If the creation account in Genesis 1 were written today

Lately, I've been thinking about the relationship between religion and science as part of a Sunday morning adult class I'm teaching and in preparation for an article that's due next Thursday. (There's nothing like a deadline to get the adrenalin flowing!) I ran across this piece in my file from a woman named Pat Schroeder from Overland Park, Kansas. She was on a mission trip with some members of her church near the Rift Valley in Tanzania and was asked to lead a devotion on Genesis 1:24-25: "And God said, 'Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.'  And it was so.  God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind.  And God saw that it was good."  This is what she wrote:

If the first chapter of Genesis was written today, using our most current scientific understanding, it might sound something like this:

In the beginning, God created.


From one very small dot, all forces and all matter started to expand. The universe began.

And a second passed as the universe started to cool. The basic forces emerged: gravity, weak and strong nuclear forces, electromagnetic force. Fundamental particles formed: quarks, electrons, photons, neutrinos. Soon protons and neutrons began to form.

And three minutes passed as simple nuclei formed, and they became hydrogen and helium. And for 500,000 years the universe expanded and cooled. Photons from this period are still observed as cosmic microwave background radiation.

And through one billion years, pockets of gas attracted by gravity grew more dense, becoming stars when nuclear fusion reactions ignited.

And through three billion years galaxies formed, spirals and spheres, and stars collapsed to form black holes.

And through six billion years some stars died when they exploded as supernovas, scattering heavier elements — oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, calcium, iron, even gold, silver, lead, uranium — into interstellar space.

In this time our solar system and its planets formed.

And through a billion years, Earth cooled.

And on Earth, single-celled organisms appeared.

And over three billion years, algae, bacteria, jellyfish, amoebas, worms, and sponges developed.

Then through 100 million more years, trilobites, clams, snails, corals, then starfish and sea urchins grew.

And during 50 million years, land plants, ferns, sharks, boney fish, scorpions, and insects flourished.
And through 40 million years, reptiles, spiders, and then conifers developed.

And in 100 million years, turtles, lizards, dinosaurs, and mammals appeared.

And in another 100 million years, squid, frogs, birds, flowering plants, snakes, modern fish, and a variety of dinosaurs flourished.

Many times extinctions happened, and much of life perished.

And through 40 million years, many more mammals appeared, and grasses, and apes.

And during 20 million years, hominids appeared.

And through one million years, mammoths, mastodons, and Neanderthals flourished, and disappeared.

And through 200,000 years, Homo sapiens developed and still flourish.

These are the generations of the creatures on Earth, their story.


The first reading at the Great Vigil of Easter is traditionally the creation account from Genesis 1. I'm thinking of using Pat Schroeder's version this year. A blessed Lent to all of you. jpr

Happy Valentine's Day, Nancy!

For Nancy, on Valentine’s Day

Sometimes I see old couples in winter

  who’ve been together for awhile, say,

  more than ten but less than fifty years.

Lovers who’ve been together and are still in love

            but in ways they never imagined

            in that first full blush of spring a lifetime ago.

There is a tender, vulnerable quality

  in the way they touch and talk and laugh together.

The smiles on their faces almost mask

            the necessary pain around their eyes,

            stigmata of a life lived full and well,

            drunk deeply to the dregs.

You get a sense they’ve been together

            for long enough now,

            that she knows that he knows that she knows …

And  like a couple of old jazz musicians

  who’ve played together for so long,

  they no longer know where one ends and the other begins,

or two dancers who know

            each other’s favorite moves so well,

or maybe two old cypress trees

            on the side of a wind-swept cliff,

            bent but not broken by rain and wind,

they cling to each other,

  roots and branches intertwined,

  and seem to hang on for dear life or

              maybe just because it’s so much fun to wait

            together for whatever storm or treasure

            the ocean will blow in next.

They can’t imagine doing this with anyone else.

I’d like to be like that with you.

jpr (2/14/03)

Pete Seeger, RIP

A great warrior who loved his country as well as its people died yesterday. His obit in this morning's NYT Pete Seeger 1919-2014 is worth a read if only for the window it provides on what Richard Hofstadter once called  the paranoid style in American politics. In the face of powerful resistance, he kept on singing with gentle and joyful strength about the best our country stands for. He wasn't perfect and never claimed to be. I always thought he missed the irony of Bob Dylan going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival to howls of protesting "folk music purists" - an oxymoron if there ever was one. Nevertheless, he championed music that inspired and fueled an American Revolution and reflects values I learned even in my small, parochial midwestern home town. In his nineties, he was still on stage flanked by musicians he inspired like Bruce Springsteen, David Byrne, Dave Matthews, and Emmylou Harris. He was a giant and we will miss him even as we keep singing his songs. jpr

Salmon, People, and Place

One of the best books I’ve read in any category this year is Salmon, People, and Place: A Biologist’s Search for Salmon Recovery (http://osupress.oregonstate.edu/book/salmon-people-and-place) by Jim Lichatowich. In the book, Lichatowich convincingly argues for a new way of thinking about salmon recovery but also about how human beings relate to the natural world—what people of faith refer to as “creation.” In an interview with OPB’s Ashley Ahern (http://earthfix.opb.org/flora-and-fauna/article/earthfix-conversation-author-calls-for-philosophic/), he talks about two major ideas that lie at the heart of his argument.

