Last week I suggested we explore some new forms of sabbath, sabbath as resistance to systems that are no longer working, systems that are tearing at our souls and at the fabric of our communities. As many of you know, one way I’ve chosen resistance, chosen sabbath, is by not getting cable television. I miss watching sports, but I can get my news elsewhere, and I am not exposed to television commercials, endless pharmaceutical ads, not to mention the flood of political attack ads from both sides that are carefully crafted using all that is known about the subconscious and subliminal messaging to leave us as angry and anxious as possible.
That I have opted out of this cycle of manufactured desire and manufactured fear does not mean I have opted out of television, of the many ways we use narrative to entertain, to inform, to make meaning. Telling stories is important, is human, and television and films are great formats for telling stories. Streaming services give me access to the work of brilliant and creative artists.
So it was that in recent weeks I watched the Netflix original series “Stranger Things.†The show, by the Duffer brothers, has been a breakout hit, something that might have never made it on a regular network. Only eight episodes long, it is an homage to the 1980’s, a mash-up of sci-fi and horror that stars Winona Ryder and Matthew Modine, both actors starting their careers in that decade.
The series centers on a group of nerdy middle school boys, seen in the first episode playing Dungeons and Dragons, and I too was playing Dungeons and Dragons. There is the “Stand by Me†scene with the kids walking down the railroad tracks, and there are multiple visual and narrative references to the “Stephens,†Stephen King and Steven Spielberg.
It was the dawning of the age of the geek, Carl Sagan and Cosmos, and two other icons of geek culture, English authors that were just starting to create the alternative universes that would be their legacies.
Terry Pratchett wrote the first of his forty-one Discworld novels, a beloved fantasy series filled with dwarves, trolls, and the undead, a parody of our own modern insanity. And Douglas Adams gave us the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, first as a BBC Radio Play, later a series of novels, a television series and a feature film. In Hitchhiker’s Guide, we join Arthur Dent, fleeing Earth as it is destroyed to create a by-pass. It is a story that gives us the answer to life, the universe and everything, which turns out to be 42, but that fails to provide us with the actual question.
In Adams’ series, a trilogy in five-parts, Zaphod Beeblebrox, two-headed fugitive president of the galaxy, is placed in a torture device called the “Total Perspective Vortex,†the worst form of torture for a sentient being according to Adams, who writes “When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it there’s a tiny little speck, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, ‘You are here.’â€
In Adams’ fictional universe then, the most crushing thing for a human is to realize how small we are when seen against the backdrop of creation. I might add how brief we are, for we are at best a momentary flash, easy to miss against the backdrop of cosmic expansion, planet formation, evolution.
We humans, with our reflective consciousness, can be deluded into thinking we are each our own universe, and we all know a few people that are black holes. We see the world from where we are, relativity is our reality, everything measured to our scale. We do not have the alien technology to create a Total Perspective Vortex, but if we try, if we wrap our head around different scales, look through a telescope or watch Sagan’s classic series, or even the series reboot featuring Neil DeGrasse Tyson, if we simply look out at the stormy ocean beyond human control, we begin to get some idea, some perspective of where we are, of that dot. Consider these words written by Carl Sagan in 1994 describing the Pale Blue Dot on which we find ourselves:
“On it, everyone you ever heard of…The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. . . .
Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.”
Sagan or maybe Dr. Seuss, humanity in Whoville, with or without Horton, and yet, we are bold to assert, there is a divine mystery we name as God, maybe not a huge white male in the sky, maybe it is base idolatry when we try to pin on this ineffable divine the sort of dreams and desires and hatreds that mark us as human, but there is something, for the odds of there being anything instead of nothing are astronomical.
The cosmos may not spin around us, and God may not be a super-humanoid in the sky, but we are bold enough to understand that something in each of us is drawn out, is transcendent, something feels connected, entangled with others, with creation, with cosmos. We find ourselves afloat in holy creativity, infinite imagination.
It was this sense of scale, this divine mystery, this tug toward transcendence that Friedrich Schleiermacher, the great theologian of the German Romantics, referred when he spoke of our utter dependence on that from whence we came. Long before the dawn of the postmodern, he broke free from many of the constructs of God, God as super human capricious king, Jesus as deity in disguise, yet he still left room for our souls, for love, for Christ. Long before those amazing shots from the Hubble Space Telescope, Schleiermacher was asking us to remember what we are, remember that we did not call ourselves into being. He was asking Christians, thinking and engaged Christians, to push back a little against the reductionism of his age, the clockwork world that would be mastered by the gray matter locked within our skulls, as if the same brains that could produce the Gatling Gun and Auschwitz might pull back the curtain and reveal the divine as nothing more than the not-so-great and powerful Oz. Long before we realized we were stardust, long before the Big Bang and the Quantum, Schleiermacher invited us to mystery.
Today, as so many throw off the ancient formulas, the false narratives that gave divine justification to human power, as so many throw off a Christianity that has become associated with ignorance and hatred, we might do with a little Schleiermacher, might need to be Schleiermacher-ed, reminded that despite all of the “I†language of our age, “I earned what I have,†“I deserve better,†that I did not create myself.
The whence from which we came is mystery we wrap in story, our existence utterly dependent on something we cannot name, do not understand, and despite the hubris of the great, we cannot grant life, only steal it away. We are part of social systems and ecosystems, and while we seem intent on destroying it all, we are not Creators.
I am, as Douglas Adams and Carl Sagan would have it, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, a flash so fast you could miss it. But like the fictional Zaphod Beeblebrox, I don’t see that as a bad thing, even if I’m not cosmically cool.
The immensity of the universe and the fact that I am not the center of it could produce an existential angst that left me quivering and curled in a fetal position, but I choose instead to see the beauty of the infinite other, to embrace life fully for however long I have it, to not only smell the roses, but to create what I can, to love and to dare, to dance like no one is watching, to love as if the Creator that called worlds into being called me into being as well.
There is a liberating humility in this, for I do not need to be God. I can let God be God, beyond my words and my simple definitions, beyond even the word “God,†itself just a construction. I can be a hippie peace-freak in Birkenstocks, embracing the divine in nature and the dude in the black tie listening to human channelling of the divine in Honegger’s Third Symphony, for God is in all of those places, in music, in that slug in the garden, in laughter and in tears.
I can watch a well-crafted story about the battle of good and evil, innocent kids, corrupt government agencies and the dreaded demi-gorgon, and see it as a way to make meaning of the chaos, the beauty and mystery, the terror and awkwardness of the every day. I need not take responsibility for all that is wrong in the world, nor can I claim all of the good, but I can contribute, can love and make beauty.
It is both liberation and yoke, this total perspective, this utter dependence. I am not the ocean. I am not the wave. But I can see its beauty, feel its power, ride it with as much grace as I can muster, thrill at the speed, balanced and daring for as long as I can.
And I can. I can see God from my moment, my flicker on a speck, a dot. I am not God. Praise be to God.
Amen.