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It seems that for as long as we’ve had people, we’ve had stories of creation. As human beings we like to have an explanation of where we come from and why things are the way they are.
The world is created through the splitting of a great cosmic egg, or a great cosmic monster. People are called up through song, or created from mud. Suffering comes into the world through the shenanigans of a trickster god, or through opening a box that shouldn’t be opened. The stories are all different, but they all speak to our need to know who we are, how we got here, how we belong to the creatures around us, why life is the way it is (and, often, why life has to be so darned difficult).
As Unitarian Universalists, we, too, have a creation story. No doubt, it’s familiar to you:
In the beginning there was The One, all of everything packed together into an unimaginably dense Core of the Universe, the Seed of Everything. No one knows how long it was there, or how to describe the Nothing that surrounded it. It was before time, before Something and Nothing.
And then, in an instant shorter than an instant, The One exploded out into the Many, crossing what could now be called space at unthinkable speed. And there was the beginning of atoms. And across the unimaginable stretches of what would now be called time, new elements formed, the building blocks of existence.
And those elements became gas clouds that gave birth to stars, and the stars lived and died, giving birth to new clouds, new elements, black holes, galaxies, planets. And eventually, eventually, a medium-sized rocky planet came to dwell at a medium distance from a medium-sized star. Rain came to this planet in vast storms, creating oceans, and somehow in the oceans and the lightning and the elements a spark of life arose.
Across the unthinkable numbers of millennia, that spark of life learned to divide in half and make new life. And as the years wore on and on, cells learned to share themselves with other cells, and eventually there were plants and animals in a profusion that will never stop shifting and transforming and adapting so long as life exists.
That’s our creation myth, a story that is no less beautiful or powerful for the fact that it actually happened. I call it a myth rather than a scientific account because this story of creation holds religious weight and meaning for us. It isn’t just a set of facts, it’s a story about who we are, where we belong, what it means to be human.
What does the story say? Well, no good story has a single, “and the moral of the story is…” revealed meaning. But here’s a few of the things our story of creation means to me:
We live in a universe that mysteriously decided that it would be better to be a whole bunch of things rather than just one thing. In this universe, matter and energy (which turn out to be the same) can never be created or destroyed, but neither can they stay the same for very long at a time. We live in a universe that we have the power to shape, and which has the power to shape us, in each and every moment of our lives. Creation is not, and never was, a one-time thing accomplished by a god or gods. Creation is a story that has been unfolding for billions of years, and we have the immense privilege of making a few marks in this particular chapter. That’s our story, and we’re sticking to it.
Quest for Meaning is a program of the Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF).
As a Unitarian Universalist congregation with no geographical boundary, the CLF creates global spiritual community, rooted in profound love, which cultivates wonder, imagination, and the courage to act.