None of it Belongs to You

The Earth is alive. Not metaphorically; the soil is teeming, frothing with life. Single-celled microorganisms of course in their uncountable kaleidoscopic species spectra but animals too: tardigrades bumble dreamily through tiny droplets of moisture in the dirt alongside countless tiny rotifers squirting around slowly like weird little microscopic jellyfish; nematode worms, a million of them per square metre, are found from the leaf litter on the forest floor to the cracks between rocks ten thousand feet below the surface. Moss mites, which are as small as a quarter of a millimetre and which can draw their legs up into their shells like turtles, are the most common bugs in forest soil, typically thousands of them in a few square feet. There are snails and spiders so small that a grain of rice lying on its side would be five or ten times taller than them, and moths so small that their caterpillars live inside leaves, between different layers of tissue. There are of course the ants and beetles and the woodlice, and parasitizing the woodlice there are wasps so small that they are thoroughly microscopic and smaller than some bacteria. And interpenetrating all this the mycorrhiza, the ubiquitous symbiotic relationship between fungi and plants, infinitesimally fine threads of fungal life reaching out through the soil matrix, extracting nutrients, and passing them continuously into the cells making up the roots of plants.

There are blind, nocturnal, wingless insects that live on glaciers and ice sheets and die if the temperature gets above 10 degrees. There are bugs and bacteria living in the lava tubes of active volcanoes and in the silent still water of undiscovered caves. There are thriving ecosystems around geothermal vents in the total darkness and crushing pressure at the bottom of the ocean trenches. There are mites, basically tiny highly specialized spiders, living on your eyelashes right now, eating the oils that accumulate on your follicles. There are trees that are 80,000 year old single organisms with thousands of trunks, there are sharks older than the USA, there is an ant colony covering a territory six thousand kilometres long. It’s almost impossible to find a surface that isn’t completely covered with a film of life, or a medium that isn’t a solution of uncountable cells, or a substrate that isn’t utterly permeated with roots and rhizomes and mycelia and amoeboids and microfauna and trillions and trillions of bacteria.

All of it is God. No fairy tales about virgins or ribs or pillars of salt could ever come remotely close to the eyeball-tingling, tooth-itching hook in the gut that is the manifest objective reality of a billion years of evolution surrounding and enveloping and interpenetrating us and every other thing. Every single organism is both completely unique and irreplaceable and in a totally real sense continuous with the entirety of the world around it. None of it is nothing. None of it is meaningless. None of it is dead. None of it is empty. None of it is uninhabited. None of it belongs to you. We feel this in our bones.

God doesn’t care when primates fuck. God doesn’t care when primates covet and trespass and beget. God isn’t even a god because God is much vaster still than that. But God wants to be with us, and we are cut off from God when we dream nightmares so tortured that we look at her and see just a bunch of rocks and sticks and dirt, and delude ourselves into pretending to own parts of her, and turn away from her and shut our eyes tight and imagine other gods that look just like us and think just like us and want us to sterilize and despoil the divine ecumene.

The darkness we find ourselves in when we are cut off like this is deeper than any oceanic trench. How lonely to have to go looking for life on other planets. How lonely to be surrounded by God and to be unable to feel her, convinced that she is somewhere else entirely, in a shimmering throne room in another dimension. How lost, how hopeless, to have to force yourself to ‘believe’ in something that is right in front of you, that is you. The Kingdom of God is not a kingdom and it is already here. The most sinful thing we can do is treat it like a series of lifeless things. The most beautiful thing we can do is to put our fingers in the dirt, to feel the love inherent in the covenant of life; and then drag the rich from their mansions, tear down their evil economic system, and reorganize our societies completely so that we can raise our children to be part of the whole again.

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