Fundamentals: Love #I

            When my daughter was in fifth grade I chaperoned her class to an over night trip to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.  We spent about five or six hours flitting from one area scientific inquiry to another before racking out in a hallway for a solid four hours of fifth-grade shut eye.  At some point during our museum meanderings we sat in the planetarium and watched a film about what the Big Bang might very well have looked like, if an Imax film crew had been there and if Archimedes had shared his place to stand.  Liam Neeson narrated.  His smooth baritone was both a full frontal assault and a warm blanket.  We watched explosions and flashes of light as Neeson rumbled at us, telling us that it is in chaos that the worlds come into being.  The birth of everything was a great clash, a violence that spins out into the universe and down to this very day.  Material existence, including us carbon based life forms, is violent and terrible.  Maybe especially so for life forms.

            The beauty of the film and Neeson’s authority captivated me, but the narration made little sense.  I started thinking about the little films of cellular division I saw when I was in fifth grade.  There was struggle, to be sure, and a great rending, but after it was over, there were two, then four, then sixteen cells.  I don’t know that violence and chaos is the best language for talking about that microscopic process or for the cosmic events forming and shaping our universe.  I wonder if the overarching theme might not instead be love. 

            There are people who argue that the story that unfolds in the first chapter of Genesis is really not about creation ex nihilo, but is instead a tale of order from chaos.  Read it again, you’ll see that they’re right.  That doesn’t mean that God did not create ex nihilo, but instead that the Genesis story takes place much later, after chaos crept in.  And God, whose breath hovers beautifully and poetically over the face of the waters, speaks order into the elements already swirling about. 

In a sense, that’s what love does.  Love brings order where there was none, not like Mussolini or some other fascist making the trains run on time, but like DNA allowing a tiger to be.  Love might be at the bottom (or top, or side, or around, or through) everything we see and don’t see.  And the reason some things seem wrong is that they’ve slipped the track and are no longer expressing love.