The Everything Seed: Lessons of Evolution

Meditation “Out of the Stars,” Robert T. Weston (uu)

Out of the stars in their flight, out of the dust of eternity, here have we come,
Stardust and sunlight, mingling through time and through space.
Out of the stars have we come, up from time;
Out of the stars have we come.

Time out of time before time in the vastness of space, earth spun to orbit the sun,
Earth with the thunder of mountains newborn, the boiling of seas.
Earth warmed by sun, lit by sunlight:
This is our home;
Out of the stars have we come.

Mystery hidden in mystery, back through all time;
Mystery rising from rocks in the storm and the sea.
Out of the stars, rising from rocks and the sea,
kindled by sunlight on earth, arose life.

Ponder this thing in your heart;
ponder with awe:
Out of the sea to the land, out of the shallows came ferns.
Out of the sea to the land, up from darkness to light,
Rising to walk and to fly,
out of the sea trembled life.

Ponder this thing in your heart, life up from sea:
Eyes to behold, throats to sing, mates to love.
Life from the sea, warmed by sun, washed by rain,
life from within, giving birth, rose to love.

This is the wonder of time; this is the marvel of space; out of the stars swung the earth; life upon earth rose to love.
This is the marvel of life, rising to see and to know;
Out of your heart, cry wonder: sing that we live.


Sermon The Everything Seed: Lessons of Evolution
(c) Jill Ann Terwilliger 2007

Out of the stars have we come
up from the sea
out of the seed of everything
this is the marvel of life.

In 1859 Charles Darwin shook the foundations of religion in the western world by suggesting – based on an inordinate amount of evidence – that the world was not created out of nothing is Seven Days as the Genesis story suggests, but is the result of slow and natural evolutionary processes that have taken the Earth from an unpopulated sphere of rock and water to the stunningly marvelous existence we know today. Most unsettling to the people of Darwin’s time was his contention that we human beings have evolved, too, that we have evolved from Apes that traveled on all fours to the upright homo-sapiens we are today.

My spouse – Charles – is a teacher of science (albeit Physics). It gives him a sometimes painful awareness of the common misconceptions the average student has about scientific concepts. Related to evolution, a common misconception is that “necessity is the mother of invention.” That may very well be true in the realm of tools creatures create, but it doesn’t translate to evolution. For example, “necessity is the mother of invention” would suggest that Apes needed better manual dexterity and larger brains to function better in their world, and so these changes came about. When you think about that, though, you realize you can’t will the growth of an opposable thumb. The concept falls apart.

Rather, biological evolution rests on the somewhat uncomfortable concept of ‘natural selection’ or ‘survival of the fittest.” As a young and radical feminist, a person who believed, and still does, in affirming the worth of people with all kinds of gifts and skills, and people with not so many obvious gifts and skills, the idea of survival of the fittest brought to mind an evolving society in which the not-so-strong, the not-so-bright, the not-so-beautiful, and the not-so-able (maybe even the not-so-white/Christian/straight/male) would have no place. And indeed, eugenics projects and holocausts that claim to cleanse society rest rather heavily on the idea of ‘survival of the fittest.’ I understand now that is a problem with how human beings – flawed as we are – have used the theory. It’s not the fault of the idea itself.

What natural selection actually says could be told in a story. Once upon a time a little Ape was born with a disfigured spinal column that turned out to let her stand up straighter and do all sorts of things no one else could do. It allowed her to feed and protect herself better and so she survived until she reached the age of reproduction. Because of these things, she turned out to be very popular with the boys, and that meant she had a lot more sex, leading to a lot more kids. Which meant she had a lot more chances to pass on that straight spine thing to the next generation. The next generation, similarly advantaged, had better survival and more sex than others in their community, and so the advantage passed, until it became the norm and we, today, can do all kinds of special things because of our wonderful, sort of accidental, upright spines.

Ponder this thing in your heart.
Ponder it with awe.
Millions of accidents
that turned out to be advantages
have made us what we are today.

Like Robert Weston, when I ponder the stars in their flight, the dust of eternity and the sheer fact of our existence, I am filled with an awe that makes my heart cry wonder and sing praise. Simply that we exist seems like such a miracle. Such a miracle.

And so of course we ask questions about it. How did we get here? How did any of this get here? And, of course, we tell stories in response to the questions. Creation stories with heroes and holy places. And the stories we tell take us into the realm of religion and spirituality. Cosineau says: The soul needs stories and the mind needs concepts. We need the religion and the science, the facts and the stories that give meaning to the facts.

The idea of evolution guided by chance and natural selection shook the foundations for many traditional religious folk. But Thomas B. Thayer – the pre-eminent Universalist theologian of his time, insisted that Darwin, far from being an infidel, actually proved the existence of God, not as a being, but as mind, as on-going process.

And Thayer was far from alone among religious and spiritual thinkers to embrace the concept of biological evolution as a support for their theology. Many also wrote and spoke of other kinds of evolution: evolution in human culture, evolution in consciousness; the idea of spiritual evolution; and of the role of God in biological evolution. It turns out, the idea of evolution itself has evolved over time, neither beginning nor ending with Charles Darwin.

Ponder this thing in your heart.
Did we all come from one seed?
Did someone make the seed?
How does it know when to open and how to grow?
And why does it have to grow, why not spring forth complete in the beginning?

The earliest of this multi-generational family of thinkers about religion and evolution viewed the evolutionary process as an act of God. Jokob Bohme, a 17th century German shoemaker and mystic, believed that “God is striving to develop a world of increasing wholeness and perfection.” It wasn’t perfect when it started. God works in the world to keep making it better.

