Chaos and Creation

September 20, 2009

Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka

Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church

Texts: 2 Corinthians 4:7-12; Genesis 1:1-5

Chaos...for many people the word itself creates images of disorder, anarchy, catastrophe. I don't get it. Indeed, I was very surprised once in a clergy seminar to realize that many (if not most) clergy shared this negative view of chaos – I've always thought of chaos as generative, as being a state of profound possibilities. So when one of our members suggested “chaos” as a theme for one of the Season of Creation Sundays, I was quite delighted, and now that I've reflected and read more about chaos, I find myself beginning to mine a rich vein of possibility and promise.

What is chaos? Biblically, it is that state described in the 2^nd verse of Genesis 1: the earth was without form and void and darkness covered the face of the deep. Without form, void, darkness over the deep – the precreative condition. A state of profound potentiality; precedent to creativity.

So let's look at chaos, both biblically and scientifically (the science will be pretty elementary) and see what we can learn of God, of life, and ourselves.

Despite the description of the precreative state in verse two of Genesis – without form, void, and darkness covering the face of the deep – the orthodox doctrine of creation is that God created the world from nothing. The Latin form is the classic name for this doctrine – creation ex nihilo – out of nothing. This is such a standard theology now that it's hard to suspend that assumption, but come with me into the chaos of theological development. Catherine Keller's marvelous book, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming, explains that for about 200 years in the Common Era, both Jewish and Christian theologians did not describe creation as being ex nihilo. Justin Martyr, a Jewish theologian, in fact described chaos as being unformed matter. The concise Oxford English Dictionary describes it similarly today: the second definition is “the formless matter supposed to have existed before the creation of the universe.” The first definition is “complete disorder and confusion.” In physics, the OED tells us chaos is “the property of a complex system whose behavior is so unpredictable as to appear random, owing to great sensitivity to small changes in conditions.” Chaos theory is described as “the branch of mathematics that deals with complex systems whose behavior is highly sensitive to slight changes in conditions, so that small alterations can give rise to great consequences.”

These latter definitions, from physics and math, of chaotic conditions as being so highly sensitive so that small changes in conditions can create great consequences – these seem to describe conditions of high potentiality. It turns out, however, according to Margaret Wheatley in Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World, that even chaos theory recognizes order within the chaos. It turns out that chaotic systems, which initially appear to be unpredictable systems which never behave the same way twice, over time “demonstrate an inherent orderliness.” It turns out that these systems in fact do have order – boundaries within which the disorder occurs. So that rather than disorder and order being binary states that are mutually exclusive, Wheatley instead explains that “...order exists within disorder and disorder within order.”

In 1977, chemist Ilya Prigongine won the Nobel Prize for work that demonstrates that disorder can, in fact, provoke systems to greater order. His work showed that (quoting from Wheatley) “Disoirder becomes a critical player, an ally that can provoke a system to self-organize into new forms of being.” Order and chaos thus become partners in the change process. David Toolan, in his book At Home in the Cosmos, further describes Prigongine's work, explaining that in certain unstable systems, organization and random behavior coexist. In certain of these systems, there will be (quoting from Toolan) “...phases of instability which turn out to be moments of unpredictable creativity. It is the very instability – in effect, the 'noise' or chaos in the system – that provides the new principle of order, and thus a key to evolutionary change.” Toolan continues: “Think of all the matter in the universe as so many islands of order in a vast sea of turbulences or entropic energy. Under the right conditions, the tides of the vast sea overtake these islands or pockets of order, causing fluctuations, disturbances in the field. The new science of chaos suggests that we have to think of these fluctuations as being the seeds of a deeper level of pattern.” In other words, the chaos is a necessary step toward greater order.

In people, we can see this happening – periods of challenge and change can be the process through which we become more fully ourselves, having a keener sense of ourselves and our own integrity after a process that includes some turbulence. Paul describes some of these kinds of challenges in the passage that Ted read from Paul's second letter to the Corinthians this morning – we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.... And just as we have seen disorder and order working together, so too, Paul describes death and life as being partners in a process occurring within each of us.

So, chaos then is not something to be feared, or escaped from, but a necessary state that we all pass through from time to time in the ongoing process of becoming. Or as Wheatley explains it: “...disorder can be a source of a new order, and ...growth appears from disequilibrium, not balance. The things we fear most in organizations—disruptions, confusions, chaos—need not be interpreted as signs that we are about to be destroyed. Instead, these conditions are necessary to awaken creativity.” I believe I may have shared the following example with you before, but it bears repeating. My mother, who is a potter, notes that often people look at the process of centering the clay on the wheel as being a good parallel to our spiritual experience – as we try to center ourselves in God. But she finds a more interesting parallel to be what occurs later in the process – as she is making a pot, she explains that in order to create the shape of the pot, she needs to first pull it off-center. That is how she enlarges the pot, and how the vessel acquires its shape. So too, Mom notes, do we acquire our identity and strength through those situations when we are pulled off-balance, and then adapt through a combination of the disequilibrium and our centeredness to become more fully ourselves.

