Opening Words from Sun. December 31 by Brian Vandenberg
Today is New Year’s Eve. Many will be going to parties where there will be much merriment, singing, countdowns, kissing (and more). Restraints are lifted; noisemakers, hats, costumes, games and drinking to excess mark this joyous occasion. It is an affirmation of life, but just below the frantic fun lies the thorn of mortality:
“We have made it through another year!!”
“Will we make it through the next??”
New Year’s Eve parties are part of a larger calendar of life. New Year’s is a national holiday that formally marks a change in time; banks, schools, government and businesses are closed, our calendar scrolls from 2017 to 2018 as we are synchronized to a communal rhythm regulating our individual lives. New Year’s marks an end, and a beginning, in the seasonal round of time. A time of pause to consider the passage of time, reflect on our lives and our place in the larger cosmic arc. It is the oldest of human holidays, dating back to Egypt and Babylon, and the most universally celebrated world-wide. It is a celebration that has been often associated with celestial events; winter solstice, moon and sun cycles, seasonal changes. This celestial ordering of our lives has also been accompanied by cosmological myths and stories of our human origins and fate. Our contemporary celebration of January 1 st is a legacy of the Roman calendar and cosmology; January named after Janus, a two-faced god, simultaneously looking backward and forward in time. While New Year’s has recently become secularized, it has long associations with both pagan and Christian celebrations.
It is most appropriate, then, that today Claude will discuss the scientific understanding of the cosmos and its role in our human origins. This is our Ethical Society origin “story”, and is why we have a prominent display of evolution in our gathering space downstairs. I use the word ‘story’ metaphorically, as this story is derived from fact not fantasy.
I know many find this “story” unappealing cold, rational, and without appreciation of the transcendental mystery that pervades our lives. And this is mostly an accurate assessment of the scientific method: It is purposely impersonal, which is required to arrive at facts that are a universal and not dependent on the perspective of any one observer. Understanding must be derived from a reasoned integration of the facts that anchor explanation in the material world. However, the understanding that results from this method, while not transcendental, is certainly not lacking in wonderment.
Our presence here today is bestowed by miraculous conception. We are stardust, composed of elements forged in cataclysmic cosmic conflagrations of unimaginable scope and power, hurling seeds of new forms, new worlds, into the void, across vast distances of space and time. The earth and all life found here, past and present, are the progeny of these seeds. And the dust that is us, configured into breathing, beating life for a cosmic eye-blink, derives its origins from the happenstance of millions of years of cumulative couplings, reaching back to the first wriggling’s of life on this planetary outpost.
Almost as miraculous, we speak here today of these origins. Dust giving voice to its own beginnings; the cosmos, through our most frail, ephemeral being, bearing witness to itself.
The facts, methods and rational inquiry of science yields an origin “story”, rooted in the material world, that is more astonishing than any conjured through transcendental metaphysics. In Goethe’s words:
“The highest religious act is the shudder of awe before the visible universe”.
May you experience a shudder of awe at the wonderment of our cosmic origins.