There's More to Penn and His Pen

A child's learning involves being able to identify things. (Spoon. Ball.)  And it involves being able to recognize recurring patterns.  (That ball and spoon both go down when pushed off the edge of the table.)  However, that wonderful human ability to identify things and discern recurring patterns has a drawback: It easily results in our simplified classifying and stereotyping of people.

Not only do we easily group people by race or ethnic background, we also classify historical personages by what they are most famous for.  For example, one person becomes "a scientist" in the historical record, even though that "scientist" might have most enjoyed playing with their children. Or, another famous person becomes "a singer," even though that "singer" might have most enjoyed tinkering with old clocks.

One historical figure in early North American history has become indelibly linked to the state of Pennsylvania:  William Penn, whose last name is the first part of that state's name.  There is a bit of irony here, because even after getting the king of England's permission to establish a colony in the "New World," William Penn spent more years in Germany and England than in the future U.S.  Because most education in the U.S. today is secularized, American-history textbooks classify the man as a political leader.  Books on the history of Christianity, in contrast, classify him as a leader of a religious movement, the Quakers.  As a result of such classifications, neither type of textbook is likely to tell the reader about Penn's thoughts and writings about Nature.

William Penn's enjoyment of Nature is demonstrated by the name he had preferred for the colony he founded in 1691: "Sylvania," meaning "forest" in Latin.  It is from the same Latin root for "Sylvania" that we get the little-used English word "sylvan," meaning related to wooded areas.  (It was King Charles II who stuck "Penn" on the front end of the colony's name in honor of William Penn's father, an admiral.)

Even though on national holidays such as the Fourth of July, patriotic Pennsylvanians might focus only on William Penn's interest in founding a colony, that man's appreciation of Nature is revealed in words like these that flowed from his pen:

"The world is certainly a great and stately volume of natural things, 
and may be styled the hieroglyphics of a better one, 
But, alas, how very few leaves of it do we seriously turn over!
... The country is both the philosopher’s garden and his library, 
in which he reads and contemplates 
The power, wisdom and goodness of God."

With those words in Penn's book "Some Fruits of Solitude," he is sharing in a long tradition within Christianity of viewing the natural world  as a revelatory "Book of Nature" that supplements and complements another book, the Bible.

Artists' portraits of Penn and his fellow 17th and 18th-century Quakers frequently portray them wearing their distinctive flat-topped black hats as an aid to picture-viewers in identifying them as being Quakers.  (The Quaker Oats Company has stated that one such portrait on their trademarked cereal boxes is not William Penn, as they once claimed, but is just a generic Quaker.)  Those flat-topped hats with two projections to the side look out of fashion today.

But perhaps not out of fashion might be William Penn's additional thought that,"It would go a long way to caution and direct people in their use of the world" if "they were better studied" in the natural world as revealing the Divine.  He continues: 

"For how could man find the confidence to abuse it,
While they should see the Great Creator stare them in the face, 
in all and every part thereof?"

~ ~ ~

(Is there any way that you feel you "see the Great Creator" in Nature?)

(Both quotations are from William Penn's book "Some Fruits of Solitude" [1682, 1693], capitalization modernized.)

A Shawl Wrapped All Around

One of the first things I was taught about God (even before I entered elementary school) was that God loves me and everybody else.  Another of the earliest things I was taught about God (just as early in my life) was that God is everywhere.  I still hold to these two basic principles, even though I admit to the complexity of using that word "God."

But how can I ever imagine that God is everywhere?  (Especially when I have been cautioned against elevating anything in the world into a god, an idol.)  How can I ever imagine that anything is everywhere?

For me, growing up as a child, it was the sky that helped me envision how God could be everywhere at once.  God was invisible, but the sky, which I could see, expressed a kind of "everywhere."  When I stood outside and looked up and around me, the sky seemed to surround everything on the Earth.  As I scanned the sky and guided my sight back down to the Earth, the sky seemed to wrap around the edge of the Earth at the horizon, no matter which direction I was facing.

Today, I know of an open, inclusive church that has in its mission statement in the worship bulletin the phrase "God's all-encompassing love."  Even though I myself struggle with how anybody could actually love every person on this planet (so ornery do we humans often become), I do have a sense of what "all-encompassing" is.  I learned my sense of that from the over-arching, all-surrounding sky I could see when I was a child.

