"A New Creation"

Sermon By: Gary Kowalski

Sunday, March 26, 2000

"In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a mighty wind swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day." (Genesis 1:1-5)

Light is good. Whether we walk on two legs or four, or fly through the air or swim through the sea, there seems to be a consensus about this.

Near the slopes of Doi Angka, the highest peak in northern Thailand, singing greets the rays of the rising sun. The chorus is from a troop of gibbons, the smallest but among the most numerous of the ape family who inhabit this region of dense forest and deep valleys. One of the first to study the habits of these creatures whose scientific name, Hylobates, means "tree travelers," was a Research Associate of the Peabody Museum at Harvard named Clarence Carpenter, who journeyed to what was then Siam with the Asiatic Primate Expedition (A.P.E.) in 1937.

We now know that gibbons are our fourth cousins--chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans are all closer kin to humankind-- but at the time, biologists believed they might have been our direct, evolutionary ancestors. Carpenter learned that these long-armed apes are experts at arboreal existence, swinging Tarzan-style among the upper branches of the dense vegetation or walking two-legged along the larger limbs closer to the ground, the youngsters playing tag, very much like their human counterparts, except for being airborne. Beyond the acrobatics, he also found much else to admire: the apes' stable families, the monogamous loyalty they displayed toward their mates, the casual equality they seemed to practice between the sexes.

Any form of anthropomorphism was considered scientifically suspect at that time and Carpenter tried hard to remain the detached observer, but when he described how the animals greet each other with warm hugs and little squeals of pleasure, he couldn't avoid the obvious: "The facial expression involves a muscular pattern which may best be described as being similar to the human smile." If the friendly and mostly peace-loving gibbons were indeed among our forbears, they were an exemplary prototype.

Carpenter also studied the animals' singing. Oriental poets had known about the gibbons' songs for thousands of years. Buddhists believed them to be the reincarnation of human souls. Perhaps they heard a note of heartache in the songs, for those who had been disappointed in love, they believed, came back as these creatures who were known to wail to the moon. But Carpenter was the first to analyze their choruses with actual recordings, calling gibbons the "birds" of the primate world because of their complex duets, arias which can last up to forty-five minutes.

No one knows exactly why the apes sing, but observers agree on musical quality of their voices, with tones so pure they seem free of the vibrato that afflicts so many human sopranos. An article in Science describes their singing as "a polyphonic tour de force." The female opens with "a brilliant theme lasting twenty seconds or more," swelling in volume from the soft opening notes until it achieves a climax of intensity and pitch. The male responds, beginning with a simple phrase which he then embellishes and harmonizes with the repeated call of his partner, following an underlying score that varies by species but on which each singer improvises freely.

As in many species, the vocalizations seem to be related to mating and maintaining territory. But Carpenter found an aesthetic dimension in the songs as well, particularly in the early dawn hours when the calls seemed to come from everywhere and the tree tops rang with symphonies. The cries were not mournful then. Indeed, the noise at that time of day was so joyful, the researcher concluded, that something about the sun's first light "cheered the hearts of the gibbons."

Light is good. Notice that God didn't merely say that it was so. It wasn't a divine announcement that made the sunlight more than okay and better-than-average. Rather, there was something about the light itself, its butterscotch texture, the toothsome way it seemed to dip everything it touched in honey, sticking to surfaces and making them shine, that made the light like eye-candy the moment God saw it.

What is it about a sparkling object--a silver spoon, a watch face, a coin or a bit of colored glass--that attracts the attention of a marauding crow? (Charles Dickens, having acquired a new raven for his garden to replace the tame bird that had died some time previously, noted that "The first act of this Sage was to administer the effects of his predecessor, by disinterring all the halfpence he had buried in the garden.") Why will a bower bird decorate its nest with a purloined collection of bright blue clothes pins? The bower is not exactly a nest, but more of an elaborate museum, carefully constructed by the male, housing the most brilliant objets d'art that can be mustered: parrot feathers, flowers, aluminum foil, and similar bric-a-brac, sometimes stuccoed to the walls like mosaics, occasionally arranged within walls that have been painted (a wad of bark serves as brush, and dust-mixed-with-saliva as the pigment)--the whole oriented precisely against the transit of the sun. Highlights attract.

