Read What We Talk About When We Talk About God for Free Online Page B

threw his tooth into the ocean.
    I tell you this story because at some point today you will eat. You will eat for several reasons, chief among them being survival. If you don’t eat, you die, because your body needs food. And food comes from the Earth. It’s planted, watered, cultivated, exposed to the sun, and then harvested, transported, prepared, and placed on your plate. Between the sun and the rain and the nutrients in the soil, that food received what it needed to keep you alive.
    At least for a while. Because at some point, you will die.
    Your body will then be buried in the Earth, where it will gradually decompose until it fully returns to the soil, the same soil that provided the nutrients for the food to grow that kept you alive . . .
    Your body, which is 65 percent water,
    comes from the Earth,
    is sustained by the Earth,
    and will return to the Earth.
    The impulse, then, to throw one’s tooth into the ocean is quite sensible, not to mention poetic.
    We’re made of dust and we come from the stars,
    we’re both skin and soul,
    blood and being—
    at 98.6 degrees continually radiating about 100 watts of energy into our surroundings, containing 7 x 10 18 joules of potential energy, the equivalent of 30 large hydrogen bombs.
    I talk about you like this because when I’m talking about you, I’m talking about the paradox at the core of our humanity—that we’re made of dust and stars and energy and patterns of planks and yet, as it’s written in the psalms, we’ve been crowned with glory and honor .
    We are both large and small,
    strong and weak,
    formidable and faint,
    reflecting the image of the divine,
    and formed from dust.
    We get stuck in traffic one day and find ourselves cursing within seconds, while another time we sit with a friend who’s dying of cancer and are filled with an ocean of compassion.
    The slightest barbed word from a coworker can cause our blood to boil, and yet as a friend comes down the aisle at her wedding our heart feels like it’s a thousand miles wide.
    We can easily find the most basic disciplines incredibly challenging, making us feel impotent and devoid of willpower, and yet we walk through a building designed by a master architect, taking in the light coming through the glass and the way the space is laid out, and we find ourselves asking over and over again, “How did someone think this up and then actually see it through to completion?”
    We’re an exotic blend of
    awesome
    and
    pathetic,
    extraordinary
    and
    lame,
    big
    and
    small.
    We hear about people climbing Mount Everest blind,
    and we hear about serial killers opening fire in a crowded theater,
    and we’re still surprised,
    because we’re still asking the same old question:
    What are we made of?
    The answer,
    of course,
    is atoms.
    You’re made of trillions of atoms.
    Those trillions of atoms form molecules,
    those molecules form cells,
    those cells form systems—
    nervous, immune, limbic, circulatory, digestive, muscular, respiratory, skeletal, to name a few—
    and those systems eventually form a far larger,
    more complicated system which we know to be you.
    This arrangement that makes you you results from something called hierarchy, in which each component is joined to other similar components to form together something new that is more complex.
    There are more atoms than molecules,
    but a molecule is more complex than an atom.
    There are more molecules than cells,
    but a cell is more complex than a molecule.
    And so on up the hierarchy it goes, with increasingly complex levels of organization at each higher level.
    Each higher level, then, is smaller in number, but greater in complexity. Smaller in breadth, but greater in depth.
    From
    trillions
    of atoms
    to
    one you.
    These trillions of atoms are incessantly coming and going, billions of times a second, all of them knowing their place within the hierarchy that is you, and yet every