BY THE REV. EDGAR PEARA
Published: (Saturday, Nov 5, 2011 05:00AM)Midnight, Nov. 5
The marvels of nature fill me with reverence, awe and wonder.
The zygote, the single fertilized cell in a woman’s reproductive organs, contains one DNA. It has 1.3 million body-creating instructions, which in nine months multiply the one cell over six trillion times until at birth it has produced a gorgeous baby.
Just think of the marvel, when the infant is being delivered, that the life-sustaining breathing process transfers in an instant from the navel to the nose!
Shorebirds called godwits summer in the Aleutians. In the fall, they fly 7,200 miles in eight days across the trackless Pacific to New Zealand, where they winter. Monarch butterflies migrate in the fall from Canada to Mexico. They are the great-great-grandchildren of the ones who flew north earlier that year from Mexico.
Seminal creativity, beginning with single-celled life, took 3.5 billion years to evolve and bring people into being. During that time it nurtured and developed an evolving sensitivity, which sleeps in minerals, wakes in plants, moves in animals and blossoms into conceptual consciousness in us humans.
Since all that exists must have a cause, nature’s wonders are evidence that the sagacity that created them has an incredible intelligence surpassing any I can imagine. My awareness of them fills me with worshipful inspiration, which awakens and heightens religious elation in me.
I am astonished at the creativity that brings forth the marvels that fill our world. Its wonders fill me with awe; its beauties thrill my emotions; its achievements provoke my admiration; its laws ground me in security; its production of 11 million species overwhelms me with amazement.
To me, worship is feeding my mind with the marvels of nature’s incredible truths. They inspire me to devote my will to improving their purposes. They give me the instincts to survive, grow, develop, improve, and to seek happiness or fulfillment. They alert my conscience and motivate me to intercede in preserving their benefits for posterity.
I’m grateful that life gives me its support and guidance in helping to maintain them.
To me, the pinnacle achievement of creation is conceptual consciousness. With it I can entertain stirring ideas — love, industry, integrity, responsibility, generosity and more. That marvelous thinking power in humanity has brought into being so many of civilization’s wonders — morality, peaceful communities, prosperous economies, enlightening education, comfortable housing, inspiring rational religion and more.
Nature teaches me to obey the laws of life and endure; or disobey them and suffer. It reveals a system of order in the universe that, with the accurate observations and experiments of science, is constantly enabling us to improve our existence on Earth, enriching individual lives and improving the social order.
I try to find ways to make contributions to the human enterprise, to serve and benefit humanity and preserve the environment. Each day, I, a retired minister, pursue a different volunteer job, in the parks, Meals on Wheels, tree planting and more, with worshipful gratitude for being able to do so.
The Rev. Sir Edgar Peara is minister emeritus of an Illinois Unitarian Unversalist church and a member of the UU Church in Eugene and Unity of the Valley. This column is coordinated by Lane Interfaith Alliance to offer a deeper understanding of individual faith perspectives. For information on submitting an article, visit www.laneinterfaithalliance.org.