Dale Wyngarden: As the wonder of life continues, there's a lot to still wonder about
As time passes, some doors close and others open. Child rearing, career advancement and retiring a mortgage recede, opening opportunities to travel, plant a garden, follow a recipe, read, write or just ponder.
The longer we live, the more there is to ponder. Consider the explosion of awesome discovery coming from astronomy and cosmology. The Psalmist praises the Lord who “numbers the stars and calls them by name.” That’s no small task, given that the naked eye can see roughly 5,000 stars from the entire Earth.
But today, cosmologists estimate there are 100 to 200 billion stars in our galaxy alone … the Milky Way. Beyond that lie perhaps as many as 1 or 2 trillion more galaxies, each with billions of stars. Our nearest galactic neighbor, Andromeda, is 2.5 million light years away. Light travels at the incredible speed of 186,000 miles per second. Multiply that by 60 seconds, then 60 minutes, then 24 hours, and finally 365 days. for the miles light travels in a year. Now multiply that by 2.5 million. The light we see today is the light Andromeda emitted 2.5 million years ago.
And then ponder heaven. For the ancients, it was always up. John the Revelationist saw a new Jerusalem descending, and Jesus ascended. Beautiful imagery, but reflecting an age that envisioned earth capped by a celestial dome of warmth and light. Now that we’ve been to the mountaintop, we know the higher you go, the air becomes intolerably cold and impossible to breathe. And beyond earth’s protective atmosphere, cosmic radiation becomes deadly to all life. Pointing to Heaven with ancient certainty has grown uncertain.
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Hand in hand with heaven is the idea of eternal life. Stone Age burial mounds and pyramids alike included implements for an afterlife. The Hebrew Bible is vague on afterlife, but the Christian faith is grounded on it, offering up two options: Heaven for the righteous, and Hell for the unrighteous. Personally, I can’t imagine what cosmological contribution I could make living eternally, either in body or soul, in either domain. But I’m certainly open to surprise.
And ponder the roots of our religion in which God’s people understood the pathway to favor and forgiveness was by sacrificing a living creature. Cain presented God an offering of the fruits of his field, while his brother Abel offered flesh from his flocks. God, we are told, rejected Cain’s offering of crops, but found favor with Abel’s offering of flesh.
This same God tested the faith of Abraham by asking him to offer up his own son as a burnt offering, and was so pleased at Abraham’s willingness to do so that he recanted and settled for slaying a sheep instead. So began a millennium of God’s people giving thanks and seeking forgiveness by sacrificing living creatures. And then in an act of reciprocity, gospel authors tell us God offered up his own son as a human sacrifice as the ultimate act of forgiveness and love.
Or ponder the undercurrent in so many biblical stories that some lives are sacred but some seem expendable. Saving Lot, of all people, but obliterating Sodom and Gomorrah. A flood that wiped out almost all living things in a fit of displeasure. Liberation from bondage through the slaughter of Egyptian firstborn, children and animals alike. Genocide of Canaanites to settle a promised land.
Ponder how these foundational stories of faith might have made tolerable later Crusades that slaughtered indiscriminately; or centuries of religious wars pitting God’s followers against God’s followers; or ghettos, pogroms and the Shoah by Jesus’ followers; or church blessings upon colonialism that robbed, enslaved or eradicated indigenous peoples in Africa and the Americas. Might the course of history have differed if the authors of western religion reported that God found favor with the offering of crops instead of living creatures? Or been a little less prone to violent solutions? Or if he’d cut a deal with Sarah to become a great nation instead of Abraham?
There’s a lot to ponder in this business of living. It can be mystifying, exhausting and occasionally edifying. Wherever it leads, though, we are blessed to live in an age and a place where we are both challenged and able to lean into the mysteries of living. And there is comfort in the words of the late Richard Feynman who said he was less troubled by the questions that can’t be answered than by the answers that can’t be questioned. Amen to that.
— Community Columnist Dale Wyngarden is a resident of the city of Holland. He can be reached at wyngarden@ameritech.net.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Dale Wyngarden: As the wonder of life continues, there's a lot to still wonder about
