I was driving back to Long Island from Scranton, PA this weekend with my dad and brother, packed shoulder-to-shoulder in a Uhaul truck. We had just moved my sister into her house for her Junior year of college, and after a long day of moving furniture we prayed that we would avoid traffic (those prayers unfortunately went unanswered). As we sat in bumper-to-bumper, my brother looked up at a surrounding mountain peak and noticed something interesting.
“How do the trees grow upward when they are on a slope?” he asked.
It took me a minute to realize what we was saying, but soon enough I got it. The mountain face was steep - why didn’t the trees grow outward in accordance with the slope? How did they know how to grow upward? A quick Google search yielded some fascinating results. From an article in Science Focus entitled “How do trees grow straight up, even on a slope?”:
Trees (and most other plants) detect gravity using tiny structures within the cells of their roots and shoots called ‘statoliths’, which tell them which way is up (a process known as ‘gravitropism’).
Gravitropism. What a cool word. I didn’t know of its existence until that Google search, and its definition is even more mind-blowing than the word itself. Trees have intelligent cells that can detect gravity? W.T. (actual) F. How did I not know about this? Diving into the details of that process was a bit over my head, but that fact alone sent me down a rabbit hole of thought about our reality and how its structured. I couldn’t help but think of two words: intelligent design.
As a former agnostic (with a dash of atheist), I am intimately familiar with the nihilistic/evolution argument. It goes something like this: over billions of years the processes of the universe have redefined themselves over and over into what we see today - everything is a result of these processes, and nothing really “matters”. Nobody did anything to create what we see, it’s just the result of many things happening simultaneously over an unfathomably long period. This belief system occupied my mind for a good 5 years, and it just so happened that those 5 years were the worst of my life. It was the final 5 years of my active alcoholism. Looking back now, I get it. Living in a reality devoid of meaning is soul-shattering. Its scary. We’re born for no reason, live for no reason, and die for no reason. That’s a tough pill to swallow for any rational (or irrational) human being.
Then one day I found an old C.S. Lewis book in one of my grandmother’s storage bins. I picked it up and analyzed the cover - I didn’t know C.S. Lewis wrote anything other than “The Chronicles of Narnia”. The title of the book was “Mere Christianity”. At that time I wasn’t a big fan of Christianity, especially the Roman Catholic form in which I was raised. Wars, murders, child molestation - it seemed to be more devilish than anything else. But for some reason, this booked intrigued me. So one day on the commute into work on the Long Island Railroad, I opened it. I had no idea that opening that book would alter the course of my life forever.
See, C.S. Lewis wasn’t writing to convince me to become an Christian. He was just giving me the reasons why he was one. And the way that man wrote - Dear God - was some of the most intimate, beautiful prose I’d come across. So simple, but with so much weight and power. And his arguments made sense. This was my first real experience with the power of attraction vs. promotion. He invited me into his world, and I willingly accepted the invitation. From everything I gathered he was a good man. A really good man. And that’s all I wanted to be.
On that train ride I had a “white light” moment. It’s difficult to explain, but basically something clicked in my brain. I came to the realization that maybe I was wrong. Maybe there was more to the story of life than just processes and evolution. Who was I to think that everything I thought was unquestionable? That started to sound like a pretty warped ego trip. I wasn’t yet convinced on Christianity, but my friend C.S. Lewis certainly knocked something loose within me. I was a 20-something year old kid. I knew nothing. And that, for me, was liberation. I didn’t have to know anything. I just needed to know that I wasn’t right about everything.
Within a month I was sober, and the door that C.S. Lewis opened for me stayed open. I read everything he ever wrote, along with works by so many other great minds. I didn’t know anything, but other people knew things. I read about every religion that I possibly could, and I started to see very similar patterns. I reignited my Christianity, I studied the Dao, and I let go of the idea that any one religion was right about any one thing. They are all just “fingers pointing to the moon, not the moon itself.” I became a student of life rather than a critic, and without question life got better. Life got fun again. There wasn’t all this pressure to figure everything out. The weight of the world was finally lifted off my shoulders.
Back to Gravitropism. I’m not trying to use this as an argument for the existence of God. What I am trying to do is argue for the existence of possibility. Trees have cells that can detect gravity. That’s pretty effin’ crazy, and that’s not all. If you think about it, your own cells have a degree of intelligence as well. We’re coming to learn that our cells have memory. Our bodies remember all the things that have happened to us, all of the things we’ve done, even when our mind’s forget or block it out. We’re starting to understand that our reality is a lot more complex than we ever imagined (don’t even get me started on quantum theory).
Maybe we aren’t right about everything. I’m certainly not. Maybe there’s more to the story than we know. The truth is, we’ll probably never know, and that’s perfectly fine. We each need to experience our own journey and come to our own conclusions. But possibility is always out there, if we open ourselves to it. I’ll leave you with one of my favorite C.S. Lewis quotes. Just some food for thought.
"If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”