cover slips which I continually broke. It had just enough magnifying power to make it the coolest thing ever. I used that microscope to look at all kinds of stuff – often leaves, spit and dirt. I remember being especially keen to examine my own hair. Hair was the smallest thing I could think of and to see it blown up like that was magic. My eyelashes had miraculously grown back after the gum incident, so my mom must have cringed when I pulled them out on purpose. I can’t honestly say I looked at eyelash roots and consciously thought, “God’s in there,” but you already know where I think curiosity comes from. Diminutive pieces of reality make up my body and the entire world; I found them using a round bit of glass in a metal frame.

Summer of 1674, Delft, Holland. You and I are science historians, come to watch a paradigm shift. Creation is about to get much smaller. We walk through Delft’s main business district looking for a particular drapery and linen shop. Textiel van Boven, no. Van Halen Linnen, no. Tekenlinnen. Antonj van Leeuwenhoek – “Cloth/ Anthony of Lion’s Corner”. We’re here. We knock. We go in. There is a man in a robe and cap working at the counter, examining a bolt of fabric with a magnifying glass. He looks up at us and raises the glass in greeting. It’s a simple ground lens common to the trade and Anthony has been using one to check the quality of his linens for twenty years; in our own time the Dutch still sometimes refer to a magnifying glass as a dradenteller – “thread counter”. Anthony has been busy improving the technology and is beyond counting threads. He leaves the counter in the care of his apprentice and waves us up the stairs to his workshop. Oddly, instead of textiles, the room has been filled with glassworker’s tools – glass rods, tongs, spirit lamp and various polishing compounds.

Hundreds of small brass and silver devices are aligned on shelves opposite the window. Each has a metal plate pierced with a small hole and a sharp metal pin mounted on screws. Anthony takes one down and shows us that a fine, minute version of his dradenteller has been fixed into the hole. He fastens a thin slice of cork to the pin, presses the device to his eye and turns toward the spirit lamp. After an adjustment to the screws he hands the device to you. You look through the hole and with the light of the flame you see an orderly arrangement of compartments - plant cell walls. These were first described ten years ago by Robert Hooke in his book Micrographia – a scientific watershed and a work of genius. Hooke’s microscopes magnified cork cells, bee stingers and mineral crystals 30 times. We look at Anthony. “Driehonderd,” he says. Three hundred. Anthony’s microscope is ten times more powerful than Hooke’s and ten times more powerful than anyone else’s. Nice one. Time for a field trip.

Anthony blows out the lamp, puts the microscope in a small wooden case and we leave the store. Word is that Berkelse Mere – the inland Berkel Lake – has changed color and Anthony wants a look. In winter the waters are quite clear, but in summer they turn cloudy and green. Local folklore blames the changes on honeydew. Anthony is dubious. His driver pulls a carriage to the front of the shop and we get in. We rattle down roughly paved streets past the outskirts of town, then two hours down a dusty country track to the lake. A fisherman on the shore is cleaning his gear and preparing his catch for market. Anthony needs a vial of water - from the middle of the mere, if you please. We buy some fish for dinner and the man consents to take us out on the lake in his boat, though he wonders a bit at our sanity – we travelled from Delft for what? As Anthony fills his vial, we look at each other and grin like village idiots. This is going to be good.

Back on land, Anthony takes the case from his cloak and reveals the microscope. Now the old man is curious. Anthony suspends a drop of the green water on his finger and transfers it to the pin on his device. He turns toward the sun, draws the lens to his face and changes the world. We know what he’s seeing – algae, ciliates, euglenoids, Protista of all kinds. In our experience microorganisms are a given, but in 1674 there are no PBS specials and no science kits from Toys“Я”Us; there is only Anthony and his lenses, and before that there was nothing. For a full minute Anthony stands perfectly still, his mouth gaping slightly. He passes the microscope around wordlessly. You look, I look, the carriage driver looks, the old man looks. “Het is een leugen. Een valstrik.” It’s a lie. A trick. The old man doesn’t believe what he sees. He won’t be the only one.

We go home and skip the inevitable arguments.

After we left, Anthony sat down in his workshop, stared at water drops and wrote a letter to the young Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. It gave birth to microbiology.

“These animalcules had divers colors, some being whitish and transparent; others with green and very glittering little scales; others again were green in the middle, and before and behind white.  Others yet were ashen grey. And the motion of most of these animalcules in the water was so swift, and so various, upwards, downwards, and round about, that it was wonderful to see: and I judge that some of these little creatures were above a thousand times smaller than the smallest ones I have ever yet seen, upon the rind of cheese, in wheaten flour, mould, and the like.” ~ Antonj van Leeuwenhoek, 1674

The Royal Society had seen Robert Hooke’s book. Fine, there were small things, but living creatures going about their business in a drop of water? They thought Anthony was drunk. After two years, and only after verification by a clergyman and by Hooke himself, the Society decided Anthony was sober and his animalcules were real.

“From all these observations, we discern most plainly the incomprehensible perfection, the exact order, and the inscrutable providential care with which the most wise Creator and Lord of the Universe had formed the bodies of these animalcules, which are so minute as to escape our sight.” ~AvL, 1674

The human race pushed through another false barrier and God became very small indeed.

We haven’t stopped looking. It was 150 years before someone duplicated Leeuwenhoek’s magnification and resolution, but quality optical microscopes eventually became commonplace. My microscope was a virtual toy, but it was just as powerful as the one we looked through in 1674. The microorganisms didn’t stay in the pond; we’ve found them on our own bodies. There are ten times as many microbial cells in your body as human cells. We’ve seen viruses, molecules, atoms. Field emission electron microscopes have given us the images of electron orbitals within a single atom. As I write, the Large Hadron Collider is trying to take pictures of a Higgs boson, which is a subatomic supersmall thing I don’t understand, plus several other subatomic supersmall things which I understand even less.

God’s big. Also, God’s small. Make up your mind.

Forget about God’s size. Instead, look at the implications of nature being limitless – too large to be measured and too small to be seen. When we assume all knowledge of nature is contained in what we can see right now, we fail miserably at learning. The chemist Humphry Davy said ”Nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate, that there are no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete and that there are no new worlds to conquer." Good man. The Royal Society made him president in 1820. 

God leaves some things wide open. There is no end to nature, and therefore no end to God. There is no end to God, and therefore no end to what we can learn.

 

 

1 Time travel notwithstanding, I’m trying to make the science in this book accurate, but things get strange when you start talking about light speed. Light-speed travel would increase our mass to infinity. The ship would flatten out like a pancake. We would experience extreme time dilation, so time would pass more slowly for us than it would for an outside observer. Time would then speed up when we stopped to refuel or make repairs to the ship – stops possibly generations long. It’s hard to relate to, and I’m trying to make a point about distance rather than time, so I’m conveniently ignoring some of the real science for the sake of the story. Add together the dilated time, the frequent stops and the periods of acceleration and deceleration, we’ll call it an even 47 billion years.

 

2 You’re beginning to see the problem. Thirty years after I wrote the first version of this story I still don’t know how to address the basic logistical problems. That could be a result of my education, which focused on right-here-right-now Earth ecology and left me thin on exobiology, astrophysics and human physiology, but it’s not clear to me that engineers and theoreticians will ever have good supply solutions for an expedition like this. We know the distance between Earth and the furthest visible objects in space. We can calculate that much. But how to get people there? By revisiting the idea now, when I’m all grown up and smart-like, I know more of the things standing in the way. You would need to effectively build a new, sustainable society from scratch - without the benefit of a planet to do it on – and sling this society at 186,000 miles per second into space with no hope of assistance. Good luck. I almost prefer the version where I didn’t know any better because I could just get to the end of the journey without any planning.

 

 

Chapter 1

This is the second chapter of my pseudo-defunct book project. I know, it says "Chapter 1". The first chapter was "Chapter Zero". I thought it was clever at the time. 

Chapter 1 – Evidence

Is there still gravity? Can we breathe the air? Yes. Then might as well go look around.

~Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies

 

            My kids love pirates.  They have birthday parties with eye patches, swords and gold-coin candy bags.  They wear pirate t-shirts.  They play pirate laser tag down at Pietro’s Pizza.  They have watched the Pirates of the Caribbean movies so many times they now quote Jack Sparrow in every day conversation.  What clogged up the sink?  “Human hair.  From my back.”    I want to encourage my sons to be whatever they want in life, but for the record, I don’t support piracy.   Real pirates don’t sit around with their father Keith Richards, they don’t get to make out with Keira Knightley and they hardly ever play laser tag.  If they did, I might have become a pirate myself.  Real pirates live by stealing and die of scurvy. 

            One thing I do find immensely valuable as a parent of pirate fiends is treasure maps.  A few bona fide pirates probably used them.  Edward “Blackbeard” Teach was rumored to bury treasure and then kill a captive at the site to mark it.  William “Captain” Kidd supposedly hid treasure maps in secret compartments in his furniture.  And try telling a good fictional pirate story without a treasure map.   Treasure Island put one in the hands of Billy Bones and Jim Hawkins, and since then just about all faux pirates have used them – my sons being the faux-est of all.  Treasure maps are a good thing to use with children because they are first-class time filler at birthday parties and because they teach good science.

