You could say, if you wanted to, because it’s Valentine’s Day, that the Biblical fifth day of creation marks the birth of love. And it wouldn’t even be that much of a stretch. Because on this day in the story, God, who has been single for ever, is now in a relationship. God speaks into existence for the first time the nefesh chayah. This is usually translated as “living creature.” But it’s way more interesting than that. These living creatures are different from the plants that were already on the scene. Plants were a bit like computers just running a program that God had written for their growth and reproduction. But nefesh chayah. Chayah means “living” or “alive” or “life,” as in l’chayim! To life! And nefesh is a very interesting word. It can mean “breath,” but that’s probably not the meaning here because we’re talking about fish who don’t breathe like we do. Nefesh can also mean “soul.” Or even more provocatively, “self.” On this day, God creates “living selves” that swim in the sea and fly in the air. If plants are objects of God’s creative work, these animals are subjects in their own right. If plants are an “it” to God, these animals are, in Martin Buber’s language, a “thou.”
Martin Buber was a 20th century philosopher who was most famous for this concept of I-it and I-thou. Here’s the short version: We have two basic orientations toward the world. I-it and I-thou. I-it is the way we relate to an object or thing that we experience. It’s separate from us, we use it, we don’t use it, we see it from a distance, the relationship has no spiritual charge. We sometimes treat people as “it” and often treat animals as “it.” I-Thou is Buber’s term for the genuine encounter with another. We drop our defenses and open our whole being to their whole being. We recognize their inherent worth and dignity. To Buber, this authentic relationship is where meaning is found. He writes, “When I encounter a …being as my Thou and speak the basic word I-Thou to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things. He is no longer He or She, a dot in the world grid of space and time, nor a condition to be experienced and described, a loose bundle of named qualities. Neighborless and seamless, he is Thou and fills the firmament.”
On day five of the creation story, God fills the firmament with birds. And the seas with fish. And for the first time God addresses a part of creation. God speaks them into being and then immediately turns around and speaks to them. “Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas…” It’s a blessing. Now for the first time, creatures are physically and spiritually animate – they can move of their own volition. For the first time, there are creatures with will. God tells the birds and the fish to do something instead of just designing them, like plants, to automatically do it. And as we know, birds don’t always do what they’re told. They have minds of their own. They have faces. Now, in some rudimentary way, creatures have selfhood.
All the speaking that God has done up until this point, all this time that God’s been creating these fabulous kaleidoscopic light shows and new elements and vegetation and luminaries, it’s all just been creating an unconscious physical world. It’s been a world of objects. Like the black holes we’ve been hearing about this week, swirling and smashing anonymously in the void. A world of “it.” All this drama has been without an audience. God has been alone. But now for the first time, there’s someone else in the room. They may not be the kind of sophisticated partner that God finds later in humans, but each bird, each fish is a nefesh chayah – like Savannah, a unique living soul. Now when a tree falls in the cosmic forest, there is someone there to hear it.
Think about how profound this is. Regardless of what you think of the Biblical version of this story, at some point in the evolution of life on this planet, at some magical moment, stuff became conscious. Some impossible leap happened somehow and now, for the first time, there were eyes looking back at the universe. Not only was there a sun, but there were beings who could see the sunrise. Not only were there sky and sea, but beings who could feel the wind in their feathers and hear the waves crashing on the shore. The empty sky and sea had been unfinished. They needed to be filled with the living souls of fish and birds for their essence to be realized. Now, with the nefesh chayah, with consciousness, there was the possibility of relationship.
Some spiritual teachers teach that this was exactly why God made our world to begin with. If you remember from day one, the world had been formless and void and the spirit of God hovered on the face of the deep. God was an infinite spirit, just breath or wind – with no other. God wanted an “other” – something different from Godself – in order to be in relationship. And so, according to kabbalah (you might have heard of it, Madonna’s a big fan apparently), according to kabbalah, in the moment of creation God retracted Godself. God went from filling all of infinity to lovingly retracting to make room for something else. Some of us could probably learn from this. To have a loving relationship with another, you can’t take up the whole room. You can’t use up all the air. Sometimes you need to retract yourself to make room for an other or that other will never materialize. And then you need to recognize that other as a nefesh chayah – as a living soul with inherent worth and dignity. In this story, God retracts, creates space for the world, and then basically asks it to be God’s Valentine. And the world says yes. The birth of love.