G. W. Leibniz followed Bohme in the next generation articulating the “first broad conceptions of an evolution of biological species, which he saw as a process ordained by God.”

F.W.J. Schelling, the 19th Century German philosopher quoted at the top of your order of service, took these two concepts a great leap forward with a “vision of cosmic evolution that saw God fully pervading all levels of being.” With Schelling, the concept of God shifted from a single entity of mind or being – so often imaged as the old man with flowing white robes – to the life-force itself that creates, animates, and pervades all that is.

That’s a concept of God I can begin to resonate with. And it’s the kind of God that Thomas Thayer – the Universalist – felt Darwin’s Theory of Evolution actually affirmed. “The force which through the green fuse drives the flower’ in Dylan Thomas’ poetic phrase.

I guess it doesn’t make a great story, though. No big heroes. No holy places. Instead, everyplace is a holy place. Each of us is a shrine! No one can own God because God is everywhere. And if the world is changing, it only stands to reason God must be changing, too And before you know it, religious dogmatism becomes very hard to hold on to. This is the threat of evolution.

I attended a talk this week given by Tariq Ramadan, a top scholar of Islam and one of Time magazines “100 Innovators for the 21st Century.” He was speaking as part of an interfaith dialogue on religion and violence put on by Trinity Church in New York City and simulcast here in Kalamazoo at Transformations Spirituality Center. Ramadan’s presence was not in New York with the rest of the speakers but video linked in from London because the US State Department declined to issue him a visa.

It’s true, he has some rather radical ideas about religion. He says, for instance, “There is no faithfulness without evolution.” “There is no faithfulness without evolution.” And by this he means evolution of our understanding of our faith traditions .

This takes us into another venue for our consideration of the creation story of Evolution. Not only can biological evolution be interpreted through a religious and spiritual lens, but religion can be practiced in an evolutionary model.

If you know just a few things about Islam, one of the things you may know is that Islam teaches that the Koran in Arabic is the literal words of God. God spoke to the prophet Mohammed in Arabic, Mohammed repeated what he heard and his scribes wrote it down. None of the other three great monotheistic traditions claim such a direct and short line between God’s word and written text.

So to say, as a believing practicing Muslim, “There is no faithfulness without evolution” IS a radical thing, and no doubt, very dangerous and threatening to our narrow American conceptions about Islam, to say nothing of threatening our ever-expanding ranks of Christian biblical literalists.

It is more important to be faithful to the meanings of one’s religious tradition than to the forms and norms of the tradition, Ramadan said. I once heard a Muslim feminist say: the Koran says a woman must dress modestly, in a way that doesn’t attract attention or make her a sexual object. These days, especially when living in the West, to wear the Hijab is to attract attention. so this woman wears very simple skirts and dresses that are modest and don’t call attention to her. The meaning is more important than the form. Meaning is eternal. To be faithful, form must evolve.

To be truly faithful to one’s religious tradition, Ramadan said, you have to engage in a dialectical process between TEXT and CONTEXT. You have to keep looking to the texts to find new answers for new contexts. Because we know, the world keeps changing, evolving. Things are not today what they were 1400 years ago when the Koran was written down. They are not the same as they were in the first few hundred years after Jesus lived when most of the Christian texts were written down. Things are not the same as they were in the many centuries before Jesus when many of the Jewish texts were written down. So when the context changes, how we read the text has to change, too, or we are not being truly faithful to the meaning of the text.

Our own Unitarian Universalism has evolved as well. Once we were Christians who believed God was so loving that ALL people would eventually find eternal life with God in heaven. Through chance mutation and natural selection, today we believe in the transformative power of love. Once we were Christians – sort of – theists at least, readers and followers of the bible, who believed Jesus was god’s son and god’s prophet, but wasn’t divine, just a man, fully human like us. Through a commitment to meaning over form, now, we consider the sacred texts of the world and the revelations of history and science, too, to be our holy writ. And a hundred years from now, or five hundred, someone could write this sermon again and say “once we believed in the transformative power of love, and today …” who knows what that will say. But we are part of the chance and we are part of the natural selection, defining over and over again for our time, how to live the meaning of our faith.

Now, what about you. Are you evolving, too?

Ponder this thing in your heart,
Ponder it with awe:
Millions of accidents
that turned out to be advantages
have made us what we are today.

I think it’s as true for what we are as for who we are. Mind, spirit, heart, soul, psyche, self – however you identify the essence of who you are as a person – haven’t millions of accidents made you who you are today? To be faithful to yourself – to your deepest longings and loyalties and values and goals – the seed of your self – haven’t you, too, had to change the outer over time so the inner could remain true?

Steven Jay Gould, reflecting on the creation myth of Baseball, said: too few people are comfortable with evolutionary modes of explanation in any form. Heroes and shrines are all very well, but is there not grandeur in the sweep of continuity?

To me, the grandeur in a life is precisely that it is so rarely heroic in a big way, but is nearly always heroic in thousands, millions, of little tiny ways as we meet each of the accidents in our lives. And some of them we meet well and they turn to our advantage, and some of them we don’t meet so well, but even then, it’s the accidents, accumulated over time, that make us who we are today.

This is the wonder of time; this is the marvel of space;
out of the stars swung the earth; life upon earth rose to love.
This is the marvel of life, rising to see and to know;
Out of your heart, cry wonder: sing that we live.