I had an English 101 classmate, all those years ago – a real bohemian looking fellow. His hair was daily disheveled, his shirt rumpled, and had the exhausted look of a poet that had wrestled the muses throughout the night whether to include, or withhold, a comma from the end of a line of poetry. For a writing prompt he wrote a short piece on how smoking makes you a voyeur of the small things of life we normally would overlook. Being disallowed from indoors, the smoker stands outside and has nothing to do while he puffs than look around at the minutia of life and observe – the way the leaves collect in a gutter, wear patterns on a collegiate lawn or how clouds churn.
I smoke a pipe, though pipe smokers do not consider themselves smokers in the colloquial sense. We are puffers (and not in the British colloquial sense either), and are generally less agitated and dyspeptic than our smoking cousins. But what he said was true about the pensiveness of smoking. Thoughts present themselves for inspection. Few activities have brought a more quiet contentment than smoking on the porch, rocking hypnotically, and considering why this is thus and the reasons for this thusness.
Tonight my rocking chair’s got a bum leg and slurs when it rocks, and so is demoted to a chair. With a closed left eye, from where I sit, the full moon is jabbed onto the end of a naked branch like a pudgy marshmallow. It slides along a limb hammered into black iron by night, and falls off into the sky.
I can’t speak to other moons, but this one is beautiful. Jupiter’s got 53 moons, Saturn 82, and even Mars has a pair of them. We just got the one. The moon. There she wanders through the black air like a pale Persephone roaming through an entropic Underworld; immortal trapped in the groaning creation of decay.
Moonlight is beautiful because it is unnecessary – it serves no purpose. Like all beautiful things, it is useless. Not like gaudy day, always a guarantee, always full of use for commerce and occupation and agriculture and those boring things that keep us alive. But it is not the sun that riles up the howling lunatics for misdeeds and mischief; it is not the bright eye of heaven that has inspired centuries of romanticism and bad poetry. That fiery chariot hides nothing and has nothing to hide. Not the shy moon. Monthly, she hides her pockmarked face behind earth’s shadow, emerging coyly from the other side to boldly shine her translated light onto the land, cutting shadows with sharp and threatening edges onto our once familiar world, obscuring, or revealing, truth.
As the smoke slithered out of my pipe, I wondered about the wide universe. In particular, what sorts of things are older than it? If that is even a questions that can be asked. Did it all just pop into being, fully assembled like a floor model Ikea desk? Is there a blueprint by which it was made? We know the bits and particles which burst into being on the day of its birth and the laws they obey. But are there greater and older realities which sit around visiting while a toddler universe plays on the floor?
Feelings of smallness and youngness are familiar. As a kid, Christmas Eve was filled with loud livingrooms strewn with aunts and uncles, parents and grandparents, cousins and distant relations jawing on about happenings which antedated me. Tarnished shames were polished bright with memory, tales of onerous backstories played out in small town dramas, and just-so circumstances spun tales in my imagination – a left turn by an ancestor instead of right and my entire time space continuum would have not been. That there were stories already in motion, which I was born into, was a great comfort to me. It made me feel part of something bigger and longer, like I was one millimeter dash on a meter stick stretching into the past, bestowed the warm comfort of insignificance.
There are certain realities that existed before the universe, before mankind, which we were born into. We did not invent them. They did not evolve over wordless eons of random processes. They did not arise as a peculiar phenomena of humans interacting with other humans which sociologists have only recently identified. They are eternal. Not everything is made from dirt.
I do not have an exhaustive list, as things that are older than the universe generally resist being on lists (lists being younger than the universe). Here are a few I managed to escape the night with: Beauty, truth, goodness, being, relationship, information, love, joy, identity, purpose, lambs, blood and sacrifice. I am not going to explore these fractals, only to name them and date them B.C.- Before Creation.
Since the Triune God (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) are eternal, that means anything emanating from them is also eternal. God is beautiful, true, and good, therefore all these antedate our infant universe by a brief eternity and the fabric of spacetime is woven with these primary colored threads in the loom. The Godhead exists in relationship, so all the ingredients of relationships were already present, such as exchanging information (for what is relationship if not communication, and communication if not sharing information?), though possibly very different that we know it to be. John’s first letter says God is love, so that is an easy one; love is B.C. along with all those things which God is like joy and peace. When we use the word “is” we are talking about identity, so mankind’s endless search for himself across the windswept plains of this life is marching to an ancient drum. Imagination too. I may be taking some license with this word, but the idea is clearly present – the ability to see a reality that is not; a forward thinking plan resulting in actuality. Mankind was created with an essence, a purpose – what he was meant to be – before he was formed from clay.
The last three items listed – lambs, blood, sacrifice – are curious, and I only mention them because the Bible does.
…and all who dwell on earth will worship it, everyone whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb who was slain.
Revelation 13:8 (ESV)
There you have it. It wasn’t my idea. Here we have a peek at a plan which emerged before the foundation of the world (greek: kosmos, meaning universe) involving a lamb, Jesus, who was slain, involving blood in sacrifice. This opens the door to a great many questions, and a much longer list of old things, if such lists were permissible for mortals. But we must settle for for a smell.
We brothers, the universe and humanity, are the ignorant toddlers playing on the carpet as our elders speak of realities which were in motion long before we came on the scene; music composed and performed to which we both were born dancing. A conversation with a friend is the rehearsing of ancient music, and the love shared between family is a reverberation of the eternal plucking of harmony between Father and Son. Longing for beauty and goodness is not a biological instinct for safety or sustenance that a genome happens upon to repeat itself, but the swaying to an eternal rhythm of what has always been.
How much of our earth is seeded with heaven?
Why is this important to think about? It is because we often think of ourselves more highly than we ought. A child takes comfort in his own insignificance – mom and dad have a long and storied history that he hasn’t a clue of and it is good for him to know the world didn’t start when he was born. There was a string of stories, choices, chance meetings and close calls, of which he is one result.
King David, probably under a moon much like the one that pulled these thoughts from my head, said “What is man that you are mindful of him?” The significance of God’s mindfulness of man is magnified by his insignificance when compared to these great realities that we were born into. Or to put it another way, we can only be significant in this great universe by way of our insignificance.
Thought Butter 