Encounters at the End of the World
I’ve a growing love for film documentaries and I've just finished watching Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World. Some stunning cinematography accompanied hauntingly beautiful music make it worth the watch alone. In it, he journeys to Antartica to the McMurdo outpost that seemingly magnetically gathers an eclectic oddball troupe of scientists, philosophers, travellers, biologists and skilled workers from allover the globe.
Everybody has a curious reason as to why they are there and this is partly why Herzog is there. An element of his quest is to uncover the human stories that gather such a disparate bunch at the southern most point of the globe. Volcanoes, seal songs, single-celled borderline intelligence, under ice-sheet dives to ‘the cathedral’ and insane penguins inhabit the wild landscape, and draw the human visitors to document them in intricate detail. All this inspires the film maker to ponder, ‘Why?’.
One such story is told by a particle physicist who was there to study the mysterious spirit-like neutrinos, of which trillions are passing through the end of your nose as you take that breath there now. He says they’re a bit like God because they are everywhere around us yet have no charge, no mass, no space dimension and they exist in a kind of parallel plane. Yet their effect can be observed, and apparently the universe couldn’t have come into being without them. In fact, in all likelihood neutrinos make up more mass than all the planets, stars and other particles in the universe. Pretty good for something that can barely be detected. It makes particle physics sound spiritual, so much so that the physicist even had a kind of hawaiian incantation drawn on the side of his neutrino-catcher-thingy, as if he needed a little good old fashioned spirit world help for his technology to harness this otherworldly habitation of the neutrino. All in the quest to understand the universe a little bit better.
Werner frames an answer to the ‘Why?’ question in the response of one of his subjects, who quotes the renowned British philosopher Alan Watts,
“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.”
It’s a great quote. Herzog and Watts have a right and profound awe at the universe. But, it sings the song of it’s Creator, not it’s own song. We are witnesses to the glory of the universe as the quote supposes, but that glory points to the greater glory of the one who holds it all together by the power of his word. The quote makes a god out of the Cosmos and out of us as a part of this supposed unified whole. The universe doesn’t become conscious of it’s own glory through our witnessing it, we become conscious of the glory of God through our witnessing the universe. The universe isn’t the point, God is!
Psalm 19 tells of the heavens declaring the glory of God, the sky proclaiming his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. The Cosmos is a poem about God.
It’s this voice of creation, it’s capacity by God’s design to reveal himself through it, that so captivates the human heart. Sadly in it’s fallenness man’s heart looks for another answer to the ‘Why?’ question, rather than ‘For my glory’. There is a well known science book called ‘The God Particle’ that carries the strapline, ‘ The Universe is the Answer, but what is the Question?’. They’ve all got it inverted, topsy-turvy, upside down, the wrong way round.
In Romans 1 the apostle Paul writes that God’s invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived in the things that have been made since the beginning of the world. God has made himself plain and shown himself to mankind everywhere. Even without a neutrino-catcher that can seemingly peer into another reality, God has revealed himself to man in his creation, and even made it evident within mans’ own self.
That section of scripture begins by describing how the suppression of truth in the human heart kindles the anger of God. It ends by saying man is without excuse. Without excuse. Not much wiggle room there.
This is the great challenge we face. Mens hearts suppress the truth about God, and through that and ungodliness, many will sadly face his wrath at sin. Poverty, disease, violence and moral degradation are all things we passionately want to see people liberated from, but they’re not the primary thing we need to be saved from. It’s God himself. He is awesome and terrible in his holiness, but, he is also love and as a loving Father he desires that none should perish, but that all should know him as sons. Peoples hearts need to opened by the power of the Holy Spirit to come to know that Jesus is Lord of the Cosmos, and that through his death and resurrection he has begun a process that will consummate with the renewing all of creation. He’s already begun by continually calling out a multitude that he purchased with his own blood, a people who’s rebellion against their Creator could only be atoned for by a perfect sacrifice. Himself. Otherwise, they would be without excuse too. He’s the only excuse.
I love Herzog’s fascination with individuals who seem driven to extreme behaviour, either devotional or through psychosis. He focuses on a single penguin who roams off towards the mountains into the interior of the vast continent rather than to the fishing grounds with his penguin chums. The rule for humans encountering these rogue penguins is stand still and let them on their way that will end in certain death. Even if they were captured and returned to the rest of their colony, as soon as their little flippered feet touched the ground they’d be off again, resolutely waddling to their doom. We’re all like that really. Thank God he doesn’t stand still and let us on our way. I never wanted to follow Jesus. He rescued me.
Tags: Glory, Made me think
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