Why I am an Atheist Who Believes in God: How to give love, create beauty and find peace by Frank Schaeffer

Author:Frank Schaeffer [Schaeffer, Frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Frank Schaeffer
Published: 2014-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

XV

It was Camilla Tilling’s fault. Just before mowing I’d gotten an email from her, along with photographs attached. The sunny pictures were of herself, her husband, and their children sitting on “my” beach! Camilla had gone to the hotel I recommended and was there at that very moment. She’d unintentionally stirred such poignant memories of the happiest days of my childhood that I had an ache in my chest. And that was even before snagging a sun-warmed tomato!

The taste of fresh, warm tomato evoked a powerful rush of childhood memory. It tasted exactly like the tomatoes I ate more than fifty years ago while on vacation with my parents near Portofino, Italy. The owner of the small pensione where we stayed in Paraggi—a five-house hamlet a twenty-minute walk from Portofino overlooking the only sandy beach in the area—had a kitchen garden. She picked tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and zucchini just before she cooked and served them to us each day. So with one bite into the dusky, luscious flesh I was no longer in New England but transported to the Italy of my golden childhood memories. As the wind direction changed, the stink of riding mower exhaust gave way to the sweet, muddy scent of the tidal flats beyond the marsh. The late afternoon sunlight cast the trees and tall marsh grass into backlit perfection. Not for the first time I thought that this gorgeous universe would be such a waste if it were unobserved and unremembered.

Aren’t we lucky that we’re storytellers? Isn’t the universe lucky to have us! Isn’t Bach lucky to have Camilla, standing in the middle of an orchestra while singing his St. Matthew Passion, while sensing Bach’s spirit coursing through her, and perhaps God’s spirit, too?

Later that afternoon, I prepared chicken stock because while on family vacation, we’d often eat pastina in brodo with tomato salads drizzled with olive oil and salt. Camilla’s email and that tomato had inspired me to jump headlong into recreating one of the meals I love to remember. I turned on the radio while I unwrapped a chicken and peeled onions, carrots and garlic cloves and dropped them into a stockpot. Two scientists being interviewed on the NPR program Science Friday were speculating that life on Earth might have started on Mars, traveled here in a meteorite as a frozen organism and then evolved into complex life forms. Although Mars may once have had “better conditions for life to begin than Earth did, perhaps Earth was a better place for it to have evolved fully.”

One speculated, “Maybe it took two planets to get life started.” The other said, “I mean, how many times would there be two planets with the right conditions in the right place at the right time the right distance from each other like that?” Then he called the two-planets-plus-a-meteorite theory “pessimistic.” Then they talked about the idea that a more “optimistic” theory of life’s origin would be one that increased the odds of life beginning here and elsewhere

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