There was a second way, as a child, that the sky gave me a visual experience of "everywhere." For, after all, church-school had also reassured me that this God who loves me is with me no matter where I go.  I got a sense of "no-matter-where-I-go" by watching the sky as I rode in the car at night.  You can experience this yourself the next time you are riding in a vehicle at night (with someone else safely driving).  Look out the side window and notice how the objects here on Earth zip by.  A parked car flashes past the side window of your vehicle.  And there's a tree a little further away from the road, so it moves less quickly -- but even it first comes into view and then is gone!  That's how everything in life is:  Things come, and things go.

But now notice, in contrast, the moon or stars up in the sky.  Notice how they seem to travel with the vehicle you are in as it travels.  Just like God.

My high-school English teacher taught me not to mix metaphors.  But religion loves using multiple metaphors, and so I'm now going to do so.  I'm going to mix metaphors because I think this metaphor of the heavens wrapping all around us resonates with another metaphor used a few times in the Bible (such as Psalm 61:4 & Matthew 23:37).  Namely, the metaphor of God being like a caring mother bird sheltering her tiny chicks under her protective wings. We are like God's chicks.

~~~

Have you ever tried to imagine God "everywhere"?  How?

Being and Becoming

Personally, I've never been hard-nosed about New Year's resolutions.  Although the first of the year does allow me an opportunity to reflect a bit more about my weaknesses and my abilities, I have always had a hard time carrying with me a fixed list of goals throughout an entire year. Even if I could write down a "to-become" list that would remain workable through the course of 12 months, I would probably forget where I put that piece of paper before the year was over.

Part of the difficulty is that it is impossible to predict what circumstances will arise in the months ahead.  True, I can resolve to head into each day with a certain re-fortified spirit toward life, but I cannot always know what challenges I am going to have to respond to.  The late 20th-century poet Wendell Berry wrote about the contingencies of even a single day's outing that...

"The chances change and make a new way."

It can be scary thinking about this unpredictability of life. Fortunately, we have been at this process of becoming since the day we were born.  We have a lot of practice with it because becoming is built into our biological nature.  As the neurobiologist Steven Rose explains, "Every living creature is in constant flux, always at the same time both being and becoming.... [A] newborn infant has a suckling reflex; within a matter of months the developing infant begins to chew her food.... The paradox of development is that a baby has to be at the same time a competent suckler and to transform herself into a competent chewer.  To be, therefore, and to become...."

Faith-traditions place markers along the road of life to support us in our development:  Such as baptism, first Bible, and Bar Mitzvah.  Our faith-traditions also encourage us onward by reminding us that the ultimate Source of Life is also the very Ground of our Being that remains beneath us, supporting us even as we sometimes stumble.

Interestingly, the idea that even God cannot predict exactly what will be and what will be demanded in our engagement with the Divine is expressed in a pivotal story in the Christian Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible). In Exodus 3:12-14, Moses, after being given a challenging long-term assignment by God, is promised by God, "I will be with you."  Nevertheless, Moses tries to gain more control over the situation by requesting to be told God's name.  Moses wants more control over the future than even God can promise.  And so, God provides to Moses the open-ended enigmatic reply, "I AM WHO I AM."  Translators sometimes add a footnote to this verse in order to express that God will be with Moses in both "being" and "becoming" -- just like that baby who both suckles and chews.  Such footnotes explain that what God has said could also be translated as "I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE," or even "I WILL BECOME WHAT I WILL BECOME."

So too can our understanding of the Divine grow with us as we grow -- in both our being and our becoming.

~~~

Has your life ever taken an unpredicted path in a way that turned out to be fulfilling?

(The Berry line is from his poem "Traveling at Home," © 1988.)

(The Rose quote is from his chapter in Alas, Poor Darwin, ed. by Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, © 2000. p. 310.)

