by Denny Olson
The long dark nights of this winter solstice time of year give us much opportunity to quietly contemplate the big unknowns in this world, and what constitutes the “spiritual” in our lives. For me, it is a sense of wonder and awe about the size and mind-boggling complexities of our Milky Way and the Universe. It is the jaw-dropping intricacy, connectedness and balance of the ecological system of life on this planet. It is the paradox and convolution of everything that makes my hair stand on end and the blood rush to the tips of my ears. And all of these definitions are often in a context separate from organized religious institutions. Spirituality is often inclusive of most of them — monotheist, dualist, pantheist, and atheist – it spans the entire spectrum.
A vivid example of one of my spiritual experiences happened while I was in graduate school. A fellow student, Tom, invited a few of us to his family’s primitive lake cabin in far Northern Minnesota, literally on the border of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. It was at the beginning of winter, probably just before Christmas. A foot of snow had just fallen a few days before and bushwhack skiing on old logging trails was silent and beautiful in the winter wonderland.
We found a Saw-whet Owl in a nest hole – just keeping warm – right next to the cabin, started and stoked the wood-fired cookstove, made some hot borscht soup, ate and laughed a bit about our academic pursuits back at the university. We went outside in the darkness, the nearest electric lightbulb probably miles away, to a startling discovery. It wasn’t dark at all. In fact, the entire sky from horizon to horizon was lit with a swaying, pulsing, multi-colored aurora. In a fit of uncharacteristic foresight, a few of us had brought ice skates, just in case. Sure enough, the lake was frozen over by below zero nights since the snowfall. It was black and smooth as a mirror.
As we laced up the skates, but staring at the sky, the only sound was an occasional whispered oxymoronic, “Holy S …”, and there seemed to be an unspoken agreement that we remain unspoken. As we skated away from the shoreline in different directions with the only accompaniment the swish of blade on glass ice, the animate aurora was above and below us in the reflection on the ice. The experience was three-hundred-and-sixty-degrees of complete immersion in a wild spectacle of solar flare igniting ionic charges in the upper atmosphere – and it was igniting every cell in my body in a metaphysical, multisensory, mystical and yes, spiritual experience within a world far beyond my understanding. The thing I remember most was the feeling of profound humility in the face of the unexplainable. It’s what we call “magic”.
Many years later, I was fortunate to experience that humility again in the Canadian wilderness. I woke in the middle of the night in the humid summer, peeked out from my tent on the shoreline to the same kind of flashing red and blue and green aurora. I could not resist skinny dipping far out into the lake – immersed inside the mystery of space, goosebumps covering every square centimeter of my body, and being revisited again with the gift of my smallness and unimportance.
I’m a scientist and educator, but a sense of wonder and awe about my expansive “church”, this magnificent thing we call life, and the universe I am privileged to be a small part of, makes me spiritual indeed.
In this season we are reminded that many, many churches and their congregations work hard for their disadvantaged brethren. They view this work as their duty. In the context of a world rapidly and permanently changing its climate on apocalyptic scale, it is far past time to expand the definition of “brethren” to include all life. Sacred beetles, sacred wolves, sacred bacteria, sacred snakes, sacred spiders … sacred birds. They are Creation, and they need us to think beyond our little lives and worries, and help our children do the same. Without all of them, we would most certainly be dead. This, I believe, is our spiritual duty.