            Treasure maps have a starting point – a rock, a cave, a kitchen table – and give directions from that point to the next landmark, directions from there to the next landmark, etc.  Using this formula you can lead a pack of 8-year-olds to a pile of candy in the tree house or lead Jim Hawkins to Captain Flint’s treasure.  Each directive requires getting to that point correctly, and any missteps have to be back-tracked.   If you were supposed to go from the rock in the front yard to the birdhouse across the street, but you went to the wrong birdhouse, none of the other steps make sense.  Science takes a starting point – a fact, an observation – and gives directions from that point to the next idea.  Each principle builds on the last one and if we pay attention we all get smarter.

            If there is a God who created the observable universe, and if that God wanted us to learn about him from nature, how would that God make sure we learned?  I think he would leave evidence for us and make sure that evidence was preserved.  If you follow the Bible at all, you know it gives us a degree of information about God.  Why only a degree?  First, the Bible is only so long.  It has 775,000 words in it, give-or-take, which is the same as reading To Kill a Mockingbird, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Grapes of Wrath, Snow Falling on Cedars, Walden and Catcher in the Rye, with just enough left over to read Treasure Island and learn about treasure maps straight from the source.  That’s a decent summer’s reading, but it’s not crazy long – certainly not long enough to cover everything there must be to know about God.  Second, the Bible hasn’t always been around.  According to tradition, Moses wrote the first part.  That means a Young-Earth-Creationist view of history leaves 2500 years of human existence with no Bible whatsoever.  Old-Earth views leave almost 200,000 years, just counting modern humans.  Adam didn’t have a Bible.  Noah didn’t have one.  Abraham, Isaac and Jacob didn’t have one.  People marched all over the world, populating the planet without having one.  God didn’t leave them all hanging; he told them a few things directly, they learned from other people, and as Paul already told us, they had nature.  The Bible provides incredible literary benefits, but for a long time God figured nature and shared wisdom was sufficient.   

            We’ve already talked about the reasons for human curiosity.  We have it because the God of nature is out there, and the first characteristic we learn about him is he wants to be found.  But, he doesn’t make it easy on us; I think the creator also wants us to experience the satisfaction of discovery.  Nature is God’s treasure map.  The treasure is himself, and the landmarks are the learning points of creation.  This map isn’t rolled up in some salt-encrusted chest, though; it surrounds us and - because we are fully integrated living beings - it is us.  We have as part of our make-up the capacity to find the landmarks.   We just need to learn to read them right.  How does God make sure there are landmarks for us to find?  Sometimes he plays pirate.   

Ancient Wing

            Today I am a paleontologist and you are a geologist.  Or if you prefer, you can be the paleontologist and I’ll be the geologist.  One of us is an expert in ancient life and fossils, and one studies the physical history of rocks and the changes they have undergone.  Doesn’t matter who is which - as long as you brought your kayak.

            We are walking down a road in the Haardt, near Solnhofen and Langenaltheim, Germany.   We have packs full of granola and water, a tent, folding paddles, and we are balancing kayaks on our heads.  Around us are wooded sandstone hills.  The river Altmühl is nearby, but rivers are not on the agenda for this expedition; they are too new and our kayaks are built for the sea.  This area is known for its high quality limestone, which is used in lithographic printing.  Lithographers make great maps using this limestone in their print shops.  As you’ll see, they also help us find landmarks on our map to God when they dig the slabs out of the ground.  We approach a limestone quarry and hear the miners at work down in the pit.  Tink-tink-tink-tink.  The finished slabs are transported using forklifts and diesel trucks, but people are using hand tools to get them out of the ground, just as they have for centuries.  This is nice, but to see what we came for we need to go back 150 years.  Hold still. 

            We rewind to 1861 and pause.  Not much has changed.  The hills and woods are still standing and the Altmühl still runs more or less in the same channel.  The quarry is smaller, the road unpaved and the trucks have been replaced with horse-drawn carts.  Actually, it is the carts that will be/will have been replaced by trucks.  You get the idea.  One thing is definitely the same.  Tink-tink-tink-tink.  We walk closer to the edge and witness history.  Tink-tink-tink-crack.  A pause.  “Was ist dies?” What is this?  60 feet below us in the quarry, somebody’s found something.  It’s a fossil.  A weird one. 

            Set your kayak down and get in.  Eat a granola bar.  You’ll need the energy.  Rewind again, this time much further.  The hills grow taller into their younger selves then shrink into the ground as the earth’s crust unfolds and the sandstone turns back to sand.  Other hills fall and rise, erode and reform, retracing geological processes.  During the ice ages forests turn to tundra, then back again.  In warmer periods water rises around us, coinciding with melting ice caps.  We stop after 155 million years go by/will have gone by.   I’d be all witty and say “Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Germany anymore.” but Germany doesn’t exist yet, so we’re not.

            We are sitting on an island in the Tethys Sea.  Much of what will be Europe is underwater now in the late Jurassic, and this island is part of an archipelago.  We are in the island’s interior, the tips of our kayaks poking into the water at the edge of a lagoon.  We can hear the waves in the distance, but they only reach here during extremely high tides.  The water is very clear, and we don’t see much living in or around it.  We wonder why.  Taste it.  Go ahead – how many chances like this are you going to get?  You dip your fingers in, touch them to your tongue and you gag.  It’s terribly salty.  The water here doesn’t get refreshed very often, and the salts concentrate as it dries.  That is why we don’t see much life near the lagoon.

            Time to get moving.  We don’t want to miss it.  We push off from the shoreline and glide into the brine.  The bottom of this large pool is a creamy white, and the mud has settled into a very flat sheet.  Someday this mud will make great lithographic plates. 

            We paddle to a wall of cliffs across the lagoon and see some living creatures at last.  There are a few plants growing in the cracks, and there are two kinds of animals climbing around on the ledges.  One type we recognize from the Flintstones.  They have large, leathery wings, and long, narrow heads, with “beaks” full of teeth.  They are pterosaurs – pterodactylus, or “wing fingers”.   Fred and Wilma sometimes used them as airplanes, but these pterosaurs are only a couple of feet long.  There is a whole flock of them, if flock is the right word.  Periodically, one launches from the cliff and flies off to hunt – probably for fish and near-shore invertebrates.  Somewhat apart from the pterosaurs is another animal that is very strange to our eyes, but also oddly familiar.  She is alone, but she is special.

            This other creature is about the same size as the pterosaurs, and has a body type similar to the well-known therapods of the Cretaceous period, like Tyrannosaurus Rex or velociraptor.  There is one glaring exception: she has wings covered with feathers and a double row of feathers on her long tail.  She’s an Archaeopteryx – “ancient wing”.  If we had been here during her prime two years ago we might have seen her nesting with her mate and raising young.  Or maybe she would have been gliding down to the shore to feed; she is more of a glider than a flier.  However, her mate is dead now, the young are gone and she is tired.  Maybe the younger Archaeopteryxes have moved to new areas to continue the family line, or maybe they were eaten by the pterosaurs when they were still small enough to be edible.  In any event, they are not here, the total population of archaeopteryxes on this island is now one, and she is old and sick.  Her body is thin, and parasites have won the war against her aged immune system.  We are at the end of an era.

            It’s sad to see an individual die, and sadder yet when you know they are not with their own at the end.  If Ancient Wing knew what God was about to do, it might be easier for her.  I like to think she does know.  She looks out at the interlopers floating in kayaks near her territory, shuffles her feet back and forth a few times, and sits down slowly.  The archaeopteryx closes her eyes and she dies.  Her body rolls off the ledge where she lived and lands in the water with a splash. 

            We paddle to the nearest shore, set up our tent and wait it out.  Maybe now is the time to finally finish Moby Dick.  The remains float for several days in the salty lagoon, but are untouched by scavengers; there are none in this place.  Eventually buoyancy is lost and she sinks almost intact to the flat, muddy bed.  Weeks or months go by and the water evaporates to almost nothing.  Then the preservation system God built gets down to business.  The gravity of the moon produces a monstrous tide and strong storm cells stir up the sea.  A wave surge crests over the lip of the lagoon and refills it with water, calcareous marine ooze and an unlucky starfish or two.  After the storm is over the lagoon is once again still and the mud precipitates out into another very flat, thin layer.  From the surface we can’t see any indication that there is a tiny body under there, but we know.  Buried pirate treasure might be mostly myth, but God buried a treasure for us out on this desert island. It’s time for us to go, and we fold our tent.        

            In 1861, Ancient Wing will be dug out of the quarry, and the nameless miner will use the fossil to pay for a doctor bill.  True story.  Such is discovery.  She will make her way to the Natural History Museum in London where her bones and feathers will spur controversy – bird? reptile? hoax? planted by the devil? – for over a century.  Forty miles south of the old lagoon, in 1971 Augsburg, I will be born.  How much controversy I will stir up remains to be seen.

