THE EARTH: Co-Creation

When Christianity came along it did one thing: it separated the sea and sky.

Or, better perhaps, it separated Heaven from Earth.

God, the Father, is in Heaven.  Up there in the wild blue yonder.

What is down here on Earth is evil.

Because it’s not God.

The Father.

A real and significant push to overlay this absolute view of God, the Father, onto the ancient Earth-worshiping religions produced very real effects.

But whose idea was it, anyway, to make Earth and all that it does not a part of God,

The Father?

It was God the Father who created Sacred Earth.

It was the Holy Spirit who got its inherent wildness under control.

Well, under some control at least.

The Earth was created to be fecund.  It was designed to go forth and multiply.

To create.

And to co-create with God.

The Father.

For a while now I have been using a certain metaphor for God’s creativity: He begins the painting, but leaves off at a certain point.

And we continue on with the painting.

The creation.

We are not the only creators on Earth.  Or co-creators with God, the Father.

Earth itself creates.  Designs, perhaps, even.

I will admit here and now, standing before you, that I’ve always had a problem with the theory of evolution.

Biological evolution, that is.

Spiritual evolution is perhaps a concept that I created and haven’t really shared with others yet.

Perhaps it was the way biological evolution was taught to me.

Here’s a butterfly that has certain markings that let birds know not to eat it.  It tells the world around it that it is poisonous.

Here is a moth with the exact same markings as this butterfly.  It’s not poisonous, it has just developed these colors to fool the birds. 

So I just sat there and went, hum.

Apparently I was supposed to imagine a moth, Mr. Tildy we can call him, who looked up one day and said, Wow!  Look at that butterfly!  That’s so cool!  He’s not getting eaten because of his markings!  I want those markings.  What a great way to avoid being eaten by birds!

So Mr. Tildy went off and changed his coloring.  He looked in his little mirror and was pleased with the results.  He was not eaten by the birds because they thought he was poisonous like the butterfly.

And so Mr. Tildy told the other moths he knew to do the same.  And they did.  And they lived happily ever after.

The end.

To my mind, even Beatrix Potter provides a truer explanation of how nature works than this.

Now admittedly I am an old lady, and perhaps this “science” is taught differently nowadays.

But, really, I’ve heard more “and the animal wanted such-and-such and went off and changed itself so it could have what it wanted” statements than I care to admit.  Would that I carried a heavy stick in order to whack anyone who gleamed after stating this or hearing such a statement.

First, a butterfly flies in the daytime.  Moths fly, generally, at night.

Was Mr. Tildy on the day shift that year and just happened to see the right-colored butterfly on his way home from work?

How did Mr. Tildy understanding the relationship between the coloring and messaging to the birds?

How did Mr. Tildy find an ability to physically change himself through willing himself to be changed? (My favorite question I will admit.)

How does will effect changes in one’s physical appearance?

I mean, I’m a human, and I can’t will my appearance to change.

So how is it that a moth can do it?

The profound discrimination against Sacred Earth, our refusal to treat it as something real, has made us blind to it’s powers.

I have been watching documentaries on the Earth from a scientific point-of-view (and I will be reading The Origin of Species this summer).  And some of this has been fun.

Moths actually do something quite spectacular.

Flying about at night they tend to run into bats.  And bats like to eat them.

Bats use echolocation to find their way about in the dark: they send out a sound and listen to how it bounces off of something to determine what and where something is.

There are moths that can actually make certain sounds that jam the echolocation function of the bat.  Confuse it.

And by doing so find their way through a cloud of bats out looking for dinner.

No, I am not going to sit here and dream up how a group of moths, perhaps led by Mr. Tilde’s great- great-grandson, got together one early morning, just before they tucked in for the day, and dreamed up this scheme.  Drew up plans.  Tested different “evolutions” of themselves until they found one that worked.

Good Grief.

Moths go out.  They do their thing.  They die or live to the next day and repeat doing their thing.

That’s it.

Moths are not architects.  Moths are not engineers.

And moths are not magic.

So who is?

The more you study nature the more you have to sit back on your heels and go, Who designed this?

Because we live in the world that we live in we immediately go, God, the Father, that’s who!

Really?

Because God, the Father sits around and in his spare time concerns himself with the colors of butterflies and the sounds that moths make?

If you think this I urge you to go back to church and read the Bible some more.

These are the kinds of things that appeal to a feminine mind.  The intricate designs.  The interweaving of systems.

The game of life on Earth.

The more I watch these nature documentaries the clearer I can hear the voice of Sacred Earth.

That was created by God, the Father.

To do just what it does: create nature.

To be continued….