"ONCE
EVERY TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS"
A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear
Sunday, February 29, 2004
All
If you saw the newsletter, perhaps you understand the strange title of this sermon. When I first looked at this year's calendar, it occurred to me that I couldn't ever remember "Leap Year Day," February 29, fall on a Sunday. Doing the math, it seems that this will happen once every twenty-eight years. So once every twenty-eight years, like clockwork, you can expect me to give a Leap Year Day sermon. My next chance to take advantage of this will be in the year 2032, when I will be in my eighties.
You are probably witnessing a unique event.
What I would like for us to consider this morning is how things that may not
look very significant in fact can become quite extraordinary if we only choose
to look at them that way. February 29 seems like just any other day, for
example. But the fact today it falls on a Sunday makes it rare, happening only
three or four times in most people's life time. But on the other hand, that is
true of any weekday it falls, Monday through Sunday. It is always something
very special. It just depends on how we choose to look at it. What I want to do
this morning is to encourage how we choose to look at everyday things, and find
in them something remarkable.
This then is a significant day, a very special day, though
it may not appear to be so. I want to begin though by looking at the idea of
being significant and special. To do so, I turn to a book entitled The
Accelerating Universe, by the astronomist Mario Livio who discusses what has come to be called the
"Copernican Principle." Here is how he says it:
"Many recognize Nicolaus Copernicus as the
Polish astronomer who lived in the sixteenth century and reasserted the theory
that the earth revolves around the sun. However, Copernicus was in fact
(although not intentionally) responsible for a much more profound revolution in
human thinking. . . . He was the first to point out clearly that we do not
occupy a privileged place in the universe. He discovered that we are
nothing special. This has evolved to become known as the Copernican principle.
. .
"Since the time of Copernicus, the Copernican principle has been substantiated even further. Not only has the earth been dethroned from its central position in the universe, in fact, at the beginning of the 20th century, the astronomer Harlow Shapley demonstrated that our entire solar system is not even at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy. Indeed, it is about two-thirds of the way out from the center.
This may or may not strike you as a sobering thought. "We are nothing special." This has become a working principle of science, it seems, because to think otherwise is to look at nature through skewed eyes.
We are nothing special. Our earth is an insignificant little speck in the universe and could easily be overlooked by any mind that looks objectively at nature. Here on earth, our species, homo sapiens, isn't all that special. Many species have much longer histories, in fact at about 15 million years, we are among the most recent of species. We didn't get here any differently than any other species - we all evolved from the same source and by the same process. We are nothing special. Some species have more finely evolved eyesight or speed or hearing, we just happen to have evolved a more complex and efficient brain and intelligence. But that doesn't give us a special place in nature, any more than a cockroach has claim to being special because it has such superior survival abilities in its genes.
We are nothing special. Our genes are made up of the same stuff as any other
life on earth. The recipe for making human beings uses the same ingredients as
the recipe for making any other living being - it just combines those
ingredients differently. Again, let me use the words of Mario Livio:
"The history and properties of life on Earth teach us (that) in spite
of the wealth of life forms, there is really only one life on earth. . . . All
life-forms on Earth, from bacteria to humans, share a common carrier of genetic
information, the nucleic acids RNA and DNA, and use the same genetic code. What
this amounts to is that all the life-forms we see at present probably evolved
from a single progenitor."
Which leads us again to the Copernican principle: We are not special.
Well, that is one way of looking at it, and probably the correct way if one is wanting to conduct a scientific investigation. But to the extent that we are interested in creating meaning to our individual lives, it is not too difficult to find a different perspective. It seems to me there is something very special about being a part of this rather astounding universe around us.
No one can question that there is something compellingly spectacular about nature. From the grandeur of billions of stars distributed throughout the galaxies to the intricate cryptology of a DNA code, the world we are part of continually astounds. From the delicate beauty of a monarch butterfly to the breathless beauty of a scarlet sunset, the world we live in is awesome, and to the extent we are part of that world, so are we. We are very special.
The realization, identified in the previous quote,
that all life-forms on Earth share in the same origin might be understood as
demonstrating that there is nothing particularly special or unique about human
beings. But it is not difficult to shift perspective. The fact that we are made
up of the same substance as eagles and redwood trees and butterflies makes us
something special. There is no way to deny the beauty and magnificence of the
nature that surrounds us, and to the extent that we accept and embrace and
respect our role as part of that nature, we share in its grandeur, we are a
part of something very special.
It really all comes down on perspective. We can live through this day experiencing it as we would any other day, not noticing anything particularly special in it, or we can realize that Leap Year Day comes on a Sunday only a few times in our lifetime, and that simple fact provides us something worthwhile to ponder.
By the way, I tripped upon an interesting fact about Leap Year. Most of us know that one day is added to the calendar every four years in order to make up for a slight irregularity of the calendar. A year is measured, of course, by the amount of time it takes the earth to orbit the sun. That amount of time is not exactly 365 days. It is 365.256 days. In other words, just