            What do we learn from our time at the lagoon?  You don’t have to accept the theory of evolution to see that the earth is not what it once was.  The animal communities are now different than at the time we visited.  The landforms have all shifted and changed.  Creation is not static.  The archaeopteryx also teaches us two things about the way God expects us to gather knowledge.  One, the evidence necessary for new understanding is all around us, awaiting discovery, and two, we will probably have to sweat to find it. 

            When I was a kid we would spend every Christmas Day at my Grandma and Grandpa Kargel’s house.  We played lots of board games because watching Dukes of Hazzard when you are supposed to be celebrating Jesus is apparently rude.  For a while the big game was Trivial Pursuit, and this is the conversation we always had:

Grandkid 1: Grandma, will you play with us?

Grandma: No, you kids play without me.

Grandkid 2: But you are just going to yell the answers from the other room.

Grandma:  No, I won’t do that this time.

Grandkid 2:  OK, fine.

Grandkid 1 to Grandkid 2:  First question – Who directed Citizen Kane?

Grandma, from the kitchen: Orson Welles!

Why can’t God be more like my grandma?  It would be nice if he just yelled answers down the hall when we had questions about him or the way the world works, but he doesn’t do that.  It isn’t how Trivial Pursuit is played, and it isn’t how non-trivial pursuits are played either.  Most often God lets us fumble along with observation, experiment and intuition.  He makes us earn those little pie pieces.

            If there were 10 million Archaeopteryx fossils in the world, they wouldn’t be so stunning and controversial and fun.  Instead of putting them behind glass in museums we’d make coffee tables and clocks out of them.  But fossilization is a rare event.  We saw the unusual conditions required to get our Archaeopteryx to us in one piece.  Most dead things are consumed by live things before they fossilize.  It is also far more common to find single bones, spores or leaves than it is to find an intact organism.  Before they found Ancient Wing down in the quarry, miners had already found individual feathers in the rock; they just didn’t know what they were from.  Usually, complete fossils are associated with rapid siltation in water or with ash fall.  Even then, the vast majority are then ground to dust by erosion and geologic processes before we can get to them.  This is the way it works, given the physical laws we live under and the conditions found on this planet. 

            If God is the source of those conditions, as I believe, it means God values the seeking of truth nearly as much as he values the finding of truth.  “Seek and you will find,” is how Jesus said it.  He was talking about knowledge of the creator God and not the science of creation, but I don’t think a person who believes can – or should – separate one from the other.  Solomon wrote, “An intelligent heart acquires knowledge, and the ear of the wise seeks knowledge.”  We don’t read, “You can find knowledge without even trying.  Don’t stress yourself.”  Instead, the Bible says “seek and you will find” and “the ear of the wise seeks knowledge”.  Expect to put in some effort.  Even accidental discoveries like our Archaeopteryx require due diligence or the finder can miss the significance entirely, as we saw in the doctor bill incident.  Once a source of truth is identified, it still takes hard work to puzzle out the complete picture.  Only nine other “ancient wings” have been found in the ensuing century and a half, and because the salinity of the water prevented much from growing in the immediate area, information about their habitat had to be built up piecemeal. 

            On the other hand, we do have ten Archaeopteryx fossils, which is more than none.  They were few and far between, but they were buried in Germany with the pterosaurs waiting for us to find them.  The potential for knowledge was preserved for us in the ground, and there is a promise in Jesus’ words: “seek and you will find”.  God knows that satisfying discovery requires effort for humans, but after the stops and starts we find a landmark and use it to start seeking the next one.  God prepares nature for our journey to knowledge.  He also prepares us. 

Windmills of Your Mind         

            We demand data, we seek data, we get data and we work out what all that data means because our brains are built to do so.  Our minds are hard-wired to link information together.  By some estimates there are one quadrillion synaptic connections in the human brain.  That’s 15 zeroes – enough for me to use one of those dollar-bills-stacked-to-Jupiter metaphors.  The things you see, hear, taste, touch and smell are registered and catalogued, then cross-referenced with everything else.  Check the connections you make against the connections made by other people during fieldwork and controlled experiments, and you’ve got science.

            Consider the person who invented dendrochronology - the first one to cut down a tree and say, “Huh.  Why are all these circles in here?”  It seems obvious to us now that tree rings reveal how old a tree is (my children check the freshly cut stumps of our Christmas trees every year), but how did that connection get made originally?  I’m only guessing, but there must have been some beginning benchmark: a king was born in such-and-such year, so they planted an oak seedling.  The king died in this-and-that year, and they cut the oak tree down.  Someone counted the rings and lo, the count matched the number of years.  This led to questions.  Was this a coincidence? Did it work for every tree, or only for royal oak trees?  They checked.  The tree-cutter’s mom planted an apple tree when she got married so-many years ago.  They cut down that tree and hey, the ring count matched the year count again.  They asked friends in other locations to count their tree rings and got the same results.  Observation, hypothesis, experiment, confirmation, science.  Why would anyone stop to count circles in a piece of wood in the first place?  Their mind needed to know.  They were curious.  God made them that way. 

            Beginning with that one tree and that one curious mind, we can now use tree rings to examine history we would otherwise have no knowledge of.  The bristlecone pines in California’s White Mountains are the oldest individual trees on Earth – the record right now is 4844 years.  Because growth rings vary in width with growing conditions, we can see generally what the weather was like in that area dating back thousands of years.  Trees of the same species in the same place tend to lay down similar growth rings year by year.  That means we can line up the earliest rings in living trees to the matching rings in long-dead trees and get a progression covering several generations.  This “cross dating” has given us information on climate variations for the last 8500 years in the bristlecone pine forest.  I see God in the tree rings.  He wants someone to realize what happened back before we were paying attention.

            When Paul challenged us to look for God in the creation, he said we would find God’s eternal power there - power that is stretched out over all of time and space.  People are not physically eternal.  We have defined beginnings at birth, defined endings at death and - due to the time constraints – only so many places we can personally visit in between.  The only way for humans to learn about eternal things is for there to be some accessible record.  Tree rings, fossils, chemical compounds and star colors are records.  God leaves us snapshots of what has happened over those eternal and inconvenient scales of time and space.  We don’t see those records by living for millions of years or by travelling to every location in the universe.  We catch on to eternal things with our minds, which were prepared for the task by God.  Eternal things are by definition beyond the physical experience of a human being, but they are not beyond our potential mental experience.

Telling Stories

On being a teacher: “You’re storytelling.  I don’t care how abstruse

the subject is.  If you’re teaching biology or physics, you’d better give it a

‘once upon a time’ gloss.” ~Frank McCourt

            In the back of my stereo cabinet there are 29 audio tapes containing every sermon I’ve ever given.  Remember audio tapes?  For a while my church didn’t have a pastor and I filled in.  It didn’t rate a DVD or a podcast, and I have probably changed my mind about some of the things I said back then, but I did my best.  Although that was years ago I can tell you what is on every one of those tapes: two minutes of reciting the topic, five minutes of my opinions, a few leading questions and lots and lots of stories.  All of my favorite teachers are master storytellers, so when I had to teach I went with storytelling whenever I could.

            Stories are a way for people to get inside ideas and for ideas to get inside people.  Mark Twain told them and people remember.  Scheherazade told them and people remember.  Jesus told them and people remember.  Jesus told the story of the Prodigal.  “There was a man who had two sons….”  It’s about a kid who got his inheritance early, ran away, blew all the money, and then was welcomed back by his father.  That made the other son mad, but the father told him, “It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.”  It would have been more efficient if Jesus just stated a simple principle and left it at that.  “People are more important than money.  The End.”  Instead, he spent ten minutes telling a story about brothers, money, parties, jealousy and redemption.  Jesus knew that stories made truth stick. Through stories we get to live with the truth – we relate to the people in the stories, we feel what those people are feeling and we change. 

            Swamps, fossils and trees also tell stories.  When people bring together facts and observations from nature - when they do science - they are reading stories told by God.  The stories are about nature of course, but they are also about how God thinks.  They are also about us.  The stories in creation give us teachable moments not just because they provide nice metaphors, but because they tell the truth.  I’ll give you an example of how we can use these stories and how I used them in my 29 sermons.  But first, the anadromous salmonid life cycle.

            Anadromous is a word we adapt from the Greek anadramein, which means “run upward”.  Salmon are anadromous fish that “run upward” in the streams they use for spawning.  Adults lay and fertilize their eggs in nests called redds in the gravel of freshwater streams.  Then the adults die, their bodies becoming nutrient sources for the food chain.  The eggs develop for several weeks before hatching into alevin or sac fry.  The gravel is very comfortable for a while, but when sac fry use up their residual yolk they emerge from the gravel as plain old non-sac fry.

            At this point the tiny salmon move to deep pools in the stream.  They hide in holes behind logs and rocks, darting out quickly to grab a quick snack and heading back to their holes before they become quick snacks.  This can go on just until they get a breather from emergence or it can take several years.  If you are keeping track, the salmon are now known as fingerlings or parr and have vertical stripes.  Pink salmon head immediately downstream and Sockeye hang around for up to three years, sometimes even going upstream to live in lakes.  Eventually everybody goes to the estuary - where ocean saltwater and river freshwater are constantly mixing - and the salmon pause to become smolts.   They bulk up on the plentiful food, change from brown to silver and alter their kidney function to get rid of the extra salt they will swallow in the ocean phase of their lives.