Light is good. Some prefer what the book of Genesis calls "the lesser light" which God created to rule over the night--like marine catfish, who are known to serenade each other with choruses that are said to resemble the sound of a percolating coffee pot on summer evenings at the time of the new moon. Freshly hatched sea turtles follow the moon's silvery beams to lead them from the sandy nests where they were born down the beach and into the sea. And gibbons, also, are depicted in the antique art of China reaching into iridescent, liquid pools, drawn by the shimmering lunar reflection. God set both moon and sun into the dome of the sky, to separate the light from the darkness. And the catfish, and the turtles, and many others, liked what they saw.

Don't roosters sing at dawn? Songbirds trill at the first hint of rose in the east? Anyone who has ever taken a walk through the fields on a crisp clear day has pretty much the same reaction. That's how I usually start the morning. Going for a walk is actually my dog's idea, and the path we trace is almost always the same, into the park at the end of our street, then along a grassy trail flanked by red sumacs, occasionally down the bike path to look across the lake toward the hills of the Adirondacks before eventually looping back home. Though the route is familiar, four-foot never seems to get tired of it, and I don't think I could ever grow weary either. I like to watch the sunlight catching the whitecaps, the purple shadows of clouds moving across the mountain tops. I've even heard the loons, with their haunting, almost human cries, near the lakeshore. What are the birds communicating, do you suppose? What they seem to be saying, at least to me, is that to understand Genesis, we need to read it in the present tense, not the past. The sunlight this morning is just as unprecedented as on the first day it was made. It's an achingly beautiful world, the Bible tells us, and we can trust our instincts on this.

The Bible has often been called "the Good Book." The section that Christians revere as the New Testament has sometimes been called "the Good News." But what's so good about it? What makes this old volume of myths and legends worthy of our time and consideration?

The Bible is an enormous storehouse of writings produced by countless men and women over the course of hundreds of years. As such, it's bound to be full of conflicting ideas and differing opinions. But if there is one teaching that is primary to the Jewish and Christian scriptures, important enough to give it priority right at the very beginning of the book, it is that life is good. It's a wonderful creation.

God was so pleased with the creation of the first day, in fact, that there was a quick executive decision to make some more. So, according to the book of Genesis, there came to be dry land, waters, and the firmament of heaven. Thus the stars and planets were created and the seasons. On the fifth day, God said, "Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let the birds fly above the earth." And on the sixth, God said, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth." And God saw that it was good.

Isn't there a nature lover in all of us? Why else do people watch all those public television specials, or keep on subscribing to National Geographic? Did you know that a coyote will extinguish fires in the wild? (Most other animals are deathly afraid of flames, but the coyote is gifted with both the intelligence and the thick coat to roll on a small fire and suffocate it before it spreads.) Were you aware that macaques amuse themselves in wintertime by rolling snowballs? (So far, these small monkeys have never been caught having a snowball fight.) And did you realize that red squirrels tap maple trees to get the syrup? (As any Vermont farmer knows, the sap needs to be boiled and the water evaporated to make it palatable for pancakes, but the squirrel accomplishes the same feat by biting through the bark on a warm afternoon, then returning a day later when the oozing sap has been distilled and the sugar concentrated by the sun.) There is something fascinating in information of this kind. We human beings seem to be drawn toward the creatures of the wild like moths toward a flame . . . or crows toward a key chain.

