In Terrence Malick’s film The Tree of Life we learn of the death of a 19 year old boy, known as RL. Most of the film in concerned with his elder brother, Jack, and the spiritual crisis he experiences on an anniversary of RL’s death. But at the beginning of the film we are with his mother, and her immediate response to this tragedy. She loves God, and has been taught that ‘those who follow the way of Grace come to no harm.’ She believes that we have to choose between Grace and Nature, nature ‘red in tooth and claw’. But her teenage boy was full of Grace, and he has come to harm, he is dead.
The mother questions God, but God makes no verbal reply. Instead Malick offers us a visually spectacular 15 minute sequence telling of the creation of the Universe, the formation of planets and the emergence and evolution of life. Some find this section of the film incomprehensible, or irrelevant. Having seen and discussed this film many times I offer this, my response to it, putting these words into the mouth of the Creator.
Your child has died. He was 19 years old. This is tragic. Because you love your child you scream and grieve and weep and rage and question. You question me, asking
Why?
Did I know?
Where was I?
What do you mean to me?
Let me answer you.
You conceived your child in love, carried him in hope, birthed him in joy and pain. You were pregnant for nine months. I waited nine billion years for life to be conceived on planet Earth. And four billion years more before it could give birth to you, my children, made in my own image. You too were conceived in love, carried in hope, birthed in joy and pain.
Life itself is my Creation gift to you, and it takes time. Just as your beloved child grew slowly, cell by cell within your womb, my universe also grew slowly. I spoke and the Universe sprang into existence, and then particle by particle, photon by photon, atom by atom, element by element, grain by grain, it grew within my womb.
My womb? Where else? There was and is nowhere outside me, beyond me, outwith me, so the only place my universe could be is within me. That genesis created everything you see and know, and everything you cannot see and will never know.
Gravity was in my left hand and randomness in my right, and these tools brought order out of chaos, and then life out of the inanimate. I created my Universe to live and to bear life itself, and more – life that is in my own image, the image of love. Giving, self-giving, compassionate, forgiving love. Love that cares, love that hurts and grieves. Grieves because there is no creation without destruction and no life without death. That is the story of this Universe.
Every atom in your body was created in the furnace at the heart of some distant sun. Hydrogen and helium, the only atoms in that first moment, had to be remade there, fused together under unimaginable pressure to form oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, iron, calcium and phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine and magnesium. You need all of these elements to simply be. These suns burned for billions of years and then they had to die, burn out, explode and seed the interstellar space with these new atoms. Atoms that gathered under gravity’s gentle push, gathered and clumped, formed dust clouds, then rocks, asteroids and planets.
How many planets have to form before one can be a cradle for life? The number would be meaningless to you, as would the trillion of minute actions and reactions needed for these earth-bound atoms to be combined and recombined, to mutate as randomness did its amazing work, countering entropy by bringing order out of chaos, complexity out of simplicity, forming chemical compounds, amino acids, bacteria, single and multi-celled beings; all your ancestors. Some think that evolution is not miraculous, but that is only because they want miracles to be instantaneous. My Creation miracle took thirteen billion years, and turned hydrogen and light into love. Is that not miraculous enough?
You were taught that you must choose between Grace and Nature. That is a false dichotomy. You thought that your child could escape the dangers of Nature by choosing Grace. But Grace needs a natural form to inhabit. Grace needs the cradle of Nature to find a home in. And do not presume that you are the only living things capable of Grace.
You are compassionate. You feel the pain of others. The suffering of others stirs deep feelings, often of anger, in your hearts. Of course you want a world where there is no suffering. Sometimes when you see suffering you call it evil and are angry with me.
How can a loving God allow such suffering? So they blame me for allowing harmful as well as beneficent bacteria to evolve, or for allowing the movement of tectonic plates to cause earthquakes. Some would like me to temporarily suspend the laws of gravity when falling objects hurt, or when falling hurts bodies. Some people seem to want fire that does not burn, water than does not drown. To eat without killing. But do you think that if I could have created you, and your beloved children, without suffering and death being part of it, without Nature being as it is, without your Universe being as it is, I would not have done so?
I also have to live, like you, with the necessary randomness that makes life possible and unpredictable. Randomness and gravity, my necessary creative tools, mean that life is fraught with danger. Maybe that danger makes it precious. Would I not have spared myself the waiting, the dying, the grieving, if I could?
If you look at Nature and hate it, and me, if you blame me and fear me, reject me for the death and loss and destruction you see in the world, then before you condemn me, consider this. It has taken your kind half a million years to learn how to take atoms apart. How long do you think it would take you to put them back together, to create them, to create enough to make your own Universe, and to breath life and love into your creation? How long would it take you to make a Universe in your own image, because you despise this one, made in mine?
You husband is an inventor, proud of the patents for his devices. I am proud of my devices too. Your eldest son is an architect. He knows that form has to follow function.
Function dictates form. Otherwise building fall apart. I am the architect of the Universe, and it also has a function. Love is that function; to love and to be loved.
This Universe has become aware, and has learnt to love. It took thirteen thousand million years for you to learn this, in your tiny corner, but in all that time my Universe has not fallen apart. It is well made. And just as your child grew from its conception as a single cell, with no interference from you, save sustenance, my Universe grew from a single moment, just one event, and grew to what it is, with no interference from me, save sustenance. As it is, it was from the beginning.
O yes, I know some believe I could create this Universe and all living things in days, not billions of years, and make you out of mud in an instant. They wonder why I did not make a Universe in which there was no suffering. Maybe I could have done so. It would be a different Universe. And in such a Universe would you be truly human? Would you have your capacity for costly love, for compassion, for Grace. Would you be made in my image? Would you be so intimately connected to the whole of creation? And could I be truly incarnate? At One with you?
Your beloved son has died, and you grieve. How many of my beloved have I seen die? If you believe that I love, then you know that I grieve for your boy too, and for every living thing. You live today in the shadow of his death. Because I gave you the capacity to choose love and Grace I had to also give you the capacity to turn away from them. So I too live in the shadow of death. The death of the Cross, of the Holocaust, of Hiroshima, of the Gulags and the Killing Fields. I live in the darkness cast by the fear that lives in the heart of every child, every woman, every man subjected to abuse, to violence, to hatred. These are not my actions, but yours.
You grieve for what you value. So add this to the value of your boy. In him his elder brother, Jack, found me. Found the love and trust and forgiveness and Grace – and the creativity – that are my image. For RL, his brother, your child and mine, lived and lives in love. All who live in love live in me. And I live in them. In all eternity.
Because you love your child you grieve and weep and rage and question, asking
Why?
Because there is no other way.
Did I know?
Yes.
Where was I?
With you. Within you.
What do you mean to me?
Everything.
