This Amazing Life

So, it's been a while since my last posting. The winter holidays have come and gone, and it’s Darwin Day!
Back in August, Mary and I visited the American Museum of Natural History’s most excellent Darwin exhibit. Shortly after that, I wrote a sermon inspired by a short phrase that I read on one of the panels at the Darwin exhibit. I didn’t write it down, but here’s the gist of it:
The more I look, the more I am filled with wonder at this amazing life.
This amazing life… what a treasure it is, what a gift. And how easily we human beings can squander it! I’m sorry, but those fools in Washington DC who have so stupidly took us to war - so unadvisedly, so irrationally, so almost cavalierly - continue to stun me with their obtuseness. Will they be aided and abetted by another “do-nothing” Congress?
Call me naive, but I just don’t get it. How can intelligent human beings, with the capacity for wonder and compassion, do what they do? How can we not have evolved to a more cooperative, interdependent state of being? As a minister, I preach, and teach and comfort and care… and when I start to look beyond my small sphere of influence, I wonder… what’s it all for?
But, as I preached back in August, I still believe in an essential goodness present with creation, within each of us, that we must continually hold to, lift up and affirm. We are but a small blip on the great span of creation and evolution. Yet we still matter – we are a part of all this grandeur, all this complexity. The more we see its sweep and vastness, we know we are connected – in the cells we share, the history etched in our genes. In this most amazing life, we matter most especially - and most importantly - to one another.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese,
harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
(from reading SLT # 490 by Mary Oliver)