March 13, 2008
Stoned
Palm Sunday catalyst 2008
Pharisees> “Teacher, rebuke your disciples.” Jesus> “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out” (Lk 19.39f).
Every geologist knows that rocks talk. Every road-cut, cliff, and valley river bank is a veritable Baedeker that the present is the key to the past, that some kinds of language speak louder than words, or to put it a bit fancier, that ontology recapitulates phylogeny.
When Jesus and John Baptist talked about the deafening silence of the stones, they were on to something long before the 19th-century Brit engineer William “Strata” Smith discovered geology and changed the way the world listened to itself.
John said the stones could “raise up children of Abraham” ever so well as those who bragged about being his kin (Lk 3.8). Jesus charged that if the people along the Boulevard of Palms didn’t themselves hail the King, “the very stones would cry out” (Lk 19.40).
It’s interesting how the creationists and the intelligent designers claim the fossils are only Satanic ruses to deceive us, and all the while it’s downright ludicrous how the little petrified bugs are just another way of God’s saying in his own Paleontology 101-ic Jovian way, “look at me and what I’m up to.” The more we learn about the cosmos and how all its stuff including us is the same only clobbered up differently, how in spite of our good looks, we’re only 90% or so water, the more we’re amazed at the way God imagines it all to be and become.
The stones haven’t got a lot of freedom, but they make it up with efficiency. By the grace of God, we’re pretty near as free as the birds, but about as inefficient as anything can get. Then we do have a way of getting ourselves stoned and pretty thoroughly bollixing it all up in our most inefficient ways.
Whatever. I get a charge when John and Jesus get into geology. As old Jimmy Durante used to say, It’s enough to “warm the cocktails” of a geologist’s heart.
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