Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast
"Our Sacred Story, Part I: Spiritus"
Rev. Rod Debs
December 5, 2004

Guided Reflection: I invite you to join in a Guided Reflection. Close your eyes if you wish, and let your mind paint a picture. In the beginning a Big Bang created the universe. This is our story of creation, our sacred story.

After the Big Bang set the universe expanding, immense clouds of swirling gases cooled into clots of matter drawn together by the attractive forces of their gravity. As the massive bodies contracted, the cores heated until their atoms overcame the electrostatic forces that keep them apart. The nuclei of hydrogen atoms fused and formed helium while liberating energy. Thus the thermonuclear furnaces called stars were ignited and lit up the heavens.

Ten billion years after the Big Bang, a star---our sun---was born in the Milky Way galaxy. Circling that star were clouds of gases that coalesced into smaller bodies called planets. One of the planets was Earth, some 4.6 billion years ago, an aggregation of dust and meteorites. Earth grew for millions of years, absorbing anything that came its way, sweeping up cosmic dust as it orbited the sun. Hydrogen and helium that surrounded the earth were too light to be held by the planet's gravity, so they escaped into space. The primordial atmosphere that remained was 98% carbon dioxide (1.9% nitrogen and 0.1% argon).

As Earth cooled, volcanoes spewed vast quantities of lava, ash and gases, water vapor, carbon dioxide, and compounds of sulfur, nitrogen and chlorine. Molecules of methane and ammonia formed from the elements in the gases, but there was no free oxygen, necessary to sustain life. The gases, known as greenhouse gases, formed an atmospheric blanket that was transparent to the sun's rays. Sunshine reached Earth's surface as short wavelengths. But when radiation of longer wavelengths reflected back towards space, the atmospheric gases behaved like the glass of a greenhouse and trapped them, holding heat like a blanket, raising the surface temperature of Earth to between 120 and 165 degrees F.

As volcanic activity subsided, the atmosphere cooled enough for water vapor to form clouds and then to rain on Earth. Thus began the water cycle, the continuous process of condensation-rain-evaporation, crucial to life.

There was no soil, but over aeons, small quantities of salts and elements leached from rock and accumulated in rivers, lakes and oceans. Atoms and simple combinations of atoms in the atmosphere wafted across the surface of the ocean and dissolved into the waters. Eventually this rich mix of atoms and molecules interacted to form more complex structures, the building blocks of large compounds in living cells---nucleic acids, proteins, lipids and carbohydrates, compounds that transmit hereditary information, carry out metabolic reactions and form the cellular structures of all organisms. In this prebiotic environment, conditions were accumulating that made it life possible.

In less than a billion years, life appeared spontaneously in the oceans. We can only speculate on the bizarre experimental forms that the first cells, protocells, took, but eventually one cell acquired the properties that enabled it to succeed where countless others had failed. It survived. It replicated itself. That cell was the ancestor of every living thing that exists today---one cell whose offspring eventually filled the oceans, covered the land and soared into the skies.

Carbon dioxide in the air dissolved into the oceans, where microscopic marine animals used it to create shells made of calcium bicarbonate. When they died, the shells sank to the ocean floor, accumulating through the ages to form carbonate rocks such as limestone, at the same time preventing massive amounts of carbon from returning to the air. Earth's atmosphere began to change.

2.5 billion years ago, a group of microorganisms evolved a metabolic process we call photosynthesis. In this process, plants use carbon dioxide, water and light to produce glucose and release oxygen gas. For every six molecules of carbon dioxide transformed into a molecule of sugar, six molecules of oxygen are released into the atmosphere. Little by little, the balance of gases shifted imperceptibly towards the oxygen-rich atmosphere we know today.

As algae altered the chemical makeup of the air, plants invaded land with a blossoming in both diversity and number of living things. As plants became prolific in the oceans and on land, animals evolved, herbivores and then carnivores, thriving on the oxygen-rich atmosphere, the sunshine, the waters, and the dust of the universe we call Earth. This is our story of life, a sacred story.

