Primordial Warmth 7-29-9

One of life’s great delights for me is rubbing my face in a load of hot laundry just pulled from a dryer. The fresh smelling warmth is the epitome of coziness and softness, certain long haired cats excepted. Even in the heat of summer this is an enchanting experience. Perhaps, some kind of birth trauma is being soothed by such a sensory occurrence. Perhaps the sometimes cold harsh ways of the world are forgotten for a moment by a reminder of the dark safe warmth we lived in before birth. Lest I get in far over my head, I will stop with the peri-natal psychoanalysis now. All I know for sure is that it feels really good to indulge in this seemingly harmless little pleasure.

In South Carolina we live out a very hot humid life experience of the world in July and August. Dante’s Inferno is appropriate seasonal reading for this time of year. So it is with gratitude that I find myself in late July in a Christmas wonderland where the 4 PM air temperature is 69 degrees and flowers have not been reduced to cinders by the heat. After driving most of the day I am now ensconced in a fine house overlooking many tens of thousands of Christmas trees growing across the entirety of the mountain valley below. The first of many hundreds of rows of trees is thirty feet away. This county is one of the top producers of Christmas trees in North America. I am again having a form of Christmas in July. I was even given a welcoming gift that was warm.

Five minutes after having arrived, a fellow came to the door and handed me four brown hen eggs. For someone who would eat a couple dozen eggs a day if studies were to reveal them to be the ultimate cardio-protective food, this was a really big deal. I really like eggs in any possible formulation. Because of the cold rain falling, I immediately noticed these eggs were warm. Still warm? A questioning look elicited the information that these eggs had been plucked from beneath indignant hens perhaps two minutes previously.

I realized that we urban dwellers don’t get to know the simple pleasures of those fortunate people living on farms. I had never felt the warmth of a fresh egg before. Every egg I had ever held until today was cold from long sojourns in refrigeration. I was reminded again of the wonders of the genesis of life. All the resources of mankind will never be able to produce a single chicken egg, but an uneducated hen does it every day for a life time. A distant related experience on an Iowa farm came out of the murky depth of long-term memory. Thirty years ago in a farm garden I dug potatoes and root vegetables out of the thick black Iowa soil. I was amazed that life self-generated in the ground, just like that, with minimal attention. We are merely beneficiaries of a grand life process.

With all of our economic and intellectual capabilities we will only ever be able to nurture and guide life that is already being lived. We can plant seeds, root cuttings, prune, water, fertilize, hybridize, harvest, and plant anew, but we will never be able to start life from nothing. Life comes from only one Source, the One who was in the beginning, the one Who was before time and light came to be. Whether one embraces the idea of a secular nano-second origin of a very old universe in a bright flash of light or the Genesis account of a young universe created in a short time, both views agree that at one point there was no time, no light, and no life and both views obviously embrace the reality of these three presently. I did not have chicken eggs and now I do. The warm reality of life was placed in my hands today as it was when I came into this world back in the mid 20th century. I had nothing to do with either event.

The warmth I felt today originated in a nuclear fusion reaction in a young star. The radiance of that sun crossed over the absolute cold of space and was absorbed by the waters of a young planet. Life in those warm waters grew. Life on land grew. Generations of farmers captured the sun’s energy from plants and fed their children who grew the plants that fed more generations of farmers until one of them grew the produce that became the feed for the hens that made my eggs today.

In the beginning was the beginning, quantum physical, creative, or otherwise. We have to decide if God is or isn’t; if he is everything or if he is nothing. In my book of origins I read, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness.”

I think I will have my eggs sunny side up.