Shards of God |
| My brother took me up into the Smoky Mountains. While he fished for trout with his two-ounce Montana rod, I sat on the rubbled shore of the stream and piled up shards of gneiss—metamorphosed granite we had identified from the guidebook as one billion years old. I brought out of my bag an apple and a paperback book of Meister Eckhart's Sermons. I piled up some of the one billion year old gneiss near me, and read aloud from Meister Eckhart to the stones, feeling a little crazy, but perfectly contented, just right, while my brother threw out his line and sunlight sparkled on the water. Before people came here, I thought, God was dreaming. Before we came here to look up at the sky and make stories and constellations, God slept the dense dark sleep of rocks in the earth, moving up, slowly up into light over millions of years. Then God slept in a hot shallow sea, drifting into the ocean floor as a snail or an amoeba. Before trees, before grass, before animals or insects or anything we know, God drifted and dreamed, and awakened slowly. When we came, we looked up, and God saw it was good. Once my brother's son Matthew and my daughter Kate and I found fossils in a deserted meadow by the river. We got out our field manual and discovered that our fossils were from the Ordovicean Period, from nearly 500 million years ago. The sunny meadow where we stood was a hillside behind an electronics store which displayed satellite dishes. Kate and Matthew and I were hidden in daisies and weeds, gathering weathered-out shells from the beginning of life on earth. I found a cephalopod—a straight-coned nautilus, explained the manual. Holding the fossil in my hand, with my fragile fingers, my opposable thumb, I felt a sudden tenderness, as if God were saying, How young we are! How long the way ahead is! Is this not beautiful, this life we live together? I thought, this is how far we have come. Still children, evolving. What will be next? Whatever it is, it will be full of God, as we are. What difference, then, what form we take? I let go of our humanness for something else: sentient moss, sentient birds, or the very rocks, singing to God. |