Unable to Detach from the Past

1872 painting by John Gast

Examine the population and growth patterns of cities in the U.S., and you will find that many of them have grown more heavily toward their west sides than to the east, especially in the post-World War II boom. Although a fair number of cities are now seeing new growth in older, inner areas (often because of the appeal of shorter commute times), suburban sprawl is often greater on U.S. cities' western sides.  This peculiarity developed out of a much larger growth pattern in U.S. history:  The movement of European settlers on this continent has been primarily to the west.  A century-and-a-half ago, Horace Greeley quoted John Soule, commanding, "Go West, young man," and people in the U.S., men and women, young and old, have done just that.  Today's cities echo the nation's past.

This phenomenon is but one case of how we cannot escape our past, even as much as we might want to.  Frequently, our ties to the past remain unconscious.  For example, because of the westward growth of many cities, more people commute by driving into the sun in the morning and into the sun again in the evening -- an inconvenience we would have avoided if it had been the only factor affecting our decisions of where to live and work.

This inconvenience of squinting into the often blinding sun as we commute reveals another way in which we cannot escape the past:  We cannot break away entirely from patterns of Nature that were laid down long before Homo sapiens were around.  The sun is not about to change its course in response to where we build our houses and places of work.  The 20th-century author Maya Angelou cleverly wrote, "Nature has no mercy at all.  Nature says, ' I'm going to snow.  If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that’s tough.  I am going to snow anyway.' "

Given that we are unable to detach ourselves entirely from the past life on this planet,  how might we relate to it?  The answer all of the world's faith-traditions have given is that we should cultivate an appreciation of and a desire to emulate the highest values of the past.  Despite that commonality among traditions, people of one faith-tradition have not always comprehended the methods of another.  For example, Lin Yutang, an early 20th-century Chinese émigré to the U.S., explains how Christian missionaries mistook Chinese shrines honoring ancestors as being idolatry.  Thus the translation of the name for practices at the shrines as "ancestor worship" in English.  Lin Yutang clarifies the practices in this way:  "Only by the wildest stretch of imagination could they be called idolatry..."  Instead, the practice "for the Chinese, is the embodiment of reverence for the past and continuity with the past....  It was the basis of all that was good and honorable and of the desire to go forward."

Maya Angelou also had some succinct words about those who went before:  "They existed. We can be.  Be and be better.  For they existed."  That statement could describe non-humans in our evolutionary past just as much as it describes our human ancestors.

~~~

What have you received from the past that you are particularly grateful for?

(The Greeley/Soule quote [1851] is taken from Familiar Quotations by John Bartlett, © 1968.  p. 678b.)

(The Angelou quote is from "Maya Angelou: An Interview," Oct. 1974, in Conversations with Maya Angelou, ©1989,)

(The Lin Yutang quote is from From Pagan to Christian by Lin Yutang, © 1959.  p. 37.)

(The painting by John Gast [1872] is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.)

Kingly Care for Animals

Before the PBS series "The Story of India" provided me a fairly-deep look at that nation's history, my knowledge about that Eastern culture had come through the movies of Satyajit Ray, restaurants, and books.  For example, an Indian over-the-counter vegetarian restaurant named Annapurna's led me to a reference book to discover that it was named after a mountain in the Himalayas.  On a different occasion, however, when a more formal Indian restaurant opened bearing the name "Ashoka's," I was ahead on my knowledge.  I was delighted an establishment with that name was opening not just because I liked Indian cuisine.  It was also because, from my reading, I already knew of and admired Emperor Ashoka's religious tolerance and compassionate attitudes toward animals.

one pillar
erected by Ashoka

Ashoka ruled in the 3rd century B.C.E. and made known his wishes partly through edicts carved on tall stone pillars, ten of which are still standing.  Part of his edict regarding religious tolerance reminds us that we do not increase the appeal of our own faith-tradition by unnecessarily disparaging the faith-traditions of other people.

Ashoka's compassionate attitudes came about as part of his adopting Buddhism, one of the most significant conversion experiences in all of history.  Previously, he had followed the approach of earlier emperors by expanding his kingdom through war.  But after winning a huge battle at Kalinga in 260 B.C.E. (in which 100,00 were killed and 150,000 deported), Ashoka was shocked by the horrible sights when he surveyed the battlefield.  He turned his life around (the root meaning of the word "conversion").

lion capital on
another Ashoka pillar
     

For the 31 years that remained of his rule, Ashoka cultivated throughout his administration a peaceful attitude of enhancing the welfare of all people, and encouraged a similar attitude among the populace.  Here is where the animals come in. Ashoka ordered protections on their lives in many ways (2000 years before the SPCA was created in the West!).  As one edict of Ashoka's explained, "On bipeds and quadrupeds, on birds and aquatic animals, various benefits have been conferred by me even as far as the grant of life."  Another edict specified over two-dozen mammals and birds "declared by me inviolable," rounding off the list by including "all quadrupeds which are neither useful nor edible."

Ashoka matched his words with actions.  Among his humanitarian accomplishments were the construction of  roadside way-stations providing water and shade.  As an edict explained, "wells have been caused to be dug and trees have been caused to be planted, for the use of animals and humans."  He also created hospitals for "medical treatment for humans and medical treatment for animals."  Some of those veterinary clinics are still in existence in India today -- a continuous legacy of care probably unparalleled in the world.

I'd tell you more about this man, but I've got to stop writing and go put fresh water in the water dish on my deck.  I've been reminded by Ashoka that the birds might be thirsty.