I know I am. My daughter Holly and her friend Kaitlin, two fifth-graders, were hiking with me last fall on one of those brilliant October days in New England when the landscape seems more sharply etched than usual when we saw a garter snake, black and yellow-striped and about a foot-and-a-half long, hurrying across the leaf-strewn trail. With the help of a forked branch, I gently grabbed the reptile behind its head and lifted it to show the two girls. I was rather proud of my feat, for like many people I'm a little nervous around snakes, and this may be one of the inborn fears we share with other apes. Gibbons, for instance, are terribly frightened of pythons, their primary predator in the wild, and young apes in captivity who have never actually been preyed upon will exhibit much alarm in the presence of a large snake, while remaining relatively calm when around other, potentially intimidating creatures that pose no natural threat. Perhaps the role the serpent plays in the Garden of Eden is based on a long ago memory, from a time when snakes in trees were definitely to be avoided. If the two girls were afraid, however, they certainly didn't show it. Each handled the harmless creature and expressed surprise at how smooth and dry the animal seemed as it draped and twisted its body over their fingers. We set the garter snake back on the ground where we found him, and he vanished in a flash, but he'd given us a memory that wouldn't soon be gone, for me recalling a similar encounter. A man was backpacking with his son when the chanced to come upon a six-foot rattler, sunning himself on the rocks. They stood stock still, hardly breathing, and carefully circled around the enormous viper before continuing on their way. "Dad," the young lad said to his father when they were in their sleeping bags some hours later, "This was the best day of my life!" The snake had given the boy something that his life in the city wasn't able to offer, a sense of the world as it was originally created, before the Fall and beyond good and evil, nature in its original glory, undomesticated and untamed.

Perhaps this attraction to the natural world is something we've inherited from our own primate past. In the Kakombe valley, in Africa, there flows a mighty waterfall. Over the course of the millennia, the water has worn a deep cleft into the rock, plummeting eighty feet in a straight drop that sends geysers of mist into the air, showering the flowers and ferns that grow nearby with a delicate spray of droplets that catch and reflect the sun in ever changing patterns of wind, water and light. Chimpanzees can regularly be found by the falls, dancing in slow, rhythmic motion, throwing heavy rocks and branches into the pools (like kids who just want to make a splash!), and swinging far out over the stream on the overhanging vines. Jane Goodall, who has seen the chimps cavorting many times in their secluded forest retreat, says that the wet, untrammeled beauty of the place fills her with feelings of awe: a sense that she is on holy ground. In her book Reason for Hope, she wonders if the chimpanzees also sense the magic and majesty of their surroundings, if their swaying to an unseen beat is inspired by the almost living rush of water and its mesmerizing, almost hypnotic quality, endlessly changing yet always the same.

Like leaves in the wind, or tumbling clouds, or water rushing over a rocky streambed, we Great Apes like to dance. The German psychologist Wolfgang Kohler, who studied captive chimpanzees on Tenerife in the Canary Islands early in the last century, often saw the animals circle single-file around a central pole, wagging their heads and keeping time with an accented footstep to the rhythm of their own bodies in a primitive ring dance, often decorating themselves with garlands of rag or string or bits of vegetation to add to the drama of their choreography. Diane Fossey, known for her research on the mountain gorilla, once saw these wild creatures create a percussion ensemble, one clapping her hands and another slapping himself beneath his chin to produce a click-clacking of teeth as a third youngster turned "pirouettes" to the accompaniment. Whether consciously or unconsciously, creatures like these seem to delight in their world. The earth revels in its own splendor.

As a clergyman, I know that a good many people spend their Sunday mornings worshiping G.O.D. (the Great Out Doors). Truthfully, who can blame them? For those of us who grew up as Christians or Jews or Moslems, in a culture shaped by the Western religious tradition, the Bible has had a profound and lasting influence, shaping our values, affecting our attitudes and molding our expectations about the world, often in ways we are not even aware of. But even for "people of the Book," the Bible is not the only source of our spirituality. The other is the book of Nature, the revelation of the great cosmos itself. The sky, the hills, the trees, the plants and animals who seem so similar and yet so different from ourselves are perpetual sources of awe and amazement. Before there were any written scriptures, the earth was our teacher and soothsayer. For many of us, it remains so today.

