A New Spin on an Old Vision

I received a Christmas gift wrapped in an unusual paper that caught my eye.  The wrapping paper was in the animal category, but displayed an extremely wide collection:  squirrel, skunk, rabbit, panda, peacock, cardinal, miscellaneous birds, butterflies, elephant, giraffe, fawn, frog, and even a small porcupine.  They were all snugly clustered around a Christmas tree half visible among the crowd of animals.  In case this novel, nearly zoo-like menagerie had seemed to take its theme too far from the message of Christmas, there were two animals side by side and touching that spoke an ancient message:  There was a lion lying down with a lamb touching the lion's peaceful head.  It was the artist's rendition of the Bible's Old Testament prophecy that the lion will lie down with the lamb (based on Isaiah 11:6-7). However, a question arises:  Why should all those other animals on my wrapping paper have been conscripted into the scene?

"Peaceable Kingdom"
by Edward Hicks (c. 1834)

The answer is revealed as we explore more about our human psychology, particularly human hopes and possibilities.  That originally Jewish prophetic vision from Isaiah makes no sense if we take it as a literal blueprint for the future.  Any plan for the restoration of planet Earth with a sound ecological basis has to allow for many species of animals remaining predators.  Lions cannot live off of grass, much less "eat straw like the ox.," as imagined in Isaiah 11: 7 (NRSV).  Lions and other predators living naturally off of prey should not be seen as immorality -- a theological insight stated explicitly in Christian thought centuries ago.

Thus, the peaceful scene of a lion lying down with a lamb must, in the very least, be understood not as a literal blueprint but as a literary hyperbole.  However, it is more than that. It is also a vision of wholeness.  When the world we humans have made becomes too distorted, too dark, and feels too closed off from future improvement, we need a vision (even if a literary one) of something that expresses wholeness.

With my Christmas wrapping paper, I indeed held in my hands an artist's portrayal of a kind of wholeness.  It seems as if the artist had been trying to squeeze into the portrait every kind of animal that might make the scene more delightful.  (I did notice, incidentally, that he left out any snakes, which might have caused a conflicted message due to snakes having been used as a religious symbol in other ways.)  In drawing a widely encompassing vision, the artist was joining a long tradition of using the Christmas nativity to express a universalizing theme.  For example, centuries ago, the three wise men frequently came to be drawn as representing a range of ethnic groups, even though there is no mention of various ethnic origins for those gentlemen in the Bible.

What was striking about this particular vision on my wrapping paper was that, except for that Christmas tree, it was composed entirely of animals.  No people!  I wonder if it did not unconsciously express an admittance that our relationship with the non-human world of plants and animals needs special attention -- that it needs to be made whole, and that it can make us whole.

~~~ 

Do you have a vision of some kind of wholeness you hope for?  What is it?

Nature’s Time Machine

"Let's set the Way-Back Machine to the year...."  Many a person in the U.S. of my generation, upon hearing that line, will recall the Peabody cartoons that were part of the Bullwinkle TV show. With that periodic segment, the Bullwinkle show joined the long line of plot-writers (primarily science-fiction) who employed the device of time travel.  It's a literary tradition that can be traced all the way back to H. G. Wells's 1895 appropriately titled novel The Time Machine.

When we look at species of plants and animals, if we have some knowledge of evolutionary biology, we can also be taken back in time.  We Homo sapiens are late arrivers on this planet (150,00 yrs. ago).  And so, knowing other species sets the dial of the time machine farther back.  To use another metaphor, if evolution is thought of as a huge tree of life with numerous levels of branches, as we look at branches that began lower on the tree, we are taken further back in time.

leaf of
a ginkgo biloba tree

Despite many extinctions, most species still around today have endured an incredibly long time.  I remember the day I noticed the unusually shaped leaves of a tree beside the sidewalk in a southern city I was visiting.  The person I was with explained that it was a ginkgo, which, unlike other trees in the U.S., was of a type that dated back a quarter-billion years.  Another example of going way back are some species of marsupials, such as ancient opossum species.  Marsupials (which include kangaroos) represent an early state of mammalian evolution, having no placenta. They bear young that are extremely small, and carry the young in a pouch for the remainder of their early development.

A nautilus,
another ancient species

For those of us who think of God as the Giver of Life and as the Fountain out of which all possibilities come, evolution can be seen as the way by which the Divine manifests its power and wonder.  Although evolution, seemingly paradoxically, requires elements of chance (such as mutations and chance experiences), there is in evolution a discernible direction toward a richer diversity of life.

Although Peabody and Star Trek episodes took the audience back in time (to such periods as Prohibition or ancient Rome), H. G. Wells's The Time Machine actually took the reader forward in time.  That is a harder task when it comes to evolution. No one studying the varieties of species 100 million years ago could have predicted that a meteor would hit the earth off the Yucatan, bringing such thick clouds that plants would die, thus cornering all the great species of dinosaurs into extinction.

We do know however, that we are suffering a loss of biodiversity -- a reduction of the number of branch-tips at evolution's treetop of the present.  The main cause is human:  the stresses of loss of habitats and climate change.  It is not yet determined in what way this plot will turn out.  Whenever we work to preserve the rich diversity of inter-species relationships that strengthen life, we try to write a happy ending for the story of life.

~~~

Does it add something to your perspective or your life to imagine way back in time?

(The photograph of the leaf is by Daniel Miłaczewski.  That of the nautilus is by Lee R Berger.

Both are used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licenses.)