~~~

Do you think any of Ashoka's ideas are applicable today?  Which ones?  How?

(All quotations are from Ashoka's Rock Edicts, Nos. II, V, II, and II, respectively,

adapted from the translation in Asoka's Edicts, by Amulyachandra Sen. © 1956.)

(Photo of full pillar by Amit Bikram Kanungo, used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

A Forgotten Lincoln Quote

In his day, Abraham Lincoln stood out in a crowd because he was unusually tall.  Today, however, Lincoln's birthday gets lost in the crowd of mid-February celebrations.  When the U.S. federal holidays were standardized, a generic "Presidents' Day" was created (partly because only northern states celebrated Lincoln, whereas more states celebrated George Washington). More recently, a growing number of churches, synagogues, and mosques celebrate Evolution Weekend in order to emphasize that the scientific theory of evolution can be compatible with religion.  That Evolution Weekend is placed near Charles Darwin's birthday.  Unfortunately, by sheer coincidence, Lincoln and Darwin were born on the same day -- Feb. 12 -- and so Lincoln can also get eclipsed by Darwin.

I suggest we might let Lincoln back into the February conversation, by bringing him in through the back door, so to speak.  Most of our documentaries on Lincoln are about the Civil War, so we miss out on what goodness developed in that man without that national tragedy.  I would propose we begin our recovery of our picture of Lincoln's character with a virtually forgotten statement widely attributed to him:

 "I care not much for a man’s religion
whose dog and cat are not better for it."

That quotation could even be slipped into an Evolution Day sermon.  After all, Evolution Weekend events bring into one world-view religion and the evolutionary web of life.  So also does Lincoln's statement bring together thoughts of religion with thoughts of other forms of life. Specifically, those we encounter most frequently, our pets.  Moreover, because Lincoln is considered a secular figure, not a religious leader, the quotation attributed to him is easily ecumenical:  It could be used by Christians, Jews, Muslims, or any other faith-tradition.  It could even be used by those who do not practice any organized religion, but who might think of an individual's "religion" as being that person's deepest values and way of living.

If it seems strange to our ears to hear the test of a person's religion being whether their "dog and cat are... better for it," one reason would be that over the past several centuries, most Christian theology in the West has become narrowed down to the human sphere.  This was not always the case.  The Hebrew Bible (which constitutes the Christian Old Testament) contains examples of how in Biblical times, religion included a number of directives for the considerate treatment of animals.  Although in the culture depicted in the Bible people did not have dogs or cats as pets, they did have domesticated animals.  And the heart of Biblical thought on how such animals should be treated was expressed by the following proverb (in which "righteous" means people who act rightly):

        "The righteous care about their livestock's needs."  (Prov. 12:10a)