My own heart soars in the outdoors. That's what inspired me to write my "Alphabet of Gratitude" a few years back. The catalogue in Genesis is even more exhaustive, listing fruit trees of every kind on earth, plants yielding seed of every kind, every living creature that moves, of every kind . . . ." There is nothing complicated about this kind of life-affirming, earth-centered spirituality. It requires no esoteric insights. A healthy animal might understand it.

The Almighty dotes on creatures of every kind. Asked what his long study of biology had taught him about the Creator, one famous entomologist replied that God must have loved beetles! His response was tongue-in-cheek, but still perfectly consistent with Genesis, pointing to the fact that with over 350,000 species identified (and perhaps several million still to be discovered), beetles are more numerous than any other being on earth. Many are familiar, like fireflies and ladybugs (of which there are two thousand distinct varieties). Some are less well-known, but no less beguiling, like the wood-boring beetle Henry Thoreau wrote about in the final chapter of Walden:

Everyone has heard the story which has gone the round of New England of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts,--from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as it appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by heat of an urn.

For Thoreau, the insect's emergence after so many decades of lying dormant was a sign of the regenerative powers in nature, and in us. "Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this?" Resurrection is this creature's specialty. Beetles first appeared on earth about 250 million years ago; they were pollinators of some of the world's earliest flowers, and remain the earth's "disposal crew," transforming dead and decaying matter into the stuff of fresh beginnings. In their book An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles, Arthur Evans and Charles Bellamy observe that many of the scientists who study these remarkably diverse and imaginatively adapted insects "refer to their passion for beetles in terms of joy, excitement, wonder, delight, thrill, satisfaction and fulfillment." To those with eyes to see, no aspect of the creation is too humble to elicit astonishment.

Life celebrates itself. But alongside this benign doctrine of life's goodness, there is another view articulated in the Bible. For after the plant and animal kingdoms have been created, God then says "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth." Human beings alone resemble God, in short, and this resemblance sets them over and apart from all other creatures.

Unfortunately, God's injunction in Gensis to "fill the earth and subdue it" seems to be the one divine commandment the human race has truly taken to heart. Like most of the Biblical precepts, it's one we've twisted to our own ends. "Dominion" in its original intent did imply "ruling over," but only as a wise king rules over and protects his subjects, or as God reigns over creation, sustaining and safeguarding every living thing. In fact, Genesis plainly states that animals and humans were both created as nefesh chaya, or "living souls." Yet later scholars, when translating the Hebrew would render nefesh chaya as "living soul" when applied to Adam, but render exactly the same phrase as "living creature" when applied to animals a few verse later. Certainly Genesis was never intended as a license to clear cut the forests, or pollute the oceans, or drive other species to extinction. Yet according to a year 2000 report by the Worldwatch Institute, eleven percent of all 8,615 species of birds living on earth are now endangered, thirty-four percent of all fish are at risk, and twenty-five percent of all mammals. Will future generations ask why people permited such a decimation of God's creation? The world has changed tremendously with the growth of technology and the problems we face in the new millennium are unprecedented; meanwhile, the wisdom traditions and holy books we have inherited from the past have evolved little over the course of the last two thousand years, if at all. Surely the myths and legends that have guided our culture and brought us to the present crisis could use a new twist . . . a change of plot . . . an environmentally friendly edition. And what better place to begin such a recasting of tradition than with a revision the Jewish and Christian scriptures? Here is how it starts:

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a mighty wind swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. And God called the light Day and the darkness Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

And God said, "Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters." So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so.

Days passed into years. And God said, "Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear." And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together God called Seas.

Millennia came and went. And God said, "Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky." So God created the great whales and every living creatures that moves. And God blessed them, saying "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let the birds and animals multiply on the earth."

And where the waters poured down from the dome of the sky, like a waterfall from heaven, the chimpanzees danced. And as the morning broke over the forest, filling the canopy with soft green light, the gibbons sang with joy. For all creatures looked upon the work of God, and saw that it was good.

Then God said, "Let us make humankind, who shall be a mirror of my creation." And so God made human beings, female and male, and within their souls placed the light and the darkness, and within their veins God placed the seas, fashioning their bodies from the tissue of every living thing.