Message: Spirit--what exactly is spirit? The term seems to be above the vulgar demand for an earthly definition, so holy. And spirituality--does spirituality have anything to do with the real world? This morning I would like to suggest to you that spirit and spirituality are very real, earthly concepts.

This morning and in future messages scattered over the next few months, I hope to focus on our modern creation story, our sacred story of air, water, earth and fire. This morning I draw from the scientific work of David Suzuki (The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature, 1998) to reflect on spiritus.

Let me begin by saying what spirit is not. Spirit is not individual identity or soul. The Egyptian cult of the dead viewed each person as having seven personalized souls: their life-force of blood, their moral judgment or conscience in the heart, their ghost that appears at death as a human-headed bird, their carved or painted semblance, one's shadow, body, and the person’s secret soul-name holding individual power. Spirit is not to be confused with these Egyptian components of individual soul.

Spirit is also distinct from the Archaic Greek concept of individual personality, psuche translated as psyche or soul. In the Iliad and Odyssey, the "free soul" personality or psyche is the double of an individual who appears to journey away from the body when in a trance, in fainting or in death. Spirit is not to be confused with soul in the sense of a little guy inside, the ghost in the machine. Contemporary Christian notions of personal immortality, notions of eternal torment or bliss in heaven or hell, reflect such Archaic Greek or Egyptian influences distinct from spirit.

The spirit of which I speak this morning is the purely biological essence of all life, the universal breath of life. To the Greeks, pneuma was the breath of life. To the Hebrews, the breath of life took two forms: the inner animating element of respiration was nefesh or the universal soul, while the external element of life force or spirit was ruah, experienced as wind, whirlwind, storm or volcano. The spirit was not an individual identity or soul, but the natural and universal force of life in breath and wind (see Ezekiel 37.1-5,7-14).

Spiritus in Latin means "breath" or "air," that invisible element which surrounds us, fills us and gives us life. We call it wind, atmosphere, sky, the heavens. In Genesis it is the spirit moving over the face of the waters; in Psalm 33, the divine command that created the world. (Suzuki)

We live inside the atmosphere, the "ocean" of mixed gasses that form the outer layer of the planet. A thousand years ago, Plato pointed out that we are "dwelling in a hollow of the earth, and fancy that we are on the surface...." (Suzuki) We tend to think of ourselves as independent and autonomous beings, but air embraces us so intimately that it is hard to say where we leave off and air begins.

Automatically controlled by the oldest part of the brain, the respiratory center of the brain stem, we breathe whether awake or asleep. Try stopping your breathing. In a few seconds, your body will demand air; within a minute, blood vessels in your head will bulge, your heart will pound, and your chest will heave with silent screams for air. In two or three minutes most people suffer irreversible brain damage and the finality of death within four or five minutes. We are more than air breathers; we are creatures evolved with, by and for the substance we need every minute of our lives.

Your upper body is one big air trap, an immensely complex system. The muscles of the diaphragm, stimulated by oxygen chemoreceptors in aorta and carotic arteries, contract to create a partial vacuum in the thoracic cavity. Air rushes through your nostrils where it is filtered, and in the process, olfactory sensors stimulate appetite, arouse, warn and soothe you. Three to four liters of air passes through trachea, through bronchi that supply each lung and into steadily narrowing passages that culminate in grapelike sacs called alveoli---300 million alveoli!

The alveoli are lined with a three-layered film that is fifty times thinner than a sheet of airmail stationery. Air passes through this filter and is absorbed into the bloodstream of 25 billion red blood cells, each red blood cell with as many as 350 million hemoglobin molecules, each binding four molecules of carbon dioxide or oxygen for transport to or from the lungs. The line where air leaves off and our cells begin is blurred. Our planet's atmosphere is as much a part of us as the air bladder of a fish is part of it. (Suzuki)

