Walking the Cosmos: On Creation & Grandeur
Traversing a Franciscan Hiking Route with Matthew Andrews
Welcome to the February installment of Letter From the Editor — a personal essay from a Solum editor, discussing their current musings and contemplations, shared every other month. Today’s essay is written by Matthew J. Andrews, Solum’s Poetry Editor.
Prefer to listen to this piece? Matthew has kindly provided a narration of his essay below.
I’m fortunate enough to work for an employer with a structured (and mandatory) sabbatical policy, so over this past month, I’ve been enjoying the blessing of rest. There’s been plenty of reading, a surprisingly fruitful period of writing, and increased time spent with my family, all without the lingering anxiety that comes with having a career in the modern era.
I also managed to get away for a few days to stay at a hermitage in a Franciscan retreat center outside of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The hermitage was a small studio home with few amenities and 70 acres of mostly unoccupied land surrounding it. For a man looking for a short period of uninterrupted prayer and contemplation, it was perfect.
In addition to a few miles of meandering trails, the retreat center contained a number of features designed to facilitate spiritual engagement, ranging from the traditional (a labyrinth) to the more unique (a Native American sweat lodge). My favorite installment was The Cosmic Walk, a short hiking path with a series of markers designating various points along the creation of the universe, from the Big Bang (or The Great Flaring Forth, to use their more spiritually directed language) to our modern day. The markers were spaced out in relative proportion to the elapsing of time, so the distance between signs gradually became shorter as we approached most events of significance (from our perspective, anyway), ending in a cluster of markers at the end.
Like all good rituals, The Cosmic Walk uses the body and its movements to help us connect to a larger truth; in this case, all of the world, and all of time itself, is so large as to be beyond my comprehension. Slowly walking between markers and imagining the hundreds of millions of years in each stride, not to mention the acts of creation and formation involved in each single step, produced in me something like standing over the rim of the Grand Canyon: a sense of awe and grandeur, an understanding that the things that ail me are all fleeting and meaningless in comparison.
Like with anything ineffable, questions abound. Namely: if we are unique among created things, and I believe that we are, why all the waiting? Why billions of years of interstellar gases, cosmic debris ping ponging around the universe, molten bubbling on new planets, and people being formed at the end, almost as an afterthought? Of course, a more literal reading of Genesis, seven days being just that, sidesteps these kinds of questions by telling a truncated, and human-centric, creation story in which the world as we know it is crafted as a place for us to exercise dominion. But if the story is more allegorical, and if the scientists uncovering the long history of the universe are correct, what do we make of it all?
Like Job before the whirlwind, I have no answers to give. But I have to imagine that part of it has to be that, like many artists, God must derive some intrinsic joy from the things He has made. Why else spend eons taking space dust and forming it into the Himalayas, the rolling prairies, the Great Barrier Reef, the boreal forests, Big Sur, and each and every waterfall? And then why else populate that planet with such an infinite variety of life forms, from dandelions to redwoods, tardigrades to kangaroos? And then there’s the rest of creation, an endless expanse of galaxies, each one filled with stars and planets we’ll never visit, some of which we’ll never even see, and therefore existing almost solely for Himself. I think God loves when we delight in His creation, and I think He’s happy to share it with us, but if 13 billion years without humans says anything, it’s that our place in the audience isn’t necessary for creation to be endowed with holiness, for Him to relish in the work of His own hands.
After completing my first pilgrimage of The Cosmic Walk, I came across these words by Richard Rohr, which couldn’t have been more apt:
Creation—be it planets, plants, or pandas—was not just a warm-up act for the human story or the Bible. The natural world is its own good and sufficient story, if we can only learn to see it with humility and love. That takes contemplative practice, stopping our busy and superficial minds long enough to see the beauty, allow the truth, and protect the inherent goodness of what it is—whether it profits me or not.
I took a lot of hikes on the network of trails crisscrossing the property during my stay, and as I did, there was plenty of beauty to be found. The creek running slowly under a thin cover of ice. The hoot of an owl and song of a cardinal. The bark on each tree, grained uniquely like fingerprints. The meadow frosted with snow. The chattering of squirrels and the rustling of rabbits. The hibernating plants waiting for their moment to blossom. And occasionally, when we would meet somewhere in the woods, the smile on the face of a fellow pilgrim taking it all in.