Abraham Lincoln is for many people a symbol of strong moral character.  Few people, I dare say, when thinking of Lincoln think of how a person's religion could be revealed in how that person treats their pets.

~~~

What do you think about the Lincoln quote and the Biblical proverb?

(Proverbs 12:10a is given in the translation of the Common English Bible, © 2011.)
(Both illustrations are in the public domain because their copyrights have expired.)

(You can read about Evolution Weekend at this external link:  Evolution Weekend)

A Shawl Wrapped All Around

One of the first things I was taught about God (even before I entered elementary school) was that God loves me and everybody else.  Another of the earliest things I was taught about God (just as early in my life) was that God is everywhere.  I still hold to these two basic principles, even though I admit to the complexity of using that word "God."

But how can I ever imagine that God is everywhere?  (Especially when I have been cautioned against elevating anything in the world into a god, an idol.)  How can I ever imagine that anything is everywhere?

For me, growing up as a child, it was the sky that helped me envision how God could be everywhere at once.  God was invisible, but the sky, which I could see, expressed a kind of "everywhere."  When I stood outside and looked up and around me, the sky seemed to surround everything on the Earth.  As I scanned the sky and guided my sight back down to the Earth, the sky seemed to wrap around the edge of the Earth at the horizon, no matter which direction I was facing.

Today, I know of an open, inclusive church that has in its mission statement in the worship bulletin the phrase "God's all-encompassing love."  Even though I myself struggle with how anybody could actually love every person on this planet (so ornery do we humans often become), I do have a sense of what "all-encompassing" is.  I learned my sense of that from the over-arching, all-surrounding sky I could see when I was a child.

There was a second way, as a child, that the sky gave me a visual experience of "everywhere." For, after all, church-school had also reassured me that this God who loves me is with me no matter where I go.  I got a sense of "no-matter-where-I-go" by watching the sky as I rode in the car at night.  You can experience this yourself the next time you are riding in a vehicle at night (with someone else safely driving).  Look out the side window and notice how the objects here on Earth zip by.  A parked car flashes past the side window of your vehicle.  And there's a tree a little further away from the road, so it moves less quickly -- but even it first comes into view and then is gone!  That's how everything in life is:  Things come, and things go.

But now notice, in contrast, the moon or stars up in the sky.  Notice how they seem to travel with the vehicle you are in as it travels.  Just like God.

My high-school English teacher taught me not to mix metaphors.  But religion loves using multiple metaphors, and so I'm now going to do so.  I'm going to mix metaphors because I think this metaphor of the heavens wrapping all around us resonates with another metaphor used a few times in the Bible (such as Psalm 61:4 & Matthew 23:37).  Namely, the metaphor of God being like a caring mother bird sheltering her tiny chicks under her protective wings. We are like God's chicks.

~~~

Have you ever tried to imagine God "everywhere"?  How?

The Earnestness and Frivolity of Flowers

The painter Georgia O'Keeffe once said, "A flower is relatively small."  And yet she depicted them as being enormous!  Her easily identifiable paintings of flowers, which were one of her favorite subjects later in her career, often depict a single, huge, brightly-colored flower spilling over the edges of the canvas.  One of O'Keeffe's flowers can cover a hundred times its square-area in real life.  A biologist could easily appreciate that out-of-scale depiction, although for biological rather than aesthetic reasons.  After all the flower was a revolution in the evolution of life on planet Earth.

Green plants with photosynthesizing chlorophyll did exist on our planet before there were flowers.  However, it could take those conifers over a year to produce seeds snugly nested in cones.  One revolution flowers brought (when they evolved 100 million years ago) was the ability to release a seed in only a month.  That was an explosion in reproductive capability. That flower-explosion also brought about a revolution in the prehistoric world of animals.  As flowers evolved into different shapes, the insect world evolved simultaneously, new insects being adapted to take advantage of new food-source shapes.  In turn, bird and mammal species found new food in the flowers, seeds, and insects, thus putting competitive pressure on the older species of dinosaurs.

Today, understandably, few people are thinking about such significant events in the history of planet Earth when they purchase or pick a flower.  Flowers can be an earnest business for commercial flower-growers and florists.  But it is a flower's enjoyable color, fragrance, and shape that capture an average person's attention.

True, flowers do sometimes become a part of solemn ceremonies.  A wreath of flowers can soften the hard edge of a coffin, thus soothing the hearts of the bereaved.  Despite the flower's fragility, symbolizing the transitoriness of life, its reproductive associations bring a hint of life into the acceptance of death.

