Matt Moore - Nourish: A God Who Loves to Feed Us

Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Speech 2005

When God made us humans, we started in a garden, not for sentimental reasons butbecause our Creator God wanted us to be well nourished and to experience life atits fullest and best. We were tossed out of Eden because we humans chose malnutritionover nutrition. It was through food that Adam and Eve were initially tempted, andas a curse for the mans poor choices about food, the Creator told Adam that nourishinghimself with food now would be much tougher in a regular garden. Soon his sons werefighting and killing over food and God issues, and so began a long saga that continuestodaya God who loves to feed us, and a malnourished world.

Thats the God-version as I know it, as Christian and Muslim and Jewish traditionshave handed it down through the years. It sounds like an absurd story, a fairy tale,in these modern times. It sounds ridiculous and uneducated, in fact, until we listento the educated version.

The goo-version of the story says man made a god. But before that, somehow rock cameto be, and rocks collided and became stardust. As particle physicist Lawrence Krauss(a seriously smart guy, by the way) likes to say, Its the most poetic thing I know.That we are literally all stardust. That the atoms that make up your left arm arenot from the same planet or asteroid as the ones that make up your right arm.

The goo-version theorizes that after these primeval rocks collided, eventually therewas goo. Somehow the goo grew opposable thumbs, stood upon two feet, and eventuallyturned into a man. Obviously Im a theist, so I am certainly selling the goo-versionshort here, but not by a whole lot. The entire happening is unlikely and preposterousjustlike our God-version. No higher ground seems to be offered here for smart peoplejustgoo vs. God. The goo-view says we all got here by accident, and the God-view sayswe humans got here on purpose for a purpose.

Those two worldviews inform and divide our country, a divide that isnt getting anysmaller. As Lawrence Krauss says, Science never asks why, and when it does, it reallymeans how. But getting bogged down in the differences in those two is of less usethan noticing the incredible similarities of the two. Whether we are here on purposeor by accident, whether we are goo-creatures or God-creatures, both stories (shallwe call them faiths?) offer us a narrative that begins in a garden.

The earliest thing we know, categorically and with any historical certainty abouthumans, is that we really got our act together and formed something called civilizationaround a garden. It was in the Fertile Crescent, the land between the rivers, wherethe first men (and women) known to anthropologists managed for the first time togrow more food than they actually needed. We know this from our world history classes,and we know it with certainty because those early ancestors actually wrote it downand Leonard Woolley dug it up. Etched in clay tablets unearthed by Woolley and histeam, who dug in Iraqi soil for twelve long, amazing years from 1922 to 1934, areaccounting records that basically say things like, Elki traded three bushels ofcorn to Ashkem for two vessels.

These writings were found in and around Mesopotamian sites like the ancient cityof Ur, home to the Sumerian peoples (in southern Iraq today). These ancient recordsare really pretty mundane as historical documents go, but they are anything but trivial,given that they are the earliest extant documents about the humans who preceded us.

Thomas Cahill in his great book Gifts of the Jews rightfully recognizes that thusbegins what we call history. Anything we claim to know about anything before thatperiod is largely a guess. Cave paintings, reconstructed pots, bones, and carbondating all give us a decent guess at what happened before that period. But thatsall it is. Largely a guess. But here in the ancient writings of Sumer and Ur we havethe first tangible human history. Real notes written by real people. Boring stufflike basic accounting. All of it, most of it anyway, revolved around their gardens:who grew what and who swapped it for what in the worlds first complex economy. Heremen and women first grew more than they needed, and thus it freed up a bunch of peopleto do things such as painting their huts or making pots. Metalworkers thrived, plowsgot better, gardens grew, and the Stone Age was gone for good. Combine all of thiswith a healthy dose of slave labor from less fortunate conquered neighbors, and wehave what has come to be known as progress.

So the God-people have their narratives of Adam and Eve and the goo-people have theirhistorical artifacts. For the latter group, we are stardust infused with happenstance-accidentallife. For the other, we are dust with life breathed into us by an intentional creativeforce for good. Believing either one may be guesswork, faith, or science, but bothnarratives basically begin in a garden.