            Salmon enter the ocean as juvenile adults, which is admittedly something of an oxymoron.  What they do out there is relatively unknown because they are so hard to follow.[1]  After one to five years the sexually mature adults become darker in color again, males may grow humps, canine teeth and hooked jaws, and they all stop eating.  They return to the freshwater systems in which they were born – most to the same stream – all the while living off of body fat.  The latest generation clears redds, breeds and dies.  Their decomposing bodies deliver nutrients from the ocean that the streams generally lack, and the whole process repeats. Eggs-alevin-fry-parr-smolts-adults. Redds-pools-channels-estuaries-oceans.  Different life stages mean different body styles, different habitat needs, different resource needs and even different names.

            We can work the salmon life cycle into stories that are relevant to us in several different ways.  We can treat it as a parable, like Jesus’ Prodigal Son – the Prodigal Fish, you might say.  “There was a salmon that had two redds….”  It also works as an allegory for humans in general. Anadromous salmon give us an extreme example of succession and variety in a single species.  We could say that people are metaphorically like salmon - going from life stage to life stage, needing different conditions and resources in every stage, succeeding and failing on a unique schedule - so we must use careful discernment before we pass judgment on how other people live.  Don’t expect people to act like smolts if they are really sac fry, etc.  Call it the Salmon Moral. 

            From a scientific standpoint I would say that the connection between people and salmon is not just an allegory.  Because we have the same biological basis, biosphere and creational source, people are more than metaphorically like salmon; we are literally like salmon.  All living things grow, change and progress from one state to another.  Our minds are more complex than a salmon’s so we understand this progression in ways that they can’t.  Because it’s sometimes hard to recognize our own condition, we see the progression more clearly in them.  The salmon live it out for us, telling stories for God.  It’s biblically true, metaphorically true and naturalistically true.  I think it’s a gift.     

            We learn about God by looking for him in records of living things – tree rings, biological community structure, fossils – and in records of never-were-living things – ocean floor geomagnetic reversals, cosmological redshift and things like that.  In this book we’ll read many of the stories that nature tells, but nowhere near all of them.  These parables and fictional field studies are just a sampler, and I’m no Jesus when it comes to storytelling.  No Mark Twain or Frank McCourt either, for that matter.  It’s most important for you to know that natural evidence allows anybody to put together the stories if they have a curious mind.  Read a peer-reviewed life science paper.  Get a degree in Ecology or Astronomy.  Go outside and walk around.  You’ll find God there, and he has a story to tell.

---

[1] If you simply must know what they’re doing, nearly every state that touches the ocean has a college that offers a PhD in Fisheries or Marine Sciences.  Some landlocked states do too.  Go figure it out.  I triple-dog dare you.

 

Chapter Zero.

A while ago I started a book project that never, shall we say, "caught on" with publishers. It didn't get past proposal stage, but I still think what I got down was solid, dang it, and I'm proud. Seems a shame to waste the effort, so I'm putting the three most finished chapters out one at a time here on my blog. Here's the first. Enjoy.

God of Nature. Nature of God.

Chapter Zero – Promise

God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but also on trees,

 and in the flowers and clouds and stars.

~Martin Luther

            We are explorers. 

            Humans have always been travelers and seekers.  Early in our history we followed herds of game or migrated to better climates.  After the rise of agriculture and settled society, people still periodically set out into the world to find safety from their enemies, more abundant natural resources, or room to grow more food for family groups that were also growing.  But human beings don’t roam around just because it’s practical; we’re also curious.  We want to know what else there is.  We want to know so badly that we often send our bravest on death-defying quests to find out.  We build machines that allow us to “travel” inside atoms and across billions of light years.  It’s no coincidence that the word “quest” is also the first five letters of the word “question”.  Webster tells us the Latin verb quaerere means both "to ask" and "to seek."  Does the sea have an edge where ships will fall off?  Give me a boat and I’ll go see.  What’s on the moon?  A rocket and some Tang, I’ll have a look and play golf while I’m there.          

            It makes perfect sense to seek out food and safety.  The most rudimentary organism has a survival instinct and a drive to give its offspring the best shot at carrying on the genetic line.  Bacteria in the middle of the ocean will spin their little flagella, following chemical cues to new food sources.  But human beings are not rudimentary.  We look for food and safety, sure, but we will leave them both for the primary purpose of learning new things. 

            Sometimes people go to extreme lengths.  Polynesians and Vikings came to the Americas in reed boats and wooden longships hundreds of years before Columbus, only to find people who had walked across ice age land bridges.  Ferdinand Magellan died trying to sail around the world.  Marie Curie died too, asking dangerous questions about radiation in her lab.  We lionize Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins for their mission to the moon; they were powered by modern technology but were following the path of that same ancient human need - the need to know what’s out there.  When current technology doesn’t allow us to follow that path, we designate Odysseus, The Time Traveler and James T. Kirk as champions until we can join them.

            Why do we have this drive?  I think I know.  Come with me to Africa, and I’ll show you.

Having a Look

            You and I are field ecologists.  OK, we’re not, but I’ll sprinkle some fairy dust, wave my jazz hands and we can Imagine.  We are leading a team of African and American college students – zoologists and botanists in training – on a survey of the Okavango Delta in Botswana.  We want to know what plants grow here, what animals live here, how they move and breed, and how the living (biotic) elements interact with each other and with the non-living (abiotic) pieces of the system.  The place is too large – 15,000 square kilometers - for our group to cover by itself in a lifetime, but we’re doing our bit. 

            To plan for the census and to get ahead of our enthusiastic young recruits we are going airborne.  We drive our ancient Landcruiser to an open area and unload paragliding wings, harnesses and two industrial-sized fans.  We put on the harnesses, the wings get clipped to those, and the fans go on our backs.  We start the motors on the fans, hold our control lines, wait for a good gust of wind and we run.  The parafoils catch the wind and inflate, then pull us into the sky.  Trust me, people do this.  And don’t worry; our wings are different colors, so search parties can distinguish between our remains.

            Below us we see a vast swamp.  There are pools and lakes with herds of hippos (Hippopotamus amphibius) and congregations of Nile crocodiles (Crocodylus niloticus).  The marshy areas are thick with lechwe antelopes (Kobus leche) who take to the water as we fly over.  They have greasy, water-repellant coats and elongated hooves to give them good footing in the muck.  In the high spots we see lions, cheetahs and African Wild Dogs (Panthera leo, Acinonyx jubatus, Lycaon pictus) looking for a meal, but we know that they will probably get wet catching it.  Are you taking good notes?

            We also observe the local people out making a living, some fishing from small metal boats with outboard motors and some from more traditional wooden dugouts.  It’s impossible to tell if they are Bantu or Bushmen from this height, and anyway we aren’t anthropologists.   They are likely catching the most popular types of fish in the area, Oreochromis and Tilapia.  Many of the fishermen look up at our noisy contraptions, and although we can’t see them do it, they roll their eyes.  They probably have a point.

            I have a double purpose in coming to the Okavango Delta, and maybe you do too.  The university pays us, of course, to run this program.  The data we gather and the connections we derive from them will be useful in planning sustainable fisheries, in giving recommendations for wildlife conservation and in setting benchmarks for future surveys.  The university doesn’t know I’m also on another assignment. I’m not just an ecologist, I’m a theist – a Christian Mennonite (Christianyx mennonitus) – and I’m out here to find God.

            You heard me.

            During our quick flyover, we’ve seen the lakes, the marshes, the animals, the fish and the fisherman, all of them dependent on the two trillion gallons of water that move through the system every year.  Of course they need water.  All life on Earth does.  Some places like the Okavango have quite a bit of water.  It isn’t the water itself, but where the water comes from that’s amazing.  You see, there is one more thing you should know about the Okavango.  It doesn’t rain here.  The Okavango is in the Kalahari Desert.          

            I shouldn’t imply that it never rains in the Okavango, just not much of consequence.  There is rain, but it is highly unpredictable from year-to-year, and the yearly total is sometimes less than what falls in Phoenix.  What precipitation does fall comes at the least obliging time of the year, when it is hottest out.  The rain comes down and the sun burns it all away plus some.  The fish, crocs and lechwe get their water from what some call “the miracle river”. 

            While rain in the Okavango is hissing away into the atmosphere, rain is also falling in Angola, 600 miles to the northwest.  Over the next several months, these waters work their way down the mountains, across the grasslands and into the Kalahari Desert, into the Okavango, the largest inland delta in the world.  During the driest part of the year in Botswana, when the sky is a hazy blue from horizon to horizon, and when the pools and marshes have shrunk to a third of their full size, the flood comes.  People watch it approach.  Children chase the leading edge of the water as is flows down dry creek beds and across cracked earth.  The withered lakes refill and the animals move in from every direction.  Miracle river.

