Leaving a Path

Photo by Lili Popper on Unsplash

There’s a great story in the Hebrew Scriptures about Moses asking Yahweh to show him his glory. Yahweh replies that no one can see His face and still live. So, the Israelite God finds a loophole.

He tells Moses to sit on a rock and explains, “When my glory passes, I will set you in the cleft of the rock and will cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand, so that you may see my back; but my face may not be seen” (Exodus 33:22-23).

The Hebrew word translated as “back” can also mean “hindquarters” or “rear,” which makes my immature side want to giggle. But the message here is really quite compelling. In effect, God tells Moses that he can’t look directly at him; he can only see where he’s been. We can’t say for sure what God is, but we can see where the divine has been present and draw some reasonable conclusions from there.

That’s my great desire, to identify the “things real” in my experience, the fingers that point to a moon that make sense to me. There are three such dynamics—three ways I see “something more” at work, three ways we can look at the universe and see where divinity has been.

The first is "unity in diversity." All the matter that exists in our universe today came from the death of starts. As Carl Sagan famously said, "We are made of star-stuff." So, even on a physical level, we are all part of some "unity," but for some reason, that unity expresses itself in incredible diversity.

The second dynamic that's part of the path showing where the divine has been present is "creativity in motion." The universe is on the move, both physically and metaphysically. Galaxies are expanding at breakneck speed, and within our own, the Earth rotates around the sun at a pace that seems to require seatbelts. And somehow this movement forward results in the development of completely new things. Amazingly, the primordial soup of the early universe somehow, over billions of years, became cells. And somehow those cells joined and complexified to the point that life came on the scene. And again, after ridiculous amounts of time, that life developed the capacity for thought and actual self-awareness.

The third dynamic is mind in matter. That last example - of life developing the capacity for conscious awareness - is such a mind-blowing instance of "creativity in motion" that it deserves it own category! When you think about it, inanimate matter able to reason and solve problems and crack jokes is beyond astounding.

These three dynamics are the closest things I have to the "hindquarters" Moses was said to get a glimpse of in the Hebrew Scriptures. They are the most compelling fingers pointing to the moon that I know.