What is more, we are part of one another; our lives interpenetrate! Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley offers this thought exercise about air. While air is 99 percent oxygen and nitrogen, 1 percent is made up of argon. Now argon is inert, so it is breathed in and out without becoming a part of our bodies. Shapley calculated that each breath contains about 3 x 10 to the 19th power atoms of argon plus quintillions of molecules of carbon dioxide. Suppose you exhale a single breath and follow those 3 x 10 to the 19th power atoms of argon. Within minutes, they have diffused through the air far beyond the spot where they were released. After a year, those argon atoms have been mixed up in the atmosphere and spread around the planet in such a way that each breath you take includes at least 15 atoms of argon released in that one breath a year earlier! All people over the age of twenty have taken at least 100 million breaths and have inhaled argon atoms that were emitted in the first breath of every child born in the world a year before! These are Shapley's words:

"Your next breath will contain more than 400,000 of the argon atoms that Gandhi breathed in his long life. Argon atoms are here from the conversations at the Last Supper, from the arguments of diplomats at Yalta, and from the recitations of the classic poets. We have argon from the sighs and pledges of ancient lovers, from the battle cries at Waterloo, even from last year's argonic output by the writer of these lines, who personally has had already more than 300 million breathing experiences." (quoted in Suzuki)

Air is a matrix that joins all life together. Every day we absorb atoms from the air that once were a part of birds and trees and snakes and fish, because all aerobic forms of life share the same air. Air exits your nose to go right up your neighbor's nose! As we have breathed in our forebears, so our grandchildren and their grandchildren will take us in with their breath. We are bound up inseparably with the past and the future by the spirit we share. (Suzuki)

Plato was right that we are "dwelling in a hollow of the earth, and fancy that we are on the surface...." If the Earth were reduced to the size of a basketball, the part of the atmosphere where weather occurs and all organisms live would be thinner than the finest paper. We are part of that thin coating of gritty slime, the life that has taken hold and flourishes in interdependence in the hollow of Earth's atmosphere.

One might argue that this global perspective is irrelevant to the bottom line of survival in the marketplace. But there is overwhelming evidence that life's interdependence within the Earth's atmosphere is neither necessary, nor is it unchanging. Our neighbor Venus' atmosphere is composed primarily of greenhouse gases, water vapor and carbon dioxide, the average surface temperature, an inhospitable 860 degrees F. Mars has an atmosphere that is 95 percent carbon dioxide and the total volume of atmosphere is only .6 percent of Earth's---too diffuse to trap heat. The surface temperature of Mars is colder than -60 degrees F. Earth swings through space together with neighbors, fiery furnaces and icy rocks as our object lesson.

Though Earth's atmosphere has remained relatively static for several thousand years, through ice ages and interglacial periods, the atmosphere has been in constant flux. The present balance on Earth is 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen and 1% argon. Should that 21% oxygen change, only 15% oxygen would be lethal to life while 25% oxygen would ignite the atmosphere. The reality is that human technology is pushing the system; changes are happening very rapidly. The exhalations of our machines are adding to and altering the constituents of air. How can anyone say that the global perspective is irrelevant?

The scientific data of Earth's evolutionary interdependence is not just useful information for economic opportunism. Earth's story of spirit and interpenetrating oneness is worthy of religious awe and wonder. We must ask: What is the bottom line on planet Earth? What is #1 among the many meanings of our lives on Earth? What is holy? What is sacred? I submit that the bottom line of our existence is not the marketplace of economic survival and accumulation of wealth, not free trade nor the global economy. The ideology of economics is too temporal and myopic and individualistic and ignores the most obvious evidences of our interdependence: breath and wind.

Every breath is a sacrament,
an affirmation of our connection
with all other living things.
Our breath is a part of life's breath. --David Suzuki

Whenever I counsel individuals in crisis, those who have lost a loved one and are suffering a sense of grief and emptiness, I ask them to find that which strengthens them, what heals them and makes them feel strong. Often, very often, almost without exception, people find their healing in nature. They breathe deeply out of doors. Thomas Berry wrote:

“When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

The first and last breaths we take and all those in between tell a magnificent story of oneness and interdependence: Spiritus Sanctus, the spirit moving over the face of the waters, breathes life into the world, strengthening and healing us.

In The Dream of the Earth, Thomas Berry wrote:

It's all a question of story.
We are in between stories.
We are in trouble just now
because we do not have a good story.

May this story of evolutionary interdependence, may our oneness of spirit be more than useful data. May it be to us a Sacred Story.