Where Were We?

              This past Monday I woke up before sunrise.  After coffee, I went into our backyard for my morning quiet time.  The days are becoming shorter, and it had been a while since I was outside before daybreak.  Ten years ago, I could see most of the night sky from my favorite spot.  But our oak tree and our neighbor’s sycamore have flourished in recent years, and now only a small section of the heavens is visible. As I settled in and looked up to see beyond the trees, the sky was dark; the moon was half-full and next to it was a bright star.  I was captivated.

Ten minutes later, the sun rose in the east, the sky began to brighten, and the star disappeared.  But the fascination with seeing light in darkness remained.

I remembered being in a downtown theater in 2011 watching the opening scenes in Terrance Mallick’s film, The Tree of Life.  It begins in darkness.  Then there’s sound in the background, almost like what you might hear if you are underwater listening to the ocean.  These words appear:

A mysterious image appears – like a flame, but not a flame; it moves and grows:

And then a voice whispers: “Brother, mother…it was they who led me to your door.”  The image fades.

              We see a young red-haired girl looking out a window on a farm, enchanted by what she sees.  We hear her voice: “The nuns taught us there are two ways through life…the way of nature, and the way of grace….”  The girl becomes a mother (played by Jessica Chastain), and her life unfolds.  Over the next two hours, we witness the innocence, joys, struggles, heartbreaks and spiritual searching of her family; interspersed are dreamlike images of nature, evolution, and the mysteries of life. (Given Mallick’s impressionistic style, there are some sequences which make it hard to follow — but it is always entrancing.)   What set the stage for it all is the passage from the book of Job.  After Job questions God why life is the way it is, the divine voice speaks out of a whirlwind: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?  When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

              Huston Smith once described an important difference between scientific and spiritual knowledge.  Both seek to explain truth in everyday terms we can understand, but sometimes that language is not sufficient.  With science, when the focus is the smallest scale of quantum reality or the immense scale of cosmology and ordinary language falls short, it turns to math – often very sophisticated math (which few of us can understand).  Spirituality, on the other hand, also offers many insights in everyday terms, but when it needs to speak of the deepest realities, it turns not to math but to story, metaphor and imagination.

              Some scientists say the Big Bang began with a “disturbance of the quantum field. ”One spiritual story says that in the beginning a divine force moved like wind over a dark void, and said “Let there be light, and there was light.”

              I choose to listen to both. I want to understand the science of life as much as I can (though I’m limited by my knowledge of math.)  But I also want to accept the gift of spiritual imagination with its stories and metaphors; they speak to my heart and resonate with the feeling of awe I feel when a star in the night sky shines before fading in the presence of a rising sun.

              Where were we when that quantum field was disturbed and the universe emerged out of nothingness, bringing into being all the elements of the periodic table, time and space?  Where were we when the foundations of the earth were set, and the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted with joy?  I don’t know.  But what we are began in those moments.  As did our capacity for wonder and our desire to understand.

              It was still and quiet when I watched the sky that morning.  But in my imagination, I could almost hear the morning stars singing and the first living beings shouting for joy.

If you want to get a sense of the mood of the movie, here’s the official trailer