September 10, 2007
Twig
It was paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould who said, “Homo sapiens [are] a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree.” And it was Frederick Buechner who raised the ante when he said that “[Human beings are] so the universe will have something to talk through, so God will have something to talk with, and so the rest of us will have something to talk about.”
If Gould is right, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that he is, and given our place in the pecking order of all creation, is it any wonder that God talks with us at all? But the even greater wonder is that without any apparent question, we presume it to such a degree to think we’ve got enough leverage to redirect God along some orthodox path which she simply cannot avoid.
Or is God simply content to give us the benefit of doubt and just leaves well-enough alone? In only forty-eight hours, the weather has turned here from the most depressing of droughts over which we’ve next to no control to the balmiest of days all in the matter of a couple of inches of rain, water full of nitrogen with an in-your-face to our pitiful chlorinated attempts. Twig on a branch, indeed.
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