At the Loom

Scripture: Genesis 1:1-5

Saturday was project day at our house on the lake. My father wanted to make sure I knew certain basic things—how to swing a hammer, how to make a straight cut with a handsaw, how to countersink a wood screw—and I wanted to learn them badly. In retrospect, badly is precisely how I did learn some of them. But the intentions were good, and so after a big breakfast of bacon and eggs he would lead me into the dark garage to pick out the tools and materials we needed for our various tasks.

As we walked into the garage, my father—who never tired of making the identical wisecrack over and over again—always started the same way: he’d flip the switch and in a deep sonorous voice declare “Let there be light.” Much later in life I would recognize that this was just one of the ways in which God made my father in His image. For, as the opening lines of Genesis tell us, God too turned on the light so He could get to work.

It is impossible to overstate the power of this idea. Think of it. Profound darkness—“darkness visible,” to use John Milton’s memorable phrase—covers everything. And then this vast and impenetrable blackness dissolves—or, maybe more accurately, blows apart—as a result of a single radical exercise of divine will. God creates light and, in the same gesture, creates language, the Word, the ineffable spoken Truth that God brings light to life so that God might bring light into life.

These are the first words God speaks to us: “Let there be light.” And I note in passing that if you wanted to adopt a creed to live by you could do a great deal worse than these four words. In the dark recesses of the world, let there be light. In the dark corners of our souls, let there be light. We might say such a blessing over a newborn: everywhere you go, in everything you do, let there be light.

We hear echoes of this imagery in the opening chapter of the Gospel of John. “In the beginning,” John tells us, “was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” Indeed, Jesus tells us to let our own light shine before others so they might see our good works and glorify the Lord.

The idea of “sudden light,” which we encounter in both the Old and New Testaments, shapes our thinking in two distinct ways. It describes an external reality—a sudden and defining instant when “the light comes on” and darkness no longer prevails around us. And it describes an internal reality—a state of mind and spirit where light fills our souls and darkness no longer prevails within us.

Eastern philosophy describes this internal reality with the appropriately luminescent word “enlightenment.” In the stories of these traditions, enlightenment typically comes suddenly, sometimes humorously. One of my favorites comes from a Zen tale. In the story, a Zen master commands his pupil to meditate in order to gain enlightenment. The student labors at this with no success, repeatedly returning to the master to complain about his lack of progress. Finally, the master gives him this ultimatum: “Meditate for three days longer, then if you fail to attain enlightenment, you had better kill yourself.” “On the second day,” the story concludes, “the pupil was enlightened.”

Of course, our own Christian tradition recognizes the phenomenon of sudden enlightenment as well. Indeed, one of the leaders of our faith was abruptly enlightened both figuratively and literally. “Now, as [Saul] was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. And he fell to the ground. And he heard a voice.”

As I say, this idea of “sudden light” shapes our understanding of fundamental external and internal realities. But this carries with it a risk. For it may lure us into thinking of God’s creative activity as primary rather than continuous. And it may seduce us into viewing our commitment to God as an instantaneous change rather than as an organic process of growth.

In recent years, many people have focused on God’s initial creative activity. So we’ve heard a great deal of talk about “intelligent design” and “creationism,” much of which has labored in one way or another to discredit the Darwinian theories of evolution and natural selection. I respect the passion and zeal of those who worry after this issue. I confess, though, that I’ve always been a little puzzled by the amount of attention the issue has received.

It has always seemed to me that the Bible and biology set out to address different sorts of questions. It is therefore unsurprising they would offer different sorts of answers. If my question is “How am I to live? What should I do with my life? How can my life have meaning?” then science may suggest some partial responses, but it cannot offer anything like a comprehensive answer.

I do not turn to science for such answers, even though I am a devoted disciple of the utility of science, anymore than I turn to my car owner’s manual for such answers, even though it's pretty useful, too. I do not turn to Isaac Newton and to the Isaac of the Bible for understanding of the same sorts of things. You've probably heard the story of the scientists who struggle to the top of the mountain of truth, only to discover the theologians there waiting for them.

