To kick the Thursday Thoughts off right I've pulled up something that I wrote in Fall of '04. This is probably the best summation of basic spirituality that I can come up with. Slight edits since the original, but nothing serious.
*Disclaimer: I don't believe in God with a G, and not really in a god with a g. I do, however, have a pretty good idea that physics and science alone don't explain the universe and that humanity is not the be-all, end-all of sentient life. There's a lot a strange energy out there that could well be something more powerful than anything we yet comprehend. So where I use God here, it's shorthand for this nebulous concept of something spiritual that I've just written.*
The Northern Lights were out tonite. It was truly incredible. They took up more than half the sky. Long streaks that seemed to point to a spot just over my house. They pulsed and shone and wavered. You could even see them to the south of us! (That never happens) I'll bet even California got a glimpse tonite.
It was so ethereal, and eye popping visual display. You feel that it has to accompanied by explosions or, better yet, symphonic music. Because that's what they resembled: a symphony in light. It would trill from west to east and everything would pulse with a kettle drum beat. If living clouds could gather and have a heated discussion using nothing but light, this is what it would look like.
I kept hearing a phrase in my mind as I looked up at it. "The face of God moving over the waters." And that's exactly what it was like, the face of God. Think of all that awesome majesty and the untold power sitting up above as you look at this sight. This is some real Moses shit.
Imagine that you were there three thousand years ago to see this. You're rolled up in a blanket, listening to your sleeping herd of goats. And then the sky is alive! There, looming above you, is nothing that you have ever seen before. Nothing in your life has ever remotely resembled this celestial apparition before you. It's so large, it's so inexplicable, it's so mysterious and complex. What else could it be but God and a chorus of angels, singing in light? Isn't that the conclusion you'd come to? Imagine never being told that God was a an ancient man with a long white beard. Imagine never having been told that there was a scientific explanation for any phenonmenon. You would think that this was the face of God.
And you know what? You would have been right. That is God. The inexplicable. The order underlying the chaos, and the disorder in the system. Some people could explain that's it's merely highly charged solar particles interaction with the upper atmosphere. But is that it? Think about just the 'scientific' explanation. This is solar silt, smaller than an atom, that has blown accross the hard vacuum of space to splash into our atmosphere and make brilliant flashes of light on the horizon. The mistake most people make is to set themselves above the atom. Very few people assign mystical weight to an atom, it's just a dumb little particle that behaves as it does because of the 'natural laws' of physics. Can't you hear those cheesy '50's science films? "Finally, with the nuclear bomb, man has mastered the atom." Most people don't get it. Just because there's a scientific explanation for something does not render it sterile. Science does not rule out faith. *I'm looking at all the intelligent design idiots out there.* And we don't even have a true explanation for why or how each atom works. We've got rules for how groups of them interact and what those groups will do, but ask a scientist what a single atom is going to do in a given instant and they can't tell you. A single atom today is just as inexplicable as the Northern Lights three thousand years ago.
Everything on this planet is made up of atoms, these crazy little things. People, rocks, plants: everything. Which is pretty wild in and of itself. You, me, the computer, the dog laying on the floor, and the tree outside are all made up of the same atoms, they're just put together in different ways and different amounts. So, where did all these atoms come from? This is where science and the spiritual actually overlap. We all once sat at the heart of a star. What is more mystical than realizing that everything we see, everything we know, is made of stardust?
And the face of God is writ above us in stardust.
