The First Order

I turn forty-two soon.

Lately, I have found myself thinking about that more than I expected.

About this journey of living. About the past couple of years of listening, wondering, writing, and trying to pay closer attention to what life has been teaching me.

Part of that has also meant learning how to live in the present—
while still allowing myself to hope for tomorrow.

Years ago, I was given a prognosis that made the future feel much less certain.

Surviving it has required its own kind of reconciliation — not simply with what happened, but with the continuing gift of being here.

Perhaps that is why I have been thinking so much about the human story.

Not only the stories humans have told, but the act of telling itself.

Across time, we have tried to remember.

We have interpreted what came before us.
Recorded what seemed worth preserving.
Passed stories forward.
Forgotten parts of them.
Recovered others.

And sometimes, we re-member — put back together what had become separated.

My seminary formation has made me more conscious of this than I expected.

History, scripture, theology, tradition, worship—
each asks in its own way what we have inherited, how it came to us, and what we will do with it now.

But the more I have been thinking about formation, the further backward the question seems to go.

Before systems.
Before traditions.
Before religions.
Before histories.

Before all the things humans have made to understand being alive.
There is life.

And somewhere in tracing that backward, three movements began to emerge for me.

The origin of life — God.
The origin of the life we inherit — human.
The return to the origin of life — communion.

What caught me was the third movement.

I did not arrive back at God as though the human story were something to escape.

I arrived at communion.

Perhaps return to the origin of life happens not by leaving creature or creation behind, but by remembering the relationship in which they have always belonged.

I do not mean that humans created life.

We created much of the world into which a human life arrives.

We are born into languages we did not choose, families with histories already underway, cultures carrying generations of memory, economies, governments, religions, institutions, expectations, wounds, wisdom, habits, and hopes.

Life may be given. But the life we inherit has been profoundly shaped by other humans.
And then we shape it again.

We receive a world and participate in making the world that someone else will receive.

That seems to be one of the enduring movements of the human story.

We inherit. We interpret. We enact.
We leave something behind.

Perhaps that is part of why humans across time have created wisdom traditions, philosophies, religions, laws, rituals, stories, and practices.

Different peoples have named the origin differently.

God. Brahman. Dao.
Heaven. Nature. Mystery.

Some have spoken of no personal origin at all.

And yet so many seem to wrestle with a similar question:

How should this life be lived?

Often, the answer begins within a particular people.

A family. A tribe. A nation.
A sangha. A church. An ummah.

A philosophical school.

A community becomes a small representation of humanity trying to learn how to live well together.

Sometimes it remembers that it is a representation.
Sometimes it mistakes itself for the whole.

Perhaps that is where communion becomes important.

Communion is not sameness.

It does not require the particular to disappear.
It allows the particular to belong to something larger than itself.

And somewhere in all of this, the three movements became even simpler.

The creature receives life.

The creature finds itself within creation.

And the creature participates in creating.

We name things. Build things.
Organize things. Remember things.
Pass things on.

Creation forms the creature, and the creature continues forming creation.

But neither creature nor creation exists in isolation.

So perhaps the most distilled way I can say what I have been tracing is this:

Creature within creation, held in communion.

The prepositions matter to me.

The creature is within creation.

Not above it.
Not outside it.
Not merely observing it. Within it.

And creation is held in communion.

Communion is not another object alongside creature and creation.

It is not simply the relationship between them.

It is the condition in which they belong at all.

The relationship.
The holding together.

Perhaps this is the first order.

Not an order imposed by us.
Not hierarchy. Not control.
Not the systems we have built to organize life.

But the order beneath them.

Creature within creation.
Held in communion.

Perhaps that is the composition of the cosmos.

Particular lives within a creation they did not originate, participating in its continuing formation, held in relationships they can nurture, distort, forget, repair, and rediscover.

And perhaps much of the human story is what happens when the creature becomes conscious of this.

We begin naming.

Separating.
Categorizing.
Building.

Remembering.
Forgetting.

Sometimes the categories help us see.
Sometimes they make us forget what was there before the category.

Maybe wisdom, at its deepest, is the work of remembering how to live inside what has always already been true.

We are creatures.
We live within creation.
And we are held in communion.

Everything else may be what we have built from there.