            Is God here?  That is a good question. 

            What kind of God makes a place like the Okavango Delta?  That is a fantastic question.  The kind of question I think we were designed to ask.   

            Maybe we can tell something about what God is like from what he made.  I believe that is the reason humans have this innate drive to seek out and understand nature, even if we don’t know it is God we’re seeing.  The Okavango Delta’s very existence depends on weather patterns so far away they can’t be seen by anyone who lives there.  In the June dry season they can only look to the northwest and hope.  A cynic might say God is playing the same cruel joke over and over and might also wonder why the Bantu and the Bushmen don’t move.  But the hope has been paying off for hundreds of years.      

Poems and Justice

            Let’s leave Africa for a minute and go to the northern part of the Mediterranean.  Since we are still Imagining, we can also go back in time – before modern theories of biology, before people knew about the water and nutrient cycles, and a thousand years before the use of any scientific method.  Korinth, Greece, AD 58.  We are here to watch an unlikely environmental advocate at work.  His name is Paul.

            Paul is a religiously-trained and highly-educated Jew, a Christian and an evangelist.  He is writing to his friends in Rome and trying to explain the difference between righteous people and unrighteous people.  It’s a difficult concept, and he’s struggling to get his explanation just so.  Since Paul is an evangelist, it isn’t surprising that he connects righteousness to the gospel – the “good news” - of Jesus.  Righteous people have faith in the Gospel.  Paul undoubtedly thinks unrighteous people don’t believe the Gospel, and you can read about that in some of his other writings, but his mind is elsewhere while he begins this particular letter.

            Paul stands up from his writing table and walks outside into the courtyard to join us.  Day is giving way to night, and he watches the transition intently.  To the west, the sun sets behind the Akrokorinth, a monolithic mass of limestone which dominates the city.  To the east, stars begin to emerge from the canopy over the waters of the Saronic Gulf.  The moon overhead gives out a bit of light, but some of its parts are shrouded tonight, following the predictable wax and wane.  Paul breathes deeply and thinks. 

            He knows nothing of the orbital forces that keep the earth, the sun and the moon dancing together.  He doesn’t understand the nuclear fusion that drives the fires of the sun and stars.  He doesn’t know that the Akrokorinth once lay beneath the sea and built up slowly from the rain of microscopic marine skeletons.   Paul has no control of these things, and has no way to learn them.  They existed before he did, before Caesar and the Romans, before any historical record he has access to.  Where did they come from, and what do they mean?  The Greeks gave credit to a group of gods and once even built a temple up on the Akrokorinth, but that temple is gone and only the hill is left.  He opens his eyes a little wider with a realization.  He turns to us with the knowing look and the half-smile smirk of a fellow seeker.  We nod, Paul nods, and he goes back inside. Here is what he writes:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. (Romans 1:18-20, ESV)

            The word “righteous” is cryptic even if you’re used to seeing it and the expression really only ever gets used in church and in 1970s blaxploitation movies.  To get a hold on what Paul is saying, we need to learn the Greek word díkē.  It’s the basic root for the words translated “righteousness” and “unrighteousness”.   Instead of “righteous”, in the regular world we say “innocent” or “just”.   Díkē is the standard used to decide if a person is innocent and just.   

            We also need to learn the word pŏiēma.  When Paul talks about creation - “the things that have been made” - pŏiēma is the word he uses.  Literally it means “fabric” and it’s where we get the word “poem”.

            Paul says God is angry.  At whom?   At unjust people who hide the truth.  Why?  Because Gospel or no Gospel, they should know what God is like and live accordingly.  How would they know that?  God told the world about himself in the things that he made - in the fabric, the tapestry, the poetry of creation.  If that was true in Paul‘s time, we in the 21^st century should also be able to look at creation and see the traits of God – “eternal” and “divine” traits that are usually invisible.  Paul insists that we look at the universe around us and that we start to ask some questions.  

            I grew up in church, and I never heard that.  If you want to know things about God, you read the Bible; you go to church and Sunday school; you listen to the pastors and teachers on radio and TV; when you are old enough, you join a Bible study discussion group.  Christians can go outside to “feel closer to God” as long as we don’t turn into Druids or liberals, but actually asking nature’s opinion about God?  That’s weird.  Yeah, God expects us to do some weird things.

            Click to the present, four thousand miles to the southeast.  Back in Botswana, hanging in the sky like a big red bird with a propeller on my back, I ask what kind of God makes a place like the Okavango Delta.  And weird as it seems, I expect the swamp and the stars and the living cells to answer.  God promises that they will.

Science, Spirituality, Nature and Faith

            The scope of things a person can learn about God and nature is so massive that recording it all would require something like the Apostle John’s comprehensive gospels: “they would fill the whole world”.  You think you’ve got enough answers to be getting on with and scientific discovery piles on more information, each revelatory tidbit more interesting than the last.   It’s the reason theologians and scientists end up specializing in the Judean kings or the end times, chimpanzee behavior or bioluminescence.  There’s just too much information, and it grows more quickly than any one person can keep up with.  That’s what you find when asking creation about the Creator, and it’s beautiful.  Also frustrating and maddening, but achingly beautiful. 

            Where I live in Oregon, I can look out my window on any warm day and see hawks riding on the thermals over our city.   It always makes me think of Solomon.  He is supposed to be the wisest man who ever lived, but in his book of Proverbs Solomon says he doesn’t understand the ‘way of an eagle in the sky’.  That’s funny; I understand the way of an eagle in the sky.  I know about convection, birds’ hollow bones, and the shape of wings and feathers.  Flying is a simple matter of physics and physiology.  Is Solomon a fraud and a stupe, while I’m a scientific genius? Of course not.  Mankind makes progress in the methods it uses for answering questions and in crafting new questions based on those answers.  We have 3000 more years of information, and my children know more about nature from watching the Discovery Channel than Solomon ever knew from a lifetime of observation.  If we can learn about God from nature, we can know things about God that Solomon didn’t.  And if we can learn those things, it’s absolutely imperative that we do learn them.

            Since we’re going to be discussing nature and learning, we have to take a second and talk about science.  Science is the best and arguably the only reliable means of gathering information about the physical universe, but much as it pains me, science and Christianity haven’t always gotten along.  There’s no use denying it.  I could list the many times when Church authorities persecuted or even killed scientists for proposing ideas contrary to official doctrine.  I could also list the many atheists who claim that science has removed the need for God.  I’ll spare you those lists, but we need to acknowledge the historical conflict. 

             You can decide for yourself, but I think the arguments are sad because they are based on bad ideas about science and the Bible.  As a Christian, raised in an Evangelical church, I am intimately familiar with the books and video lectures which portray the Bible as scientifically advanced and which give evidence for the reliability of its scientific claims.  I am impressed by the mental gyrations in those presentations, but not by their conclusions.  The definition of science is always fast and loose, while the theology is so narrow it excludes me and most people I know.  This aggravates me as a scientist and kind of hurts my feelings as a believer.   

            I think there are two main traps that people – my people - fall into when making claims about the Bible with regards to science.  The problem lies in not knowing the difference between fact and truth.   First, some assume that any statement the Bible makes is automatically scientific fact.  I think that is a mistake.  The two Genesis creation stories are in two different orders, one with mankind coming last and one with mankind beating out plants and animals.  At least one of these must be factually inaccurate by definition.  When Moses listed the animals that Israelites were allowed to eat, he classified bats as a type of bird and said insects have four legs.  Not even close.  During his famous Vanity of Vanities riff in the first chapter of Ecclesiastes, The Preacher manages to makes technically incorrect statements about planetary physics, climatology and hydrology all in under a hundred words.  The sun doesn’t really “rise” and “go down”, the wind doesn’t travel “around and around”, and not all streams “run to the sea”.  God didn’t forget how the creation came about or how it all runs.  Passing on that information wasn’t the goal.  The authors of the Bible are instead concerned with revealing relational truths.  The things they wrote are not always factual; rather, they are true.  In delivering these messages the Bible uses language that is meaningful in the context of the audience’s experience – metaphor and colloquialisms, or what is called “phenomenal language”.  The Preacher of Ecclesiastes was venting his frustrations with life’s monotony by referring to seemingly endless cycles in nature.  He was bored.  He had no intention of developing physical science curricula, so he doesn’t have to stand up to scientific scrutiny.  The scribe who wrote down the Genesis stories wasn’t doing a Master’s thesis on evolutionary biology; he was describing the relationships between a Creator, the creation, and the sentient beings that are left to ponder it all.  Hey, the ponderers - that’s us.

            We’ll take one more field trip and I’ll see if I can better explain the difference between fact and truth.  This time you can Imagine, and I will Remember.

            Twenty years ago in a disturbed Oregon wetland.  The sun has set.  We are walking carefully and quietly down a heavily used trail.  It is hot and humid for this time of year, but we are dressed lightly and are prepared for the warm work ahead.  You have pepper spray and we both have whistles in case things get out of hand.  As we get nearer to the den we put on our wildlife behaviorist hats, then we approach the entrance.  We ring the doorbell.   We’re here to witness the courtship habits of the Young American.  Three dollar cover charge.