More frequently, however, flowers shout out "life!"  The humorist Mark Twain made the earnest observation that "Whatever a man's age, he can reduce it several years by putting a bright-colored flower in his buttonhole."  Over a century later, men wear boutonnieres much less often. But the symbolic tie between flowers and restored life endures.  All the way down to anti-war demonstrators inserting flowers into phalanxed soldiers' rifle barrels.

With their colorful intensity and their message of new life, specific flowers have gained a role as a prominent symbol in many of the world's faith-traditions:  The lily of Easter resurrection in Christianity. The lotus of life-giving tranquility in Buddhism. And the light-giving Golden Flower in Taoism.

For the billions of bees and other insects who search for food each day, flowers are a serious business.  But for most people, flowers are just plain fun!

~~~

Where do you encounter flowers?  Do you have any favorites?  What do they express?

“Family” Rituals

All of the world's faith-traditions have rituals.  So much so that many people recognize the importance of rituals in adopting a religious path.  And so, as we live within religious traditions, we, our families, and our friends learn and cultivate regular practices that nourish our spirits.

Of course, rituals need not be particularly religious.  The 20th-century writer Joseph Wood Krutch wrote simply yet eloquently of one particular kind of ritual.  He wrote:  "To plant a garden, a window box, or even to cultivate a house plant is to perform a sort of ritual and thereby to acknowledge even in the middle of a city, one's awareness that our real kinship is with life, not with mechanism."  I think Krutch's words are particularly important and could become increasingly valuable with time.  With more people in large cities growing dissatisfied with long commute times, and with builders designing more compact modes of housing closer to downtown areas, more of us find ourselves living with less open land around our homes.  People more often have contact with green plants in the form of a small garden plot or house plant than in the form of a large, suburban backyard.

The phrase "family ritual" usually suggests some custom or ritual that is passed on within a family generation after generation.  I think Joseph Wood Krutch has given a new possible dimension to the phrase "family ritual."  He points out that we have a "kinship" even with plants -- a "kinship... with life."  We and plants are in the same family with the last name Life. Therefore, cultivating and teaching children habits of planting a garden or tending a house plant or window box, can be ways of becoming more aware of what might be called "our extended family."

Setting aside jokes about talking to house plants (whether anybody wants to do so is their own choice), plants can truly be sensitive to influences we don't easily pick up on.  Just as is sometimes the case with human family members.  I know from my own sad experience that a room that seems to have adequate natural light to my human eyes (which can adjust to the dark) is woefully gloomy from most houseplant's point of view.

Any good ritual, however, can deteriorate into routine, becoming mechanical.  Not a good thing, especially in a world that has become increasingly full of "mechanism," as Krutch put it.  To prevent the deterioration of rituals, spiritual directors and writers give us guidance on cultivating mindfulness during our religious and spiritual rituals.  Perhaps the same thing could be done during our rituals of caring for plants.  The much loved Buddhist writer Thich Nhat Hanh has bridged the divide between Buddhists and many Christians with such practices as "gathas," or simple prayer-verses designed to be said during ordinary activities.  I suggest that we might cultivate the use of a gatha as we water that garden plant or house plant.  A gatha such as:

"As I water this plant, may it be given new life, 

and may there also be new life in me."

~~~

Does a garden, window box, or house plant add anything to your life?  What?

(The Krutch quote is from The Best of Two Worlds
 by Joseph Wood Krutch, © 1953.  p. 168.) 

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.)

Byways of Chocolate and Flowers

I have no doubt that sales of chocolates and flowers increase in the U.S. before every Valentine's Day.  Hardly anyone shopping on Feb. 12th & 13th would know, however, that chocolate and flowers intersect at a point in history a little over three centuries ago. That conjunction tells a story involving, of all things, British imperialism, science, and religion.

As with many such incidents in the byways of history, the connecting character in the story is now one of the little-known figures of history.  His name is Hans Sloane (1660-1753), and he is the person who introduced milk-chocolate to the United Kingdom.  A larger story begins to emerge when we find out that Sloane had a collection of 71,000 objects that, after his demise, became the basis for the British Museum in London. Flowers enter the picture as we learn that among those objects were 800 new species of plants from around the world that he had collected.

