Nature Journal: Looming
On my mission I used to see all of mankind. In the bustling plazas of metropolitan Singapore, the gregarious subway stations of Kuala Lumpur, and the quiet stillnesses of Bornean longhouses I could catch a glimpse of God’s vision. At times like these, I no longer seemed like a separate piece to the infinite puzzle that is our race. I could see us all, mysteriously connected by invisible threads weaving a complicated tapestry full of life and potential. At these moments, you can’t help but feel overwhelmed by God’s love. And by God’s love I mean I can’t put this emotion down into words. I’ve never belonged quite the way I did in those moments. I would look around amazed at the sheer number of people, at their varying cultures, languages, and religions. To even begin to number them would be futile. And yet, with all the volume of differences, there still ran that common thread. To God, they were more than a thronging of Homo sapiens. They were His children, each with their own life, family, and concerns. And He loved them; He knew them. He loved me too. I could tell. And I loved them. All of them. It was beautiful. So with a smile the size of the Himalayas I approached the next person with a sense of love that even the most cynical ‘free-thinker’ couldn’t help but be touched by.
Today as I walked out of church, I looked around me amazed at the sight of grass. With snow blanketing the ground for so long, I seemed to have forgotten the tiny blades of suspended animation even existed at all. And then it hit me. Again I saw us all the way God tends to let me, all beautifully woven into the tapestry of life. We were His focal point that was sure. But the tapestry this time was bigger, fuller, and somehow even more colorful. Different threads held the whole thing together the way our common thread was holding us as one. They were even holding us in place. And somewhere in that intertwined world was a blade of grass, waiting for Spring to bring back its lust for life. I looked up at the mountains and they were there too. Again I couldn’t help but smile. He loved them. I could tell.
The beauty of this world lies in this connectedness. Last semester I took Ecology and lived in quiet musings at the simple yet overwhelmingly complex beauty of His plan. You can’t imagine the complexity in the natural world. With all its population, competition, predation, evolutionary and climatic dynamics, just thinking of it can be enough to give you a headache. In my class we tended to simplify things to the extent that each species limited the effects of its presence to only one of its neighbors, the way that physics classes give you problems full of frictionless worlds. But the truth is that frozen ponds aren’t frictionless, and that we are all intertwined with Nature in more ways than we care to know. Yet again, the allure of these visions is that God is aware of all of this. He is looking down watching not only the interactions of His beloved children, but is also keenly aware of the dynamism of His creations.
So here am I, somewhere in the thawing basin created by the Rocky Mountains, contemplating the vastness of this Universe. Either direction I go tends to lead to dizzying conclusions. If I go downward in size, I am overwhelmed at the grass, the world of insects. Deeper still I find myself covered in films of fungi, protozoa, and bacteria. Plunging further, my chemistry classes rear their ugly heads. But there is beauty here too, despite my dislike of fixed GPA’s and graduate students who rule the classroom like the tyrants of old. The splendor of the chemical world lies before me in neat, arranged goodness and everything makes sense. Our electron microscopes are good enough now that we have pictures of atoms. Deeper still and I find myself within those atoms, where things no longer behave like particles and the physics of it all makes my head reel.
So I stop and look upward. Slowly the mountains shrink and the oceans reveal their vastness but then shrivel into puddles and the earth becomes a marble. Our own solar system looks like one of those silly science projects with hangers and balls of foam, only this time it’s done to scale. Our galaxy glitters like a beautiful spiraling arrangement of so many engagement rings, but before long it too twinkles out of sight. Current estimates say that there are billions of galaxies in the observable universe and that it is 93 billion light years or 8.8x10 to the 26th meters across. And it's growing. But of course it is. God is God and has things to do. If this doesn't make you awe at the beauty of everything, play with this and maybe it will: Scale of the Universe
And yet with all that going on, He still knows it all, He’s still at the helm, and what you and I do are still important to Him. Those threads I was talking of – the ones that connect everything – it really doesn’t get much prettier than that. With everything connected into such a complex and variegated tapestry, God truly is the best artist and scientist there is. It seems He knows just the trick to get us to leave our desks and open our minds to everything that’s out there. Maybe William Blake was venerating this intricate arras when he wrote his Auguries of Innocence:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
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