            Nearly fifty young males live together in this habitat, spread over four floors.  Every three months the group gathers food and beverages – root beer kegs – and leaves signs letting the females know they are welcome.   Outside males are tolerated grudgingly, but I am too old to be a threat and they let us pass.  Inside, the noise is nearly deafening.  They appear to be dancing, though the males’ movements are awkward, as if the presence of the females has caused them to lose their sense of coordination. 

            A new sound begins – one that I recognize from previous visits, and one that has been repeated for countless generations in this gathering.  I open my field notebook and write down “Bee Gees”.  Eight males enter from another room dressed in extremely tight shirts, unbuttoned to the waist.  We take special note of one with bright red polyester pants, a phoenix medallion and astonishing wing-mullet hair.  For familiarity’s sake we call him Ryan.  The small group of males dances in unison and I write again: “Bus Stop Hustle”.  The females are appreciative, or at least they are laughing.

               You should pay special attention to one particular female who has come in response to the signs left by the males.   We call her Angela.  I have become quite familiar with her during my observations.  Over the course of the ritual we see Ryan dancing near, and even with Angela.  They talk a little, and we can tell Angela is kind, smart, funny and also has the coolest, curly, blond hair we’ve ever seen.  Again I write in my field notebook: “Way out of his league”.

            You know this isn’t really a study in wildlife behavior.  You figured out three paragraphs ago that it’s the story of how my wife and I met.  Very astute.  My question to you: what is science here, and what is not?  There are several observations we’ve made which can be considered fact-based and subject to peer review; they are scientific.  The disco pants are both red and made of polyester.  We can test the color with a colorimeter.  The polyester composition can be shown with a burn test or chemical analysis.  We can measure the amount of root beer consumed using scales or volumeters.  We can count and confirm the number of males and females active in the ritual, and can use those numbers to develop a hypothesis about whether enough females came.  By checking in periodically over the next two decades we can show the long-term effects of the ritual on the population – this many marriages, that many offspring (one and three for me) - and I can give observable evidence, verified by dozens of witnesses that the Bee Gees played on the stereo that night.  These are facts.  They are science.     

            Now consider: my wife Angela is beautiful.  She is perfect for me in every way.  These are true statements, but they are relational truths that I can’t prove scientifically.  When I tell you that Angela is kind, smart, funny and has the greatest hair on the planet, those are relational truths.  They are things which are un-measurable by any instrument and un-testable by any experiment.  There is no peer review for how people feel about each other or fall in love.  “Somebody for everybody,” Ang says.  My interactions with her over the last twenty years have shown me that we work well together - I want to be with her all the time - but nobody expects me to come up with a falsifiable hypothesis regarding our relationship.  That’s what science does with facts, and relational truths aren’t facts.  When I read the Bible I find great truth.  Our friend Paul calls it profitable to read and sufficient to base your faith on.  Get one and read it.  However, I can show many statements in the Bible that do not hold up to scientific scrutiny.  That doesn’t make the Bible illegitimate.  It is primarily a book of poetic, relational truth and scientific facts aren’t the point.  I love my wife without needing proofs, and I relate to the truths in the Bible without experimental verification.  No conflict is necessary.

            The second trap people get caught in when making claims about science, nature and God is probably the most common and the most important.  It’s interesting because it catches theologians and scientific naturalists alike - not all of them, but large swaths of those populations.  One group tries to use science to prove God exists, and the other group tries to use science to prove God doesn’t exist.  I’ve seen this frequently at youth rallies I’ve been a part of.  Speakers come up with an unusual set of facts – say, the bit about the Okavango Delta and the miracle river – and ask us, “Now how could anybody doubt there is a God behind all that?”  I’m not sure incredulity is a good argument.  If you believe in God, it is a fascinating example of how he works.  If you don’t believe in God, the Okavango is still a really cool place with an interesting story behind it.  The thing is, we can’t use facts about nature to scientifically prove anything supernatural.  Why not?

            Science and the scientific method use observations of the natural universe to form testable hypotheses – educated guesses - about the natural universe.  Those hypotheses are then tested by natural means and are either accepted or rejected.  At no point is anything supernatural assumed or used in the process.  Science can make no statement at all about the supernatural because it is the wrong tool for the job.  Think of it this way: if I try to use an arc-welder to make a banana-mango smoothie, I’ll make some hot fruit and a big mess but I’ll fail at making the smoothie.  Does that tell me whether it is possible to make a banana-mango smoothie?  Whether there is, in fact, such a thing as smoothies?  No.  An arc-welder was the wrong tool.  I should have used a blender.  Science is a wonderful tool for increasing knowledge, but it isn’t the right tool for deciding pro/con the existence of God.  I would argue that each person has their own individual set of tools they should use when deciding on the God question – reason, dreams, emotion, visions, life experience, revelation, the counsel of the wise - pick yours.               

            God, being supernatural, is not subject to natural verification or falsification.  People either believe in a God of some sort – in my case the God of the Bible – or they don’t believe in a God.  Everybody has their reasons, but they aren’t scientific ones.  That doesn’t mean science is useless to our quest to find God in the natural world.  There is a fine line I’m trying to walk.  I believe that God is the supernatural source and planner of nature and natural processes; that is actually a very neat definition of God.  This book is about nature and science and what they say about God to a person who believes. 

            Science may not be useful in proving God’s existence, but it reveals what God is like by describing creation.  Science expands our knowledge of ourselves and our surroundings, showing with increasing clarity how the natural universe works.  It informs us about the forces driving nature – the rules nature plays by.  Science is predictive, letting us know what we can expect to see if a meteoroid falls from space at a given speed, or what will likely happen if a pregnant iguana is isolated on an island and founds a new population.  Who doesn’t want to know this stuff?      

            And how do we fit into the mix? The common ground we share with God is nature.  God is outside of nature, but is connected to nature relationally.  We are a part of nature.  We are connected to it physically and – by way of our explorers’ intellect - scientifically.  If you believe in God, or are even curious what a God might be like, you can use observation and experiment to learn about nature, then come to accurate conclusions about God’s character. 

The Who, the What and the Why

            I’m writing part of this book during a family road trip to Yellowstone.  We’ll avoid the term “workaholic” and say I’m taking advantage of an opportunity for research.  On this trip we’ve driven through lava beds poured out 5000 years ago by the volcanoes that formed central Oregon, and which are still naked and scalded.  We’ve seen forests, burned to ash only seven years ago, that already have a carpet of juvenile Lodgepole Pines below the dead black spires of their parents.  Snow hanging tough in July.  Bacteria colonies thriving in water hot enough to cook pasta.  Venus, Mars and Saturn stacked on top of each other in the southern sky.  If God is teaching us about himself, he’s being pretty thorough.

            Right now I’m playing the part of a teacher and a writer, but by training I am an environmental scientist.  You might generously call me a Gentleman Ecologist or an amateur Eco-Theologian.  Every step outside is an opportunity to teach my boys something.  “Hey guys, did you know that the trophic cascades caused by wolf bounties suppressed the reproductive capabilities of aspens, willows and cottonwoods in the national parks?  Let’s talk about biodiversity, ecological disturbance and stable ecosystems.”  Usually I get a blank look at this point, but I hope they get something out of it.  I’m having a good time.  You can’t ask for better source material than everything that exists.

            I’m going to make a proposal that you can either accept or reject as you will.  I want to take Paul up on his challenge.  I’m going to look for God in nature - to look for “his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature” in “the things which have been made”.  It is something people were built to do.  We have the drive and the mental capacity to make these connections, and I’m excited to get going.  Do you want to come along?  I’d love some company, plus I need someone to carry all the stuff I couldn’t fit in my pack.      

            If you are game for it, fantastic.  Get your shots and bring plenty of water.  You won’t believe some of the things we’ll see, and that’s the reason we’re going – to challenge what we believe, to find out things we didn’t know and to become what we never expected.  If that sounds a little melodramatic I’ll say it this way: I love to learn.  I love nature and I love discovery.  I’m always on the lookout for the God-Who-Is.  I laugh.  A lot.  And loudly.   If you join me on the journey I’m proposing I promise it will be a good time.  Even though I’m a card-carrying Christian, I try not to be a jerk about it.  And even though I accept the scientific evidence for an old earth, an older universe and evolution, I try not to be a jerk about that.  Everybody is welcome. 

 

            

 

9/10

My son Silas was born on the last normal day. September 10, 2001, at 10:30 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time, he joined the human cause. A nurse messed up using the scale, so we never knew how much he weighed, but he was big. Healthy and loud. He met all his grandparents. He ate, he slept, he got his one kooky eyebrow smoothed down a hundred times. 

When Silas was 17 hours old, Mohamed Atta boarded a plane in Maine. Before my son hit 24 hours, the Pentagon was on fire, there was wreckage in Pennsylvania and both towers were down in New York. 