The jazz process too requires a certain amount of unpredictability to develop a deeper sense of pattern – often, musically, there will be a sense of disequilibrium that becomes resolved. And the improvisation in jazz is, after all, a series of disruptions to the music through which a deeper pattern emerges.

Having exhausted my barely rudimentary understanding of physics, math, chemistry, psychology, art, and now jazz, I'd probably better return to what is for me safer ground: theology. And this is, indeed, the beauty of the Season of Creation – we can observe in the natural world, and these disciplines which describe the natural world: science and math, truths that echo what we discern theologically. And we find that the patterns that exist in science, math and theology also ring true in visual arts, music and psychology. Science and faith are not opposed – they are different languages for describing reality, which is both single and whole – that is, there are not multiple realities, but it is we who have multiple perspectives on the one reality. And that reality isn't divisible into science, art, music, religion – again, these are different ways of looking at and describing life.

And science may be providing theology the key to better understanding in the case of chaos. For a long time, people have tended to buy the first definition from my Concise Oxford English Dictionary for chaos: complete disorder and confusion. And we have understood it as bad. Theologians were then driven to creation ex nihilo by an incomplete understanding of chaos. They reasoned that chaos is bad, and God wouldn't not have created the world out of bad stuff, therefore, God must have started from nothing – no matter what the second verse of Genesis says.

But if chaos is not bad, but simply is, and is a part of the creative process, then certainly God could have started with the unformed matter, the stuff that was very sensitive to small provocations. And so the six days of God's small actions – a little light, a little land, a little bit of this and that – combined with the deep potentiality of chaos...and all of a sudden (or over millions of years) you have a world. A world in which chaos and creation continue – a world in which the status quo yields to disruption from time to time, whether from without or from within.

The kinds of disruptions that come from without are, in our own lives, the kinds of events that spring into our lives with sudden dislocating impact: there are layoffs and a job loss, a loved one faces a diagnosis, the car dies, a friend moves away, a parent dies. Nothing is the same anymore, and there is a sense of being unmoored from our own lives.

The kinds of disruptions that come from within are reminders of Yeats' poem “The Second Coming” and its lines: “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, anarchy is loosed upon the world....” Perhaps we are the ones who realize that it's time for a relationship to end. Or a new dawning leads us to go back to school, or to take up something that begins a new trajectory. Or an inner restlessness pulls us away from the understanding that had grounded our sense of self. Or some bad habit, or inborn frailty, finally results in its natural conclusion and we are facing a health crisis.

And in either event, or the coalescing of external and internal that are commingled in many disturbances, we find ourselves no longer ourselves in the way we knew ourselves to be, and so there is for a while a disorder and confusion in our selfhood that is almost always troubling. And yet, this time of chaos can also release a new creativity that will eventually establish a deeper sense of self.

So as we have begun to understand that creation – both in the world and in ourselves – is a constant, or at least recurring process. And chaos is the precedent state in which creation can occur. While none of us probably welcomes chaos, we can probably realize that, as Wheatley writes, “...fluctuation and change are essential to the process by which order is created.” And perhaps, over the longest haul, disorder, or the precreative state of chaos, is the norm – perhaps creative processes are the stable condition of life, and what we experience as stability is a temporary state, as Wheatley says, “...a lucky moment grabbed from natural disorder....” And she mentions one unnamed systems scientist who says “that a system is a set of processes that are made visible in temporary structures.” So caterpillar and butterfly are two temporary manifestations of the same life system.

In fact, if we understand change as the only constant in life, we are indeed understanding that there is a certain essential chaos that is ordinary to life, it is the openness to change, the receptive dimension, that in the world, in the cosmos, in organizations, and systems, and in us which is unnamed, unformed, empty, dark and deep.

This is not creation ex nihilo. Receptivity is not nothing – for if creation can take place in an ongoing way, it starts from something, and the precedent condition is receptivity. And what's the importance of this from a spiritual perspective? Perhaps we are like the impatient horse, and God the driver in Robert Frost's poem, “Stopping by Woods On a Snowy Evening” - the woods, and all life, are lovely, dark and deep – and we have miles to go before we sleep. As we learn to understand the ongoing process of creation as the constant, a process that is creating a deeper truer self in us, and we are called by God to be not merely vessels for the process, but partners in the continuing process of creation. As the Spirit moved over the watery deep in Genesis, so too does God's Spirit move over the deep receptivity in, among and through us, bringing something new and truer to life each day. And so as we partner with God in the process, we find life is dynamic – for chaos and creativity are found together – and as we can open ourselves to the process, we find ourselves more fully alive, an d experiencing life with a deeper humility, for what is may only be for right now and what will be is just beginning to emerge.

And we are never alone, for just as the chaos, the receptive formless void, the deepest deep over which the Spirit moves, is always present in life, so too is God. God is everywhere, always, present in creation and indeed, as Catherine Keller reminds us, “A ubiquitous God cannot be absent from any molecule, membrane or mucus of the creation.” And so the challenge for us is to be present, too – to the chaos, to the Spirit, to the potentialities that lie deep within us and all life. Amen.