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The Universe, God, and US

by John Rensenbrink

There is a story, handed down for generations, about a powerful potentate who wants to understand the nature of things. He directs his advisers to find and bring to him the best thinker in the realm. This is done. A sage, a man in the bloom of life, is ushered into his presence. "What is at the foundation of the world, what thing or force or being starts it, keeps it in place and functioning," he asks."Tell me what you really think, not what the popular religion says. You can be sure that I will keep in confidence what you tell me."

With that assurance, the sage bowed and stood for some time as if in deep thought. At last he motioned to the king and said with great emphasis and authority: "Sire, the world rests on a giant turtle." The king was startled, wondering if perhaps the man was toying with him, but he could not brush aside the answer because it evidently came from so deep a place and spoken with conviction. Still, the king was not born yesterday and after a moment he turned to the man and said: "But my dear man, what is underneath the giant turtle." "Another giant turtle," came the response. The king pounced on that one. "And what," he said with a degree of asperity, "does that turtle stand on?" The reply came back instantly: "From there it's turtles all the way down."

There are so many interpretations of this story. But what I note is the lightheartedness, the laughter, and the irony -- and beneath the irony this rueful (but also enlivening) realization — that there is no answer to this most fundamental of all questions. Not yet anyway. People of faith in one of the high religions would say that of course God is at the foundation of all things, to which the immediate and appropriate question is asked: and what does God stand on, who or what produced God? Another God? And thereafter, is it Gods all the way down?

Whoa, some may now say, you're just being anti-religious and a smart ass to boot. Au contraire! The story offers a way to reclaim religion. It offers a way to peel away the dross that has always clung to religion and to re-unite religion with its source in the spirit of wonder, the search for truth, and the longing for God.

The learned man in the story did not need to stand there as if in deep thought. He had already done all that, but he had to find a way to help the king go beyond popular revealed religion with its dogma, its claim to being the only channel to God, its absolute certainties, its coerced beliefs.

In "Letters to a Friend," the poet Rabindranath Tagore writes: "I know that a community of God-seekers is a great shelter for man. But directly this grows into an institution it is apt to give ready access to the Devil by its back-door."

By telling the story of the turtles the learned man wants to provoke the king to think outside the box, to realize that we human beings are in a life-situation the boundaries of which are not fixed. He longs to tell him directly that the cosmos is not fixed, nor, by the same token, is the earth a fixed entity, nor is his kingdom a fixed entity.

The sage would like to talk with the king in this wise: that all too often the reaction to our life-situation is to recoil in fear. Men and women build seemingly invulnerable defenses, walls of all kinds -- physical walls, social and political walls, and spiritual walls. They do it to keep out the fear. But the fear will never be assuaged by walls of dogma in the religious realm, or walls of military armament and bureaucratic orders in politics, or of bias and prejudicial stereotyping in social relations, or of belief in perfectly functioning markets in the economy, etc, etc.

Nor is the fear to be assuaged by adopting the skeptical posture, pretending that the fear is unreal -- this being the favorite respite of the post-pious liberal who thinks that through agnosticism he or she escapes the dilemma altogether.The agnostic reaction to pious belief is doubly unreal. It denies that the question posed to all men and women of the origin and ground of the world is not important; and couples this denial with indifference to the different answers that nevertheless abound all about them -- whether theistic or atheistic. They are no help in helping the species deal with their real life-situation.

Is there a different way to deal with the fear other than to invent yet another religion, secular or revealed, build yet more and more ingenious walls?. There is a different way. A tantalizing hint is half hidden in our story. The story invites us to fully accept our life situation, to see life not as a threat from which we must find shelter but as a stupendous and intriguing opportunity to explore, learn more and more about the world, the cosmos, and everyday life.

Safety comes from living as if life is real. One may shrug and say impatiently, of course it is real! But wait a minute: the human for a long time has not lived with an inner, confident, life affirming attitude of learning and discovery about all things high and low, but in an attitude of defensive fear , cowering before the inexplicable, denying it as much as possible, and scrabbling to get control of things. And so the human has missed half if not more than half of his or her life.

This has gone on for so long! Religions, which may have come into the world to revel in the source of being and to be a channel for the flow of joyous life, have instead tended to trade on the fear and to exploit that fear for the sake of control. So instead of being a channel for grace they become an obstacle to the flow of grace. Religions have worked hand in hand with entrenched political powers both to assist those powers in maintaining control and to preserve, even expand, the powers and privileges of the few over the many.

Which is not to say that all religions all the time have done so, or that religions of the future must and will surely always be like that. Not at all.

Looking forward, can we envision a human species will to life? Can we envision a powerful, species-wide, intention to engage with life, to savor it, to BE it, not to control and consume it? Will an ecological consciousness germinate and grow so that the everyday life of the human is suffused with the presence of living being whose being is daily acknowledged as real?

This world is our home. We are not just passing through. What are called animistic religions, such as that expressed by the aborigines of Australia, has come much closer to an understanding of God in nature than the high religions.

Nature, at every moment and in every nook and cranny, is the melding of the finite and the infinite. We human beings are part of nature, along with all other life. We are constituted as nature is constituted. In our being we unite the finite and the infinite and we are everyday invited to express this in our work, our families, our leisure, our politics, our worship. The longing for God is the longing for union with all things

What an exciting and satisfying world that would be/will be as our species acknowledges and grabs hold of this way of being. How much less fear! How much less loneliness! How much less need to control! How much greater freedom to explore, discover, learn. How much closer to being able to satisfy the longing for God through immediate experience of the life-world and the living beings that God inhabits! "This is my father's world, and to my listening ears, all nature sings, and round me rings, the music of the spheres!" Sounds corny perhaps to post-pious and secularized ears, but it's real.

Religions then will either be fully consonant with this way of being, this way of finding and experiencing the longing for God, or they will go out of fashion. And quite rightly so. And, there is this very intriguing point: politics will then be free of politicized religion.Tthe authoritarian state will decline, maybe even wither away, because it's main prop has been dissolved; there will rise a genuine citizen-based politics, for everyone, rooted in the species' real-life situation.

But alas the sage knows that he cannot tell all this to the king. It's too much to say, it requires too many didactic words, too much rational discourse -- the king's eyes would glaze over before he even got to the middle and by that time the words would surely be misunderstood.

So he tells a story, a very enigmatic one, but one that just might be heard. It might lead the king to search for himself and within himself. It is up to the king to figure it out, having been given a tantalizing hint.

What happens to the sage? What does the king do? There are different versions. One version is that the king is furious, has the man tortured and beheaded. Another version is that the king looks hard at the man, smiles into his eyes, grips his hand with a gentle pressure of acknowledgment, and sends him on his way. And a third version? The king has the man to dinner during which the sage falls in love with the king's beautiful and life-affirming daughter, a physicist, and she with him, and they live happily ever after. THE END.

Second Note: If you are thinking that the Big Bang answers it all, think again and ask if perhaps that is just another giant Turtle.

He co-chairs the International Committee of ASGP. He is Professor Emeritus of Government, Bowdoin College; and is author of several books including Against All Odds: The Green Transformation of American Politics, Leopold Press, 1999.