What had brought that about?  Sloane's collecting was not just a personal mania.  He was part of a wave of collecting plants and animal specimens by the English during the 1600's and 1700's. That foundation for botanical and zoological studies rode the wave of British expansionism as the British Navy spread throughout the globe, establishing colonies, and securing trade in goods and slaves.  Plants -- particularly flowering tropical ones -- were among the cargo brought back to England.

It is the connections surrounding the milk-chocolate man Sloane that get us more specifically to matters involving flowers, science, and religion.  Sloane, with his vast collection of specimens, corresponded with the botanist John Ray (1627-1705), who  would come to publish a three-volume catalogue of over 16,00 plant species.

John Ray

Ray was able to accomplish such an astonishing feat because he developed an innovative system of classification, the key to which was concentrating on the seeds produced by flowers. Although modern biological classification has evolved beyond Ray's system, he established species as the basic unit.  Also, modern botany still employs Ray's major division of plants into monocotyledons (such as corn), which have a single leaf sprouting from the seed, and dicotyledons (such as lima beans), which have two leaves sprouting from the seed.

In the historical study of the relationship between science and religion, John Ray is best know for another book he wrote, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation.  That title dates Ray as being from an earlier era of science, in which scientists more freely mixed their scientific observations with their belief about God.  It is an approach no longer used by scientists today.

Nevertheless, virtually everybody feels that Nature's cacao plant and the chocolate derived from it were very smart inventions.  And countless people love flowers.  Hopefully, we have all been able at times to feel (as Ray did) a love for the marvelous intricacy of living beings, whether or not we depict it as being the wisdom of God.

~~~

Have chocolate or flowers added anything to your spirit for living?  How?

(The drawing of John Ray is in the Public Domain

 because its copyright has expired.)

The Ambiguity of Nature

There is a somewhat apocryphal story about Albert Einstein having once been asked what is the most important question that can be asked.  As the often repeated story has it, his reply was "Whether the universe is friendly or not."  That story developed out of some other things Einstein did say (even though he never said quite those words).  I think that the story has taken that form because it speaks to a universal human concern.

Although few of us have Einstein's mathematical knowledge about the universe, we do encounter the non-human world on the level of what we call "Nature."  We experience sunrise and darkness, good and bad weather, trees producing fruit as well as falling on houses, melodious birds and insect pests, beautiful flowers and poison ivy.  As that list demonstrates, we encounter the ambiguous character of Nature, and so we easily ask whether the world is "friendly or not."

What gets tricky about this ambiguity is that the answer we come up with can depend so much upon our own perception.  We can interpret the same natural phenomenon in different ways.

In all the volumes of literature in which the ambiguity of Nature is addressed, one usually overlooked book is Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

The young Huck (who is the book's narrator) perceives nature differently depending upon whether or not he is lonely.  Early in the narrative, when he is living with the Widow Douglas, with whom he feels no camaraderie, Nature seems ominous.  Alone in his room at night, Huck describes how it was "so lonesome I most wished I was dead.  The stars was shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful;... and the wind was trying to whisper something to me and I couldn't make out what it was, and so it made the cold shivers run over me."

In contrast, after Huck begins to develop a somewhat brotherly friendship with Jim on their raft journey, Nature is experienced favorably by Huck.

As one example, Huck now depicts nighttime as being beautiful: "Sometimes we'd have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark -- which was a candle in a cabin window.... It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars."

In this example, Huck's human relationships affect his ability to feel at home in the natural world,  In contrast, in other cases, many people have discovered how Nature can become a healing balm or a source of companionship when human relationships could not comfort.  In those instances, Nature became the needed friend.

The issue is a spiritual one, because, as the 20th-century philosopher Ernst Bloch put it:

"The wish at the heart of religion is still 

that the human being should feel at home 

in the mystery of existence."

~~~

When have you felt at home in Nature?  How did the universe then feel to you?

(The Bloch quote is from his The Principle of Hope, © 1959,

as quoted in God in Creation by Jürgen Moltmann, © 1985, p. 321.)