God blessed them, and said to them, "Love the earth and preserve it, for you are related to every living creature: the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and those that creep upon the ground and the wild animals of every kind." And it was so. Then God saw everything that had been made, and indeed, it was very good.

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. And on that day, God celebrated, saying to humankind, "Honor creation and keep it holy." And God rested, placing the world in our hands.

EPILOGUE

THE BIBLE ACCORDING TO NOAH

When the world was very young, people talked with the animals. They understood the wailing of the wolves, the chanting of the whales, and the whistling of the marmots in the high mountains. All creatures spoke one language and shared the garden of the earth. There was peace and plenty in the land.

But as time passed, human beings forgot how to listen to their sisters and brothers who churned the oceans and leapt on the wind. Those who walked upright looked down on those who walked closer to the soil. People mined the earth to build fortresses of stone. They milled the endless tracts of timber to surround their towns with high walls to shut out the turning of the seasons. Human beings came to believe they alone possessed the knowledge of how to live. They no longer paid attention to the wisdom of the coyote, the fox, the wild geese or salmon.

Then the earth began to suffer. As the rivers were dammed and the swamps were drained to irrigate man's fields and bring water to his cities, droughts and floods began to trouble the land. Great storms gathered.

Only one man remembered how to talk to the animals, and his name was Noah. Old as the hills, he liked to walk softly through the forest, watchful as the deer. Noticing how each thing communicated with its kind, he listened to the notes in the branches overhead. But what he heard now disturbed him. There was a warning in the air.

A great flood was coming, the animals told him. It would rain for forty days and forty nights. The skies would open, the rivers would overflow their banks, and whole cities would be washed away. People and animals alike would lose their homes. There would be death and drowning everywhere.

Noah was afraid. What could be done to save the earth? He wanted to protect not only his family, but the other creatures who would be lost in the swirling water. An inspiration came to him. He would build a boat.

His neighbors thought he was foolish when they heard his plan. When Noah explained how the animals had warned him, they said he must be mad. But Noah collected the lumber he needed and shaped the keel for his ark, a vessel that would be large enough to hold two of every living creature, female and male, to save them from the flood.

And when the boat was finished, the rain began to fall. Small brooks became rushing streams, the streams were changed into mighty rivers, and the rivers outran their beds and swept over fields and valleys. Houses and barns disappeared beneath the surging waves. But Noah's ark floated above it all. Inside there were animals of every kind, from ocelots to otters.

For weeks they floated and for weeks it rained. And when the rain ended, there was no land to be seen. The flood had covered the entire earth.

Then, each day, Noah asked a dove to fly above the water to search for dry ground. And each day the dove returned without success. But the sun was warm and bright and the water slowly evaporated. One day, the bird returned to the ark with good red mud on its feet and a leaf in its beak, and Noah knew that land had again appeared. Plants had once more begun to grow. The next day when Noah released the dove, it flew away without returning.

Finally, the boat came to rest upon a mountain top. And when the water had disappeared from the highlands and the valleys were once again green with grass and fragrant with flowers, Noah opened the doors of the big boat and the animals departed. The kangaroos, the kingfishers, the koalas and the rest made new homes and began new families. And soon the earth was once more blessed with life of every kind.

As the last shimmering mists of rain were lifted up into the clouds, a rainbow could be seen in the heavens. It was a reminder of the beauty of creation. It was a symbol of the sacred circle of existence. It was a reminder that all creatures who live and breathe beneath the many-colored arch are holy and deserving of respect.

And when Noah died, his body returned to the mother that gave it birth, to rejoin the elements of earth and sky. His reason for being was completed. He was on the journey home.

So people continued to tell the story. They recorded it in their scrolls and scriptures and passed it on to their young. And the animals also shared the tale with their children and grandchildren, of how the world was threatened in days long ago and how the world was saved. But the animals didn't call it the story of Noah and the ark. For they knew the tale by another name. For the animals, it was always "The Difference The Dove Made."