The first is what naturalist John Livingston refers to as the environmental iceberg, i.e., all environmental problems are like icebergs which have a visible part above the water—in the case of salmon the symptoms are dams, poor logging practices, overharvest, misuse of hatcheries, etc. But as with icebergs, there is much greater part that’s under the water and is invisible. It is made up of the myths, beliefs, and assumptions that we bring to any problem. Again, in the case of salmon, this includes our misguided efforts to use hatcheries—literally “fish factories” as they were first called—to have “salmon without rivers” (the title of another book by Lichatowich; http://islandpress.org/ip/books/book/islandpress/S/bo3560726.html). In ignoring these myths and beliefs that make up our “salmon story” we risk the future of not only salmon but the other 140+ species that salmon have created and support in the salmon ecosystem. We will remain largely powerless to address the problem of vanishing wild salmon in an effective way until we examine the part of the iceberg that’s underwater.

The second idea comes from writer Gary Nabhan who believes that species go extinct not because we destroy the last one but because the web of relationships that sustains them unravels. In the case of salmon, their demise is a result of our attempts to manage them and while ignoring the highly complex ecosystem in which they live out their life history and of which they are the keystone species.

Lichatowich believes that in order to “save the salmon” (who may, in turn “save” us) we need a new salmon story, one in which not only salmon numbers are important but in which the entire life history of salmon and the multiple habitats in which that history is lived out are taken into account. You might think of it as an ecological approach to salmon recovery.

Being in the “myth, belief, and assumption” business myself, I find Lichatowich’s ideas to be both a challenge and an invitation. For example, anyone who’s ever worked in a church or other institution knows the power of invisible underlying myths and beliefs because we run up against them every day. He adds new meaning to a perspective that many of us have held for a long time: caring for creation is a profoundly spiritual undertaking and the place to start is with our most basic beliefs about creation and our place in it as human beings. I hope to follow up some of these ideas in future blogposts and I invite you to join the conversation. In the meantime, I highly recommend Jim’s book. jpr

Follow-up to A River Never Sleeps

Here's a short trailer with angler and film-maker Mel Krieger reading the passage from A River Never Sleeps that I quoted in last week's blog. It's filmed in Patagonia which is on my short list of places I'd like to fish before I die. I hope you enjoy it.

Blessing the waters of Moxlie Creek

Yesterday was the Baptism of Our Lord according to the liturgical calendar. In the Orthodox tradition it's also the time for house blessings (Epiphany) and the Great Blessing of the Waters. A group of us met at a local park to learn more about our watershed and bless the waters of Moxlie Creek, a local stream that flows for most of its short length through a pipe underneath downtown Olympia. The prayer we used is adapted from the Service of Baptism in the Leader's edition of Evangelical Lutheran Worship. 

Just and compassionate God, you are the river of life, your are the everlasting wellspring, you are the fire of rebirth.
We thank you for oceans and lakes, for rivers and streams. We honor you for cloud and rain, for dew and snow. Your waters are below us, around us, above us: our life is born in you. You are the fountain of resurrection.
We praise you for your saving waters: Noah and the animals survive the flood, Hagar discovers your well. The Israelites escape through the sea, and they drink from the gushing rock. Naaman washes his leprosy away, and the Samaritan woman will never be thirsty again.
Today we ask your blessing upon our watershed--Moxlie Creek-- along with the waters of Ward Lake, the Deschutes River and its estuary, and all the waters of Puget Sound and the Salish Sea. Breathe your Spirit into all of us who are gathered here and into all creation. Strengthen us to redouble our efforts to preserve, protect, and defend the gift of clean water and healthy watersheds so that they might continue to be a blessing for all the people and all the creatures that depend upon them for life. Illumine our days. Enliven our bones. Dry our tears. Wash away the sin within us, and drown the evil around us.
Satisfy all our thirst with your living water, Jesus Christ, our Savior, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen

A River Never Sleeps

In Roderick Haig-Brown's classic 1974 book, A River Never Sleeps, (Skyhorse Publishing, 2010), he concludes with these words: "I still don't know why I fish or why other men fish, expect that we like it and it makes us think and feel. But I do know that if it were not for the strong, quick life of rivers, for their sparkle in the sunshine, for the cold grayness of them under rain and the feel of them about my legs as I set my feet hard down on rocks or sand or gravel, I should fish less often. A river is never quite silent; it can never of its very nature, be quite still; it is never the same from one day to the next. It has a life of its own and its own beauty, and the creatures it nourishes are alive and beautiful also. Perhaps fishing is, for me, only an excuse to be near rivers. If so, I'm glad I thought of it."

Like Haig-Brown, I love to fish because it gives me an excuse to be near water. On this weekend when we celebrate the Baptism of Our Lord (January 12) and members and friends of The Lutheran Church of The Good Shepherd bless the waters of Moxlie Creek here in Olympia www.gsolympia.org, his words seem especially appropriate. May the rivers and streams of the Salish Sea watershed flow and flourish in 2014! jpr