Merry Christmas to our readers — take heart that life always persists even when it appears fragile

National Post, 25 December 2021

An article by the National Post View

The whole world has been athirst for life against its perils this pandemic; Christmas is a birthday, and every birthday is another affirmation of life.

The Royal Ontario Museum opened a new exhibition recently, Dawn of Life, a thousand fossil specimens and creative artistry telling the story of life on planet Earth. It’s a Canadian story in large part. More than 60 per cent of the fossils are Canadian, as Canada has been a rich ground for the earliest fossil discoveries. Four such sites are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, from Mistaken Point in Newfoundland to Yoho Park in British Columbia.

Mistaken Point is apt, as Newfoundland place names often are. Is all this — the fossilized record of flourishing flora and fauna — a grand mistake, just a series of random processes without purpose or design?

That question is not being asked at the ROM. Fossils can’t answer it in any case. The museum curators told our Joseph Brean that they “are not telling the story of the origin of life”; rather the “gallery takes the existence of life for granted.”

We take life for granted too — until we don’t.

Life is here and life wants to live. We see that whenever a blade of grass finds its way through a crack in the parking lot. Life finds the tiniest cracks in the vast emptiness of the universe in which to flourish. Can there be a crack in the emptiness? Maybe not, but how better to describe the vanishingly small odds that make life possible on earth? A crack in the void seems to capture it.

That crack is teeming with life. Imperiled to be sure, avoiding from time to time — and not avoiding also — extinction. We have been preoccupied now for two years with the threats to life, how a virus we cannot see can change everything we do. There is a debate among biologists about whether viruses should be considered living things or not, but they certainly demonstrate the tenacious capacity, as the biblical injunction put it, “to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28).

We have been subdued this year, beaten down and beleaguered. The pandemic is still raging, people are still dying, anxiety is still rising, liberty is still eroding. That too is the story, over billions of years, of life on earth. The threats are always formidable; that life still lives is the news, not that it is fragile.

The question the ROM exhibition does not ask — and really cannot ask, for it is a museum, not a philosophy seminar or theological academy — is why this great battle for life matters. If that cosmic collision hadn’t happened, or that orbit was just a bit wider, or that star just a few hundred million light-years closer, or that swamp just mildly more acidic, or that atmosphere just a little more dense, and there was no dawn of life on earth, what would be lost?

At Christmas, Christians give their answer to that. Love would be lost. The great drama of life is a setting for love. That’s what Christians believe about God: The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are an eternal communion of life and love, and the mystery of that life and love is at the origin of all things.

“I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly,” Jesus says (John 10:10)

Continue reading at the National Post.