The Gravest Sin of All
MM6 Part 1: Home to Spirit--Nature, in which I ask the question "But why?"
Thank you for joining me on this next Mile Marker! A couple of reminders as we move beyond the halfway point in this journey: This a work-in-progress that will eventually lead to a book, so your feedback is important. One way I receive feedback is through the little hearts at the bottom of each post. If you like this post, please hit the little heart! Even better than that is constructive criticism I receive, which enables me to make this effort as good as it can be. So I welcome comments or DMs from you. Hitting the “buy me a coffee” button would be nice, too! Thank you for supporting my work. I hope you enjoy this essay.
The Dream by Henri Rousseau, 1910
I'll make this clear up front: Although I am in the process of writing a chapter on spirituality, I am not an expert on the subject to say the least.
Given my temerity at claiming the know-how to write on spiritual matters, I’m going to start at the ground level—literally: the spiritual connection with nature. After all, a lot of people do claim that Nature is their religion.”1
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When I think about the spirituality of connection with nature, I consider how mesmerized this three-year-old is by a baby newt:
Then I think of Matthew 18:3:
“Unless you turn and become as little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
I’m not going to get into the theological interpretation of the word “kingdom” or “heaven.” But “little children”? I do have some expertise in that department, having raised four. Based on my observations, I can speak about their ways of interacting with the world.
Children see things we miss all the time. They approach the world with brand-new eyes. They express curiosity and delight in what they see. On a repetitive feedback loop they ask:
“But why?”
”Because (blah blah blah)”
”But why?”
”Because (blah blah blah)”
”But why?”
”Because (blah blah blah)”
(Participating in this pattern of dialogue for years with my children was a good training ground for me in my market research career—the interviewing technique is called “laddering” and it is extremely effective, for researchers of both the grown-up and pint-sized kind.)
As for most of us adults, our “but why’s?” tend to fossilize into assumptions that are as hard and impenetrable as a turtle shell. This does not serve us well. Why not go back to reviewing every object of our curiosity with “but why’s” and an attitude of wonder? We need to relearn that practice from the 3-year-olds.
So, one curiosity I have never been able to resolve is the following:
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It cracks me up when we get reports from NASA like this:
Or this…
And this:
Oops, maybe not!
Holy cow! MAYBE carbon, dimethyl sulfide, methane, signs of water—maybe.
Here’s what I wonder. We now have advanced large-diameter telescopes, spectrometers, and robotic spacecraft. As a result, astronomers have been able to observe a total of 5,893 known planets, all located in our galaxy.2
And in their search for life, what have they come up with? Possible water. Possible carbon. Possible methane.
And then there’s Earth.
You’d think that one of those six thousand planetary bodies would have bridged the gap of life on a continuum somewhere between “possible” and “amazingly prolific”—but instead it’s more as if Earth has run, swam and biked the triathalon of evolution, and every other planetary body we know of so far is still not even dressed for the race.
But why?
We are SO beyond hints of dimethyl sulfide. Hints of water below the surface?? Ha! We blew past that a billion years ago.
While we celebrate headlines about the discovery of possible atmospheric chemicals that may signal life, we stand here in the midst of a mind-blowing, immeasurable, and complex cacophony of life forms in a symbiotic dance that has evolved over billions of years!
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“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.”
—Walt Whitman
Every time you put one step on the ground, you are interacting with—not hints, not “possible” chemicals—but thousands upon thousands of life forms—billions and trillions of microbes, microfauna, earthworms, ants, beetles, mites, algae, not to mention the plant life atop it—of which, hundreds of thousands of species exist.3
And if that weren’t enough, the activity under that footprint isn’t like the random inert stuff like the Legos, toy cars and building blocks piled in my grandkids’ toyboxes—the life forms occupying the world under your foot are speaking to each other, in silent signals, weaving the warp and woof of connecting threads—creating that scaffold of life that you are mindlessly skipping over on the way to Someplace Important.
And that’s just in one footprint! It makes me cry it is so astounding and miraculous.
And yet, we don’t call out that patch of footprint for the wonder that it is. We complain it’s time to mow it. We shriek when we come upon snakes and toads crossing our paths. We look but fail to really see. And with disrespect and callousness, too often we see non-human forms of life, not as a miracle, but either as a nuisance to be managed, or as a resource at our disposal, much like rows of hardware at Home Depot.
We forget and overlook that we are only alive today because of the eons of evolution-on-fire it took to get us here. Eons of cells have generated and duplicated over and over to form more and more complex and adaptive life forms. What was the trigger? Why the existential push to grow and multiply and build so many intricate reciprocal relationships?
“But why?”
No wonder the Bible starts with a Divine Metaphor for life on Earth in the form of the Garden of Eden story. No one would even believe these miraculous “6 days” of Creation otherwise.
Is our earthly Garden of Eden the real kingdom Jesus was referring to?
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“We are here to witness the creation and to abet it... Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house.”—Annie Dillard
So.
I think, in my humble opinion, that when Jesus said “unless you become as little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven,” he was warning us not to commit the Gravest Sin of All:
Taking this stuff for granted!
Oh, yeah, we take a lot of stuff for granted, but for now I’m focusing on our tendency to take for granted the wonderful, crazy-prolific, mysterious, life-giving, eye-wateringly beautiful, inspiring, restorative system of parts to one beautiful whole that acts as a symphony to the glorious witness of whatever Beneficent Power randomly or intentionally handed this incredible gift to all creatures, including humans who are too often mindless, heedless and ungrateful.
Those other planets must be so jealous of what Earth has. They are bare naked. Earth is dressed to thrill. But do we appreciate it?
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We don’t need Jeff Bezos and his Blue Origin for earth-enlightenment. We don’t have to be special like Katy Perry or William Shatner and spend millions to fly to almost-space, and then, upon re-entry, fall upon the tarmac and cry like a prophet of the privileged about what the rest of us are missing.
We can simply pick up our feet, peel from our sole a blade of grass with a little clump of dirt still clinging to it, and get the same effect—but only if we stop taking the earth for granted.
We are living the miracle of life every second.
Look! Do you see it?
“There are the stars doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky... Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings up there. Just chalk…or fire. Only this one is straining away all the time to make something of itself.”
—Stage Manager, Our Town
Resources and Recommendations
Recommendation: Go outside
Resources: Your five senses + your sense of wonder
Nearly half of U.S. adults say they believe that parts of nature – such as mountains, rivers or trees – can have their own spirits or spiritual energies. (Source: Pew Research Center)
“So far, astronomers have discovered 5,885 planets around other stars (known as exoplanets) in the Milky Way. Add in the eight in our solar system (not nine, sorry Pluto), and that gives us a total of 5,893 known planets, all located in our own galaxy.” (Source: Livescience.com)
“A gram of soil — about a quarter of a teaspoon — can easily contain a billion bacterial cells and several miles of fungal filaments…Soil is overwhelmingly diverse, with an estimated 10,000 to 50,000 different taxa in a teaspoon of soil.” (Source: UCDavis) and “We have counted the currently known, described and accepted number of plant species as ca 374,000,” (Source: Biotaxa)