I invite you to think about it this way. Let’s assume for purposes of discussion that evolution is an established scientific fact—I recognize that opponents resist this idea, but let’s assume it to be the case. Now, what follows from that assumption? Well, I can tell you what doesn’t follow. What doesn’t follow is that evolution therefore offers a comprehensive explanation of reality—external or internal. Indeed, quite plainly it does not. Neither, for that matter, does gravity—something we all accept as a scientific fact even though it conflicts with numerous biblical texts.

Those who have tried to make evolution into a comprehensive explanation of reality have been pretty convincingly rebutted. In his wonderful book Being Good, the Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn offers several arguments against those who have attempted to convert evolution into what he calls a “Grand Unifying Skepticism.” Along the way, Blackburn points out that evolution actually fails to explain many things, including such questions as why we are fond of the songs of birds, or why we like the taste of cinnamon, or why we have ticklish feet.

I respect the fact that people of good will can and do disagree about conflicts between faith and science. And I do not know where you stand on these matters. But I personally do not find my faith in God threatened by a theory of human development and behavior that cannot even explain why I like mustard and relish on my cheeseburgers. Partial explanations are just that: partial.

More importantly, though, all this focus on God’s initial acts of creation can distract us from God’s ongoing acts of creation. It shifts our attention toward God as a “prime mover,” to use Aristotle’s image, and away from God as a continuing creative force in the world and in our lives.

Denise Levertov beautifully and brilliantly captures this contrast in her poem The Task. She begins the poem by entertaining the image of God as an old man sitting upstairs snoring—and she rejects it. She describes God as being in “the wilderness next door … busy at the loom.” God is hard at work, she writes, indeed “absorbed in work, and hears the spacious hum of bees, not the din, and hears far off our screams … And hurries on with the weaving.”

God is at the loom, in the woods right next to us, listening to us. God is at the loom, laboring to transform our beseeching cries into music. God is at the loom, the light on, working busily, weaving a “complex creation” that is, as Archbishop Rowan Williams puts it, “coherent and fragile.”

I don’t pretend to know much about how to live. But I think that, when we get life right, we are at the loom as well, working beside God, with God, for God.

For most of us, perhaps all of us, enlightenment comes not at a point in time but through a process over time. We see this even in the dramatic conversion of Saul. A sudden flash of light knocks him to the ground and a divine voice interrogates him. And yet, years later, the same man—called Paul, now, to mark his defining change—must nevertheless ask himself why he does over and over again the things he most wants not to do.

Our struggles at the loom, like Paul’s, prove a source of frustration, confusion, and disappointment. Those struggles keep us humble as our light brightens and fades. At least that’s how it works for me. And that explains why, someday, I’m going to print up a bumper sticker that reads: “Unfortunately, my enlightenment seems to work on a dimmer switch.”

The stories from Eastern traditions I described earlier tend to have a common theme. The student seeks enlightenment but cannot find it. The master gives the student a koan—a sort of puzzle or riddle, like “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”—that forces the student into deep contemplation. Ultimately, however, the student discovers that enlightenment does not reside in complex theories or abstract intellectual concepts but rather in simple, basic, truths.

We might think of the opening verses of Genesis as a divine koan given to us by the true and final Master. After all, it has preoccupied an immense amount of intellectual energy over the years. And it is rich in puzzles: Where did God come from? Did time and space exist before God? If so, how did time and space come into being? If not, where did God exist and how could God engage in a creative process—which seems to presume the existence of time? How long were the days God created? Can we reconcile the creation story in Genesis with our current scientific understanding?

These questions are fun to debate and interesting to consider. But, as with all good koans, perhaps the point of the story is to learn to put aside the complexities and see the simple, basic truths the story conveys. We might summarize them in these three straightforward instructions, which may just be the secret to living faithfully and well:

Turn on the light.

Go to the loom.

Make something beautiful.