“And time, we now know, is actually a persistent illusion? What we understand as past and present and future all exist within some sort of eternal now?
What?
And we’re each made of billions and billions and billions of atoms, because everything everywhere is made of atoms? And atoms aren’t really things or stuff at all but more like relationships of energy or clouds of possibilities that are mostly made up of empty space?
What an astonishing phenomenon this is,
This life that we find ourselves in.”
—Rob Bell, Everything Is Spiritual: Who We Are and What We’re Doing Here
Sometimes, autumn appears so suddenly that I am surprised into sadness. Summer has flown past, gone before I had a moment to celebrate it. On a day this week when I felt this sadness, I drove out into the Iowa countryside late in the afternoon. The sky was a hundred shades of blue and gray with patches of sunshine and clouds both fluffy and threatening storms. The sight of beautiful autumn fields that have lost their late-summer yellow, mellowing into russets and tawny golds brought me out of the almost panicked sadness of time’s passage into a more peaceful moment of acceptance.
It was at that moment that Rob Bell, whose voice was reading an audio version of his latest book over my car’s stereo, began marveling over the infinity of creation, the evolving Earth, the expanding galaxies. What a serendipitous moment:
How can one be sad about the changing seasons when the deeper truth is that we aren’t really made of “things or stuff” but, instead, are “made of relationships of energy or clouds of possibility?”
This life, whether in summer or autumn, is astonishing.
—Jenifer Hanson, Prairiewoods director