Musings on “The Long and Winding Road”

O Lover,

In recent weeks my spouse and I have watched several documentaries focusing on the deep history of planet Earth, particularly the last four billion years when it included some form of life. As these series have melded archeological finds with the plausible, probable, and/or provisional, and thus mingled science and artistry, viewing them has intensified my awareness of the interface of bio-evolution and spirituality. I offer to You several of these amalgams of wonder and query the sum of which only expands further my awareness of Your Dóxa (“glory”).

First, embedded throughout the four billion years has been a propensity, a bias, a seeming insistence that, once inexplicably begun, life—whether fungi, fauna, or flora—might be, adapt, complexify, proliferate, evolve, and survive. As if, having finally come upon a possibly hospitable environment, perhaps for the first and/or only time, this bio-vector would drive inexorably toward ever-fuller realization all obstacles notwithstanding, at least to date. This improbable and irrepressible impulse, one not only to be and survive, but to flourish, would be the shoulders upon which all current forms of life stand, this blogger not excepted.

Although many of us humans have self-identified as the télos of this unfolding, is not Your dream vastly larger than that? Do You not delight in all of the multiple millions of existent species, to say nothing of the inestimably larger number of the extinct? Is not this unleashed bio-explosion a veiled hint of Your lavishness and largesse? Is there not a breathtaking wildness to Your fruitful fecundity? Is not Your penchant for life, profusely proliferating life, connoted by the image of You “brooding over the face of the waters” at the onset of the Bible’s creation myth (Gen 1:2)?

Second, this unfolding bio-journey has been anything but linear or tranquil or certain. On multiple occasions in Earth’s history varied catastrophes took place nearly extinguishing the life spark. Many promising branches of the unfolding were forever truncated, whether by drought, predation, volcanic eruption, solar deprivation, or bolide. For example, the predator pattern—Tennyson’s “red in tooth and claw”—was nearly ubiquitous and remains widespread. From our current perch the entire drama seems awash in contingency, laced with death, and episodically on knife-edge. Life repeatedly almost wasn’t and then only barely was. Precarious is too weak a word for life’s journey.

And yet, whether via remnant species, stunning adaptation, or improbable intersection of emerging species with new context, has not the life You have “Self-diffused” (Bonaventure) survived all catastrophes to date, almost, but never quite completely, “starting over” again? If the entire cast of the living both comes from You (exítus) and to You is returning (redétus), what am I to make of Your perseverance, the irrepressibleness of Your “brooding”? Is not the account of Noah’s flood (Gen 6-9) repeatedly paradigmatic for the entire journey? And might not Your rainbow’s promise pertain to the entirety of the four billion years as well? Am I not reduced to mute wonder in the face of Your alchemy of Self-emptying (a la Phil 2:7) and contingency, the purposive and the seemingly random? Is there anything in the newer testament which both encapsulates and transcends this tension, this Your timeless and unswerving bias for transformed life, as does Resurrection, the capstone of the Tríduum?

Third, while the thrust of all of the above resonates within me like a massive dissident chord moving toward resolution, it was not always so. My origins, first in biblical literalism and then in a bifurcation of science and faith, did not have me pining for a greater holism until well into my span’s second half. Late have I come to consider the intersection of bio-evolution and the scratchings of the Christian mystics to be one of the most shimmering and precious gifts received amid my ripening; late has this unfolding emerged for me in one way or another as what Bonaventure termed Your Self-diffusion, Eckhart Your ebullítio (“overflow”). While You are untethered by time, has it not been otherwise for us of the long journey? And have there not been in the biosphere what might be called “tipping points,” (kaíroi [“pregnant times”]), Your Christ (e.g., Mk 1:15) their principal and defining window? 

But why is it that so many of us bearers of his name are hostile to Your stunning M.O. in this four billion year saga? Why is it that we are offended that in Your Macro Project You should share with materiality both Your splendor and Your agency, that contingency and chaos should be centrally drawn into service of Your Dream? Why this pitting of nature’s ongoing revelations of life’s antecedents against the richly layered poetry of our sacred texts? Why are the treasures of the time capsule which is planet Earth dismissed in favor of obfuscatory conspiracies accounting for their existence?

Finally, a characteristic of both Earth’s span of life and its nearly ten billion years of cosmogenetic antecedents is the stability of the totality of its energy. All that ensued from Your Flaring Forth, including energy’s mass equivalents (atoms, molecules, varied elements, stars, galaxies), remains constant. The resulting cosmos, thus governed by this Law of Conservation of Energy, is a universal recycling system in which energy, while ever assuming new forms, is neither created nor destroyed. 

Have I not long found the declaration “Nothing is lost” to be a hauntingly implicit word about You, O Lover? In the face of unspeakable loss, whether in the primeval collision of galaxies, the predation within/between species of fauna, or the countless wars within my own lifespan, is it not so that somehow nothing is lost to You? Are You not Reality Itself, the All-encompassing, the “all in All” (I Cor 15:28), the Far Horizon beyond which there is náda? Here again, does not cosmology invariably bleed into the spiritual, the mystical?

Paul McCartney’s “The Long and Winding Road” (1969), for me a piece translucent to the journey Your brooding elicits, hints of Your Self-diffusion’s serpentine return to Yourself. The bio-portion of that saga is not yet finished, but even in these dark and chaotic times we can find hope in the story, Your Story, thus far.