Martin Buber would probably say that God is completely transformed by this encounter. When Buber talks about I-it and I-thou, he describes them as, not different two kinds of relationships, but as two different words… the only two words that we really ever speak. We’re always saying either “I-it” or “I-thou.” To Buber, there is no such thing as the word “I” just by itself. “I” doesn’t exist. We are always either experiencing someone as an object or embracing them as a living soul. And which it is makes all the difference to who we are. We’ve all probably had moments of I-Thou encounter, maybe with a lover, a friend, a baby, a bird, a dog. Buber believed you could even enter I-Thou space with rocks and trees – a kind of mystical merging with the universe. It’s that feeling of knowing that the boundaries between us are imaginary. We are one with all that is. If you’ve had these moments, they can be life changing.
There’s an anti-bullying program called “Roots of Empathy” that brings babies into classrooms as a way of pulling on kids’ heartstrings. They’ve found that it’s a powerful thing to invite people into relationship with someone as authentic and undefended as a baby. It evokes love and compassion. Probably oxytocin. One of the program leaders, Mary Gordon, tells about a kid named Darren who had a profound I-Thou encounter that changed his “I,” if only for a moment. She writes:
“Darren was …in eighth grade and had been held back twice. …I knew his story: his mother had been murdered in front of his eyes when he was four year old, and he had lived in a succession of foster homes ever since. Darren looked menacing because he wanted us to know he was tough: his head was shaved except for a ponytail at the top and he had a tattoo on the back of his head… The instructor… invited the young mother who was visiting the class with Evan, her six-month-old baby, to share her thoughts about the baby’s temperament…. The mother told the class how Evan liked to face outwards when he was in the infant carrier, how he didn’t want to cuddle into her, and how she wished he was a more cuddly baby. As the class ended, the mother asked if anyone wanted to try on the carrier…. To everyone’s surprise, Darren offered to try it…. Then he asked if he could put Evan in. The mother was a little apprehensive, but she handed him the baby, and he put Evan in, facing toward his chest. That wise little baby snuggled right in and Darren took him to a quiet corner and rocked back and forth with the baby in his arms for several minutes. Finally, he came back to where the mother and the instructor were waiting and asked, ‘If nobody has ever loved you, do you think you could still be a good father?’”
In that moment, Darren was not an I-it, fighting for survival in a hostile world; he was an I-Thou giving love and nurturing and making space for an other. And his image of who he was shifted. Mary Gordon writes, “That baby might have changed the trajectory of this youth’s future by allowing him to see the humanity in himself.” Of course the baby didn’t do this on purpose. But babies are the perfect I-Thou practice beings because they have no barriers up. They haven’t been wounded, they haven’t had to become tough – through their openness, they invite you into authentic relationship. Animals are often like this too. While James might not use the same language, it seems clear that he and Savannah are in an I-Thou relationship.
For those of you who hear me preach with any regularity, you can probably feel my sermon leading up to a recommendation, a suggestion, an admonition. And yes, of course, I’d love to suggest that we each examine our relationships, to locate the places where we’ve left no space for others and have then found ourselves too much alone in a cold and empty universe. But relationships can’t be manipulated. We can’t simply go out and get us one of them I-Thou relationships. You can’t buy one. Even a Valentines box of chocolates or a dozen roses isn’t going to do the trick. Every relationship with people or with animals is like a dance, where one partner changing the steps causes the entire choreography to become altered. Only the divine can create a universe single-handedly.
So perhaps we can simply take the lesson embedded in this story – that creation isn’t complete without the nefesh chayah – without beings who can see each other through the lens of soul. Maybe we can try to see a bit more into the eyes of all those we meet and recognize that soul looking back at us. Aliveness and awareness, searching our eyes for aliveness and awareness. All of us could use such practice. All of us could use more I-Thou in our lives. It’s the connection that makes life worth living. And I believe it’s the heart of Unitarian Universalist spirituality as well – that the divine is found in relationship. And relationship is available absolutely everywhere. In the story God creates the swarms of creatures in the water, fills the sky with birds of every kind, enters into relationship with them, speaks to them, and blesses them. And the text says, “And God saw that it was good… and there was evening and there was morning, a fifth day.”