The Sublime in Deep Time & the Present Crisis

Years ago, I was visiting Washington DC with some friends, when we went to the National Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. I expected to see some pretty cool things there. What I did not expect was that I would be overcome by what I can only describe as a religious experience, there in those hallowed halls of science.

They had at the time an incredible exhibit where you walked, room by room, through the fossil record of the entire scope of the evolution of life on earth, as currently understood by science. Room by room, it took you from fossilized ribbons of bacterial colonies 3.5 billion years old, through epochs of change measured in the 100s of millions of years, through all the flourishings and extinctions of strange and wondrous forms of life finding new ways to survive and thrive before dying away, from towering monsters to the tiniest complexities of microscopic eco-systems, through to the emergence of the fossils of the strange and clever apes known as anatomically modern humans, appearing a mere 250 thousand years ago.

Immersed in this encounter with what remains of the remains of these countless other beings who shared life on earth, I fell into a reverence, approach each one with the kind of respect you’d show at the grave of an ancestor.

Through this reverence in the midst of the immensity of the scope of life on earth, a kind of reverie opened within me.

It was like the scales started to fall from my eyes and I glimpsed just how brief and tiny we are, and just how vast and ancient reality itself is. That mere glimpse overwhelmed me with awe and reverence and a kind of holy horror before the sublime that births and subsumes all life.

99.9% of all the species to ever exist on the face of the earth are now extinct. The time our species has been around is just a tiny sliver on the timeline of life on earth – not even .01% of all the seasons and cycles of life’s generations and generations and generations and generations …

How can we begin to fathom the scope of these facts?

Read Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg’s full sermon from Sept. 22, 2024, here.