Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - The Fixed

Via Positiva

 Chapter Four: The Fixed

Life and the world, the universe (whatever that is) is a curious combination of the fluid (changing and dynamic) and the fixed.  I wonder if we are not in the image of God to the degree that we can occasionally interrupt the fixed.  We are not really talented at it. Our interruptions are often clumsy and yield unintended consequences.

When your eyes are open to this world, what do you see?  It seems to me that it is not always neat and clean according to my sensibilities.  I would say it is rough and rowdy, profligate (extravagant) and deadly.  Biochemistry is making things happen in amazing and weird ways!

• Praying Mantis: “If the eggs survive ants, woodpeckers, and mice – and most – then you get the fun of seeing the new mantises hatch, and the smug feeling of knowing, all summer long, that they’re out there in your garden devouring gruesome numbers of fellow insects all nice and organically.  When a mantis has crunched up the last shed of its victim, it cleans its smooth green face like a cat.” (56)
  
• Adult mantises eat more or less everything that breathes and is small enough to capture. (56)
• The mating rites of mantises are well known: a chemical produced in the head of the male insect says, in effect, “No, don’t go near her, you fool, she’ll eat you alive”  At the same time a chemical in his abdomen says, “Yes, by all means, now and forever, yes.”  While the male is making up what passes for his mind, the female tips the balance in her favor by eating his head. (59) (She has her reproductive way with headless him. Then she eats him!)
• Polyphemus moth: The whole cocoon twisted and slapped around in the bottom of the jar.  The teacher fades, the classmates fade, I fade: I don’t remember anything but that things struggle to be a moth or die trying. (62)
• He couldn’t spread his wings.  There was no room.  The chemical that coated his wings like varnish, stiffening them permanently, dried and hardened his wings as they were.  He was a monster in a Mason jar. (62)
• Fish gotta swim and bird gotta fly; insects, it seems, gotta do one horrible thing after another. (64)

When we see nature acting in this way – wasps squeezing the honey out of a honeybee, licking the honey from the bee’s tongue while a mantis comes and clutches the wasp and begins to saw and gnaw while the wasp continues to feast in the throws of death – what is communicated about the Intelligent Designer? That God experiments?  That there is no end to creativity?  That there is a world that we often refuse to see because these are not thoughts we wish to think?  Insects make up a considerable about of the world’s biomass.  Maybe we should be looking at bacteria, the life form that takes up the greatest percentage of the world’s biomass.  It all challenges one’s view of the cosmos.