Steven L. Peck: Our Eternal Round With the God Who Dances

from A Thoughtful Faith for the 21st Century

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If you can’t take a little bloody nose, maybe you oughtta go back home and crawl under your bed. It’s not safe out here. It’s wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross; but it’s not for the timid.

—“Star Trek The Next Generation,” Q to Picard (Season 2, Episode 16: Q Who?)

God calls us to adventure. I believe that Earth life is not a test to separate the wheat from the tares. It is not a proof in the way that medieval villagers threw a witch into the pond to see if she would float. Not a simple assessment for placement in some grand hierarchy of prisons or resorts. It is an exam, rather, in the sense that we are learning the skills necessary for existence. Faith, hope, charity are attributes necessary to travel into the eternities. We are graced with a chance to set sail with God. We are learning to be shipmates on an adventure that requires certain tackle, knots, and such accoutrements that have been found useful for an eternal voyage into the unknown. I find using the Greek word, techne, useful for framing the characteristic equipment we will need to manage our work travelling through an eternal existence. Existence is motion, nomadic. Nothing is ever set in stone, not even things really set in stone—even protons decay. This techne includes the idea of arête, skill, including some I would like to focus on: curiosity, generating novelty, and creativity. I cannot seem to bring myself to separate faith from these traits, which are necessary to equip us for an adventure that will never end. For example, can we really imagine that love and charity and hope and faith are being so ardently worked on here if it is not to continue their refinement as we journey on with God in the eternities?

One of my earliest memories is of capturing bees foraging on dandelions in a grassy field behind our student housing complex at the University of Utah where my dad was going to school in Social Work. The trace impressions from those days are indistinct, and it is hard to form them into a visual picture that comes readily to mind. But one event stands out as if it were lived yesterday, and I can recapture the delightful attractiveness of the day quite clearly.

The sun is bright and the colors it discloses are not just instances of their usual hues. Rather they carry into my heart and mind an affective mood—a feeling that seems to define the long summers of childhood, when to play and explore was what it meant to exist. I must have been about four or five and my mom and I were in a grassy field behind a long building with blue wood siding. The greenness of the lawn, the light blue of the unsullied sky, and the billowy clouds are more distinct than anything I can recall of those early years. We were capturing bees in mayonnaise jars. I remember how excited I was to actually have one of these little creatures in the jar who moments ago had been visiting bright yellow dandelions. I was holding it in my hands! I put my ear up to its side and could hear the loud buzzing of the tiny prisoner proclaiming its confusion and displeasure. I knew bees could sting, but I had no fear or apprehension about these—just a sense of triumph, delight, and elation.

I suppose that is why, after a lifetime, the event remains so clearly etched in my mind's eye, though the images have become a bit disjointed. I remember the bees in the jar. That I was not alone and that my mother was there guiding and helping me. The colors seem so clear. I'll never forget the grass and the dandelions and their contrasting treasure of emeralds and golds. There seemed to be so much freedom and gladness in watching a bee soar from the jar, its dangling legs laden with pollen under its heavy body, as it made a small slow circle before flying home. Since that time, these images have likely been reconstructed with bits and pieces of other memories, because the ways that memories are laid down and pulled up again are fraught and messy. Still, I’m convinced there is something of the visual essence of the recollection that remains true to the original event. But the mood! The feelings of delight and magic are so clear, so deep, that when I look back on that afternoon, I cannot help but long for such unassuming clarity of purpose and such untainted joy. I hope I get to be an untamed child again. Perhaps, it was in that jar of bees that a scientist was born. Curiosity was midwifed into the world. There were things to discover. The universe was infused with novelty and wonder.

I embrace a theology in which faith is a curiosity-based exploration of existence. A trust that God has graced us with equipment that will enable safe passage across fathomless seas. Ours is not a static existence that follows well-worn deterministic paths of Einstein’s or Augustine’s block universe in which the whole course of existence is laid out—played in a cosmic film reel with fixed action sequences that cannot be changed or influenced by the projectionist from its deterministic order of scenes. I see the universe as one in which novelty emerges into new structures and forms—there is no set film that guides the sequences of adventure. Evolution’s creative flourishing is part of my theology. As is astronomy, literature, geology, and all the ways humans have learned to engage with the manifest universe.

Given that the world demonstrably engenders new forms as it evolves, what does God mean when He says His course is “one eternal round?” Such a course seems to invoke a sense of repetition, as if existence circles back around and repeats endlessly. That doesn’t feel right given what we know about eternal progression. What then could the Lord mean with this statement? The image occurs at many points in scripture: “For he that diligently seeketh shall find; and the mysteries of God shall be unfolded unto them, by the power of the Holy Ghost, as well in these times as in times of old, and as well in times of old as in times to come; wherefore, the course of the Lord is one eternal round” (Nephi 10:19).

Another example:

And it may suffice if I only say they are preserved for a wise purpose, which purpose is known unto God; for he doth counsel in wisdom over all his works, and his paths are straight, and his course is one eternal round. (Alma 37:12)

Several things strike me in these passages. The first is that God's course is “one,” and that course is an “eternal round.” In addition his paths are straight. Both “straight” and “round?” Three other verses in the scriptural canon contain the phrase “eternal round”:

For God doth not walk in crooked paths, neither doth he turn to the right hand nor to the left, neither doth he vary from that which he hath said, therefore his paths are straight, and his course is one eternal round. (D&C 3:2)

I perceive that it has been made known unto you, by the testimony of his word, that he cannot walk in crooked paths; neither doth he vary from that which he hath said; neither hath he a shadow of turning from the right to the left, or from that which is right to that which is wrong; therefore, his course is one eternal round. (Alma 7:20)

Listen to the voice of the Lord your God, even Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, whose course is one eternal round, the same today as yesterday, and forever. (D&C: 35:1)

In all of these, it appears that there is something God cannot get out of. Whatever this eternal round is, there are things He cannot escape. The path is set: no left turns, no right turns. The banks are too high to climb out, and He is stuck with the things He has embraced, as in the phrase “I the Lord am bound, when ye do what I say….” (D&C 82: 10). Trapped in existence like a bee in a jar. But that makes no sense—God is creative. Inventive. A being that takes delight in novelty. Right?