We were in Oregon, and never in any real danger, but in his own way Silas saved me. Every TV in America was tuned into presidential speeches and replays and news crawl tickers. Every TV except one. In the recovery room we had Si, and he was all the news that mattered. Reports came in continually and other people ghost-walked around the hospital talking in low voices. Any other day and I would have joined in the collective mourning - but I just couldn't do it. Every conversation I had on 9/11 involved the phrase, “Hey, did you see my son?”

It sounds heartless, I know. I feel a little hesitant admitting it, but on arguably the worst day my country's had in 60 years, I had one of my best days. I didn't plan it or choose for it to be so. It was fated to me and it was out of my hands. Picture getting married on the same day your neighbor's house burns down. Being told your cancer is in remission on the day of a school shooting. The other event is sad - maybe unbearably sad – but your own life has become so immediately wonderful through other circumstances that you can't help but feel happy. Conflicted, but happy. Call it extremely localized grace. 

The reminders start around August 25 every year. Facebook posts about supporting the troops, honoring the victims, never forgetting. Television specials, political rallies, NPR discussions about policy. It will be exactly ten years tomorrow, so the memorials are even thicker than usual. Silas made these redundant for me. Sure, he made the first 9/11 easier for me to handle, but I see him every day and - I promise you - I remember.

Happy Birthday Si. 

Under the Shell

It seems like success should be easy enough to measure. If I make a good amount of money doing something I like, it’s rational to assume I’ve chosen the right career.  If my house nicely serves the needs of my family and protects the stuff I own, I must be in the right place.  If I’m happy with my church/community/associates, I’ve done well. If I’m satisfied, I must have fallen into the right story. I must have.

I’ve been contemplating success a lot recently.  Mostly I’ve been contemplating whether I’m having any.  It’s a real temptation to judge a life by measuring its degree of personal achievement.  Is there some singular destiny God intends each person to fulfill? Do we know we’ve hit that groove when our needs are met? My doubts have been growing. They started with Griffen’s Isopod.

Griffen’s Isopod  (Orthione griffenis) is a button-sized crustacean that lives on the Pacific coast from California to British Columbia.  Man, does it ever live there. Its population is numerous and widespread; you can find one easily if you know where to look. Food is plentiful, habitat conditions are ideal and it looks like it will be an integral piece of Pacific tidal flats ecology for a long time to come. You’d have to say they were successful little buggers, except for one thing: no one is sure if they are supposed to be there.

The first time O. griffensis was described scientifically was in 2005.  They are cryptogenic, meaning it isn’t clear where they came from. They were either good at hiding before 2005 or they hitched a ride in from somewhere – a lot of people guess Asia. When they showed up they found their niche in the gill chambers of mud shrimp. A large female isopod and one or more tiny males move into a shrimp and live off its blood. They keep the shrimp alive to provide meals, but not healthy enough to reproduce. The mud shrimp population in most places is crashing. When the shrimp finally go, they won’t be filtering water anymore. Species A that needs shrimp-filtered water will move or die. Species B that eats Species A will follow. Species C that was eaten by Species A will boom. Which leaves us where we started, contemplating success.  Is Griffen’s Isopod successful or what? Am I?

In Sugar Happy Sunshine world, community works through the interchange of abilities and service; in Dark Gray Reality some people come out ahead at others’ expense. Blame is shifted and credit is misapplied at just the right time. Accolades are poured out for those with the best sell-jobs instead of those with the most knowledge or best results. See enough of that and you start to wonder if anyone achieves greatness by finding their destiny or if success is just a matter of invasion and a willingness to suck people dry.     

My friend Randy was about to have his first child and he asked me for advice. I had been a father for three years, so I was an expert. I told him he was going to give his son a life credo - whether by design or by accident - and that he got to choose what it was going to be.  I suggested that, as far as credos go, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” is better than “Look out for number one”. Looking back, I realize Randy was probably looking for recommendations on diapers and teaching the alphabet, but I gave him what I had. 

 

 

The Unknown Line

I’m going to be 40 in a couple months and, given the health history of males in my family, I am more than half done living.  I have more used-to-be in my life than I have going-to-be.  But, that’s all guesswork and frankly I love the things I have in mind for what’s left.  I’m writing more than I ever have, teaching with greater freedom, learning with passion, and my last couple attempts at naan have been solid.  I like what I’m becoming; I just wonder what to do with what I’ve been.

A few years ago my parents were crabbing in the Siuslaw River Estuary and they pulled up a parable.  When you drop crab pots in open water you have to attach a marked float to your lines so you can recognize which are yours.  Though there are commercial floats available, empty yellow Prestone jugs work just fine.  The traps can stay down for hours if you want, but if you wait until the tide is moving out too fast the tension in the line overpowers your float.  You go back to where it was and you see a yellow smear ten feet underwater.  Didn’t bring a long pole with a hook on the end?  Don’t have six hours to wait for the tide to turn?  Your trap is gone.

The parable.  My mom and dad had half a dozen pots in the water and were making a circuit of the lines.  One particular trap seemed far too heavy and they had to work for a long time getting it in the boat.   When their trap broke the surface there was another line wrapped around theirs.  The second line was frayed, covered in seaweed and wadded into knots.  Cut vs. pull.  If you are the kind of person who would cut the line loose, we can no longer be friends.  They dragged the bonus line into the boat and at the end was a commercial-sized crab pot, heavily corroded and just about to fall apart.  Inside were the largest Dungeness crabs they had ever seen, and with the crabs were multiple generations of empty crab shells, molted away as the crabs grew and marking many years of tumbling back and forth with the tides.   

Somebody had launched this pot and then lost their float.  The crabs that went after the original bait were stuck inside.  Nobody else could catch them because they were already caught.  Waters on the Oregon coast are some of the richest in the world so there was plenty to eat.  What the monster crabs couldn’t do was escape the company of their former selves.  It was getting crowded.

We are the product of our pasts, no doubt.  If we like what we see in the mirror, or even if we see some potential, we have the molted shells to thank.  If we cringe, the shells accept curses without getting defensive.  I’ve been a student, a grandson, a preacher, man-in-charge, blue-collar, stay-at-home and in-the-field.  Now I’m none of those.  The temptation is to hold up whatever is most impressive for the ephemeral audience.  Experience is something to remind us and draw from, but it seems wise to let some of the past wash free in the current.  It’s easy to get crowded by former glories, you see.  Besides, these waters are rich and we’re still growing.       

 

Buried and Exposed

I believe I can finally identify the magic moment when a person crosses over from Young to Old.  Last year I knew more people who died than people who were born. 

That makes you think.  The world’s human population continues to grow, so the wee bairns are winning the race for now (go life), but on an individual basis there’s a lot of catastrophe.  It’s starting to loom a little in a check-your-cholesterol-go-to-the-gym kind of way, if you know what I mean.  I expect to lose people at a more rapid clip from here on in, at least until attrition keeps me from having anyone else to lose.  Coming to understand loss isn’t a picnic, but to my way of thinking it’s a lot like going to the beach.

When some people say they are “going to the beach”, they mean they are going to lie in the sun, play Frisbee on groomed white sand and swim in warm water.  Ideally, David Hasselhoff will be there to keep them safe and provide a slow-motion musical montage.  I’ve been to those beaches and I don’t get the appeal.  They feel like oversized golf course sand traps.  For my money, nothing compares to walking the beach in the middle of an Oregon winter.  Storms cover the sand with dead seaweed, dead jellyfish and basically dead-everything-else.  Waves churn sea foam from a mixture of salt water and diatom proteins, and it looks like 10,000 washing machines all overflowed at the same time.  Right now it’s the beginning of February and the ocean water just hit 45 (that’s both degrees Fahrenheit and your expected survival time in minutes).  The Oregon coast isn’t for people who insist on things like comfort or facilities, but if you put on a thick jacket or two you might find God out there.  I don’t mean you’ll see an old guy with a flowing beard and a white robe, though in Oregon you never know.  What I mean is I think you see God most clearly when nature has not been sanitized for consumption. 

That keeps it honest and - from what I gather - God is honestly fond of upheaval. You could hardly ask for a better place to see this than at Beverly Beach.  When the winter storms have scoured away enough sand and when the tide is very low you see some odd things.  Between the beach and the highway is a thick band of Miocene sandstone.  Look closely, and you see it is packed with near-shore fossils – clams, snails, I once found a scallop shell as big as my hand.  This used to be a functioning biological community.  Then, about 22 million years ago, tectonic forces buckled the area downward, deepening the sea floor and burying the residents in mud.  Other areas were unaffected and the various species continued, but this community died.  Twenty millions years ago the earth’s crust moved again, the area lifted up above the water and erosion revealed the fossils we see.  They seem out of place up there, but they tell a story.  Now turn around and I’ll show you something even more out of place.  Down by the wave line there are tree stumps.  When the land uplifted, it was high enough to be colonized by the surrounding forest.  Four thousand years ago a combination of earthquakes and rising sea levels covered this part of the forest and the saltwater protected the stumps from rot.  When white settlers came to the area they liked the idea of wood that had no bark or branches to bother with, and they cut the remnant trunks off at ground level.  Bend down and you can see saw marks.  Rise and fall, bury and expose.  Seashells in the hills, trees in the ocean.    Quite a bit of destruction happened here.  It was scary and the system felt the loss, but without it there would be no fossils, no stumps, nothing to learn from.    

