Painting in large, metaphorical brushstrokes here. Use any interpretation you like. This story has been told many times, over many millennia, in so many ways. The way I understand it is this:
We were created. We had no personal hand in that. However it all happened, we were not involved.
It doesn't matter which god we attribute with creation, be it a deity or a physical process. What matters is the fact - we know it to be fact these days - that life here began, and was made possible, by processes and events "out there," or subjectively, "up there," in the heavens, of the Universe, of stardust. Our world, our experience here, our existence, is what feels to us as the "end result" of creation, though we rationally know there's more, and sometimes remember it, and sometimes conveniently forget. And, like an unborn child, we were not involved.
We have, however, also like a child born to this world, evolved. We were born to our Mother, the Earth, this beautiful planet, this "pale blue dot," which gave us sustenance, gave us room to grow, provided for us, appetitive parasites, and hid us from the processes to which she, too, is a slave, a cog in the machine, a vessel. Yet, like children, we also need our Father, want to know him, to understand him, to matter to him, be he unmoved mover or big bang. We've explored the world, work, study and strive to learn what makes it all tick, we study the skies, we discover - we evolve, changing now and then, searching for our heavenly, universal, perhaps metaphorical father, for the seed that made all this possible, for the force that gave us form.
We do this through religion, through philosophy, through science, we try to see our father, to know or understand our father, through inquiry and prayer we're pounding on his door, calling, begging for the keys, but when we think we've found them through our telescopes, our microscopes, spectrometers and colliders and we cross the threshold, we find only another locked door on which to pound and beg. Still, our father doesn't answer.
Perhaps he isn't there? Perhaps we've upset him? Perhaps he's ashamed of us? And now we look less to the father and more at ourselves, and we make a choice.
I'm not saying it's an easy choice.
Some of us take faith that our father lives within us, acts through us, exists in some way whether we know him personally or not, and find some measure of peace in the faith that evolution is a process of becoming, of discovering and unfolding the product of creation (in which we were not involved). We learn, we explore, we tell stories of what we find, we tell them to the lost, dejected, tormented. We are driven to this by kinship, by love for our brothers and sisters, that all may find this moment of refuge, this scrap of peace.
Some of us continue banging on that door, and seek the secret formula to convince our father to accept us, imperfect as we are - we worship, we create and follow rules, we guess at what he wants, and come to hate ourselves a bit (and sometimes those around us) for what we are, because as long as that door remains unanswered whatever we are must surely not be good enough, not ready.
And some of us get angry, and turn away from the father we take to have rejected us. "The hell with you," we say, "who needs you anyway? We'll get on just find without you," and we set about becoming what we believe a father should be, we make ourselves the centre of our own Universe. A father is the seed of creation, and we take the role upon ourselves, and strive to create our own reality, strive to manipulate, rape our Earthly Mother, explore that we may exploit. We convince ourselves that it's our role to get involved.
Here we become our own false idols, assume a false throne at the height of creation. We obscure the meanings of words to announce that childhood has passed and the time has come to be our own Masters. We create a language to tell a different story, one to entice, to persuade, to explain this new reality, to rewrite and cloud our memory, and to confuse.
Oh yes, we need a language to confuse. Because a father carries an unintelligible authority, inaccessible to the uninitiated. The seemingly unattainable wisdom of the father is what gives him power over his children. The harder the subjects of this earthly kingdom work to understand, the less they'll realize their capacity to question.
Here we reject our universal father, lose faith, forget that we were created and rewrite the narrative to focus it on ourselves, and here we fall, and there will be no peace in the chaos we create, and there will be no true love where the meaning of the word is redefined and clouded, and there will be no transcendental joy in a world reduced to power struggles and politics, and there will be no sublime, painful beauty without utility, guilt and shame, and the paths we follow, seeking Truth, won't lead us there, but instead will start and end with only us. We'll search in all the wrong directions and come full circle ravenously hungry, tired, ever unsatisfied by what we've seen, and create ourselves some frivolous purpose to keep our hands busy, unsettled by the cowardice by which we force ourselves to endure another empty night, another empty dawn, another empty day.
(You say you hate me, but I love you,
and I worry about you, and I
want you to be happy. You say
you're here to save me, to protect
me, but that makes me sad, and
I won't let myself stand and be counted.
It's not your fault. I can't save you
either. I took awhile getting here. I'm
not a warrior, not a doctor, not a
preacher, not a prophet. I tell stories.)
So we follow a path of our own choosing, and here we are, a world of 7 billion trying, in our own ways, to play our roles and make it work. If it sounds depressing or pointless, it needn't be. There's a tiny silver lining in a world of pain and fear and cruelty and crisis, and it's that what is cowardice in some manifests as hope in others, and where there's hope lives a measure of faith in the forces beyond our control, a subconscious message buried deep within ourselves, speaking of a truth that exists with or without our acknowledgment. The message is a promise that reality existed before us, will exist beyond our time, and that any way we look at it, we were created. The message is an open door, inviting us back to a place of childlike wonder and exploration and discovery. The message tells us we all fall off the path sometimes, and that there are ways to find ourselves, to orient and right ourselves when we get lost.
This hope is our lifeline. Does that seem flimsy? Irrational? Unscientific? Spooky, maybe? Look beyond the words. Don't just read them, try to feel them. The open-minded, the open-hearted, the curious and the unafraid, the unbound and unaffiliated, the truest children-at-heart are guided by a constant taught by religions, mythologies, philosophy and yes, even science, and that constant, stapled across the canons, is that we, mere mortal humans, are incapable of certainty, and this for the better. If we had certainty there would be nothing to live for, nothing to fight for, nothing to look for, no stories to tell, and nothing to do.