God has a predilection for disturbance and the status quo is seldom as quo as it seems. Forests burn and dormant seeds are released to re-colonize the area.  Ancient stars go nova and the dust gives birth to our own solar system. Sometimes wonderful things are built from ashes.  Other times parents, friends and children die, and the surviving community has to develop a new, seemingly poorer reality while living with ghosts.  I don’t know why reality hurts like that.  Not knowing makes me a lousy evangelist, but it makes me a good seeker.  When the last of our grandparents died, I told my sister Maryn, “Now we are great orphans.”  She thought a second and said, “Yeah. We are pretty great.”

 

Whistles at the Crossing

Down the hill and across a field from our house is a little spur of the Burlington Northern rail line.  It was built along the river’s edge back when you could still do that.  In the summertime with our windows open we can hear the 2 a.m. train, engineers sounding their whistles at the Minto-Brown Island road crossing.   If I wake up, it’s with Paul Simon in my head. Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance. Everybody thinks it’s true.   I drive alongside the line four or five times a week on my way somewhere else, and I often pay more attention to what’s on the tracks than what’s on the road in front of me.  Because it’s Oregon there are loads of logs going by, plus quite a few tankers of vegetable oil and corn syrup to feed peoples’ addictions, but the main cargo on our trains is identity. 

It’s a Christmas miracle if you can find a train car somebody hasn’t spray-painted their name and face onto.  As far up as people can reach – about eight feet – someone has laid claim to every square inch.  Some is crude, scrawly stuff done quickly while the brakeman’s back was turned, but some is really beautiful and obviously took some time.  People don’t use their real names.  They make up new ones – Snapz, Red Killah, Miss Moto.  My all-time favorite is Consumer; either it was a lamentation over an expected social role or it was it a badge of avaricious pride.  Either way, it was raw honesty.  There’s Paul Simon singing again. The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls.

When most living things undergo identity changes, it is under duress.  Iguanas get swept off a South American beach and are transported to the Galapagos; lack of food forces them to begin diving for algae, which they scrape off of submerged rocks; their bodies become more adapted to aquatic life.  That’s territorial change, leading to behavioral change, leading eventually to genetic change.  When the female in a clown fish pair dies, the male changes gender and another male comes in to take his-now-her place.  No offense intended for Pixar fans, but Marlin the Clownfish was Nemo’s mom.  That’s a change in community dynamics leading to hormonal change.  Prior to a stressor, organisms tend to work with what they have in stability, but identity change is necessary for survival under pressure.  

With people it’s slightly different.  We change behavior and power roles in response to stress just like other organisms, but we also change because we want to.  Even if things are steady and safe, we re-invent ourselves.  Why?  We’re natural explorers, fascinated and defined by the new.  We thrive when we go to new places, learn new things, become new people.  Curiosity killed the cat, but it made the man king. 

I get a mental picture of the train vandals which may be pure fiction, but I lay odds on it being close to truth.  People get stuck – geographically, socially or emotionally – and are stripped of their opportunity to explore and change.  It goes against their nature.  Our nature.  They think they can’t leave their situation or seek the new.  Maybe they are right.  They can’t go, but Snapz can.  A new identity awaits at the paint store.   Once you mark territory on a train, your territory moves again like it should.  The trains down the hill are an illegal canvas, but they carry the right image.  If you can do it without being inconsiderate or disruptive, it’s healthy to grow and learn and try out an expanded identity whenever we get the chance.  The effort may be crude and scrawly, but watching that train go down the tracks to new territory is eminently satisfying.  And it may be that the person we send out is more authentic than the one staying behind.  

 

Walking in the Woods, Making Sense of Things

Spend enough time in the old growth rainforest here in Oregon and you get to see some things.  One thing you inevitably see is trees that look like bow-legged cowboys.  The bottom four or five feet look like they are riding an invisible horse.  “That’s an odd way for a tree to look,” you say.  You’d be wrong. 

Look around, and you notice that there are dead, fallen trees scattered on the forest floor, gathering vegetation as they rot.  We call these Nurse Logs; they support and feed the next generation of forest with the organic riches of their own bodies.  Some of them are recently fallen and are covered with mosses and ferns.  Some have been down a while and have bushes and new, smaller trees growing out of them.  Some fell so long ago that they are slumping into the earth and they look like long, narrow burial mounds – which they are.  Eventually the new trees wrap their roots around the nurse log, extend the roots to the ground and start supporting their own weight.  The nurse log disintegrates underneath them, having given out all its stored nutrients, sometimes hundreds of years after its own death.  We are left with our tree cowboys.

For a long time the Kargel Family had a coattail member named Adeline.  She was somebody’s third cousin, five times removed or something, but nobody could remember exactly and nobody cared.  She was always around during Christmas at Grandma and Grandpa Kargel’s house, and she came to all the anniversaries and summer barbecues.  At a graduation party my cousin went around the room introducing family to friends. “This is my Grandpa.  This is my Grandma.  This is my Cousin Ryan.  And this is…um…this is my Adeline.”   

Adeline was coattail in other ways too.  Whatever “celebrity” is, Adeline was precisely the opposite. Un-celebrity.  She was perfectly round and had big old-lady glasses.  She worked in the same laundry shop for 40 years as a folder and a floor runner.  She lived in a house that she inherited, stacked it full of newspapers and seldom went in public.  Never married.  Never had kids.  The kind of person you would expect to slump into the earth and disintegrate.  But after Grandpa died, Adeline carried my Grandma.  She and Grandma called each other every day at the same time to “make sure everyone was still alive”.  Adeline called for 12 years, just making sure.  I am absolutely certain Adeline is the reason Grandma lived long enough to meet my children.  She gave them the gift of roots.  Then Grandma died at Christmas, and Adeline died at the start of spring.

I won’t call anyone a “nurse log” because the words are inelegant, but I will say when you have an Adeline, you often only notice them in their absence.  They work in the periphery, seeming on the surface to be used up and inert, but giving out energy and structure and mustache-y kisses they spent a lifetime storing up, even if they don’t have much stake in the result.  Sometimes they disappear and leave you standing funny in the wilderness.  Sometimes they make it possible for you to support your own weight when it’s time.

Special thanks to Jay Eads for the photo.  Check out his work Jay Eads Photography

 

Almost There

The first book I ever published was about a journey to edge of the universe.  It was called “Journey to the Edge of the Universe”.  I published it myself even though it was hard lettering a whole book by hand.  The pictures were pretty good and Mrs. Barker gave me an “A”.  I was the main character and I ingeniously overcame every obstacle.  I didn’t have to figure out the relationship dynamics of the crew because I went by myself.  Acquiring fuel wasn’t a problem because I used fuel that was completely recyclable.  Growing and storing food was irrelevant because I didn’t specifically write anything about eating.  I didn’t need to worry about the time requirements for the trip because I hadn’t gotten to that part of math yet.  And lastly, I didn’t have to come up with a goal for the mission because when I got to the Edge of the Universe I became a Disembodied Mind (the way this happened was too technical to explain to people who weren’t space explorers so I didn’t bother).   I think NASA is incorporating some of my ideas into their programs.

The reality is I had no clue, and the knowledge I have now gives me a clue so small that it can only be called a clue in comparison to my previously possessed no-clue.  What would it take to go on that trip for real?  Well, you can’t.  It’s too far and you would die.  Depending on how you identify and measure distance in space-time, the edge of the visible universe is as little as 3 billion light years away (Angular Diameter Distance, which measures how far away the furthest visible galaxies were when they emitted the light we see) and as much as 47 billion light years away (Co-moving Distance, which tells you how far the furthest visible galaxies are right now if you had a measuring tape hooked on their outer edge).  Don’t get me started on Luminosity Distance and Light Travel Time Distance.  If space-time stopped expanding the day you left and if you could somehow move at the speed of light it would take 47 billion years to reach the edge of the universe – if the universe actually has an edge, which it probably doesn’t.  Got that? 

 I know.  It hurts.

Sometimes it feels good to be ignorant.  It’s easier, because you aren’t aware of potential flaws in your beliefs. You aren’t aware of how relatively small you are, and feeling small is hard to distinguish from feeling unimportant.  That may be why it was so difficult in the 17^th century for government and church to accept the Copernican astronomical model, which placed the earth in orbit around the sun.  Surely God made the universe at human scale.  We were meant to subdue it.  It says so in Genesis.  If the earth isn’t the center of the universe and if the universe is much larger than we thought, maybe we ourselves are less central than we thought.  Hard truths for people used to feeling significant.  I know if you’d pointed out the logistical problems in my plotline back in fifth grade I’d have felt pretty stupid, and then I’d have tried to argue with you.  “Nuh-uh.”  “Yeah-huh.”  To this day I’d like the stars to circle around me in their crystal spheres.  I’d still like to scoop some up in a satchel and bring them back for show-and-tell.  Not ignorant enough to believe it could happen, but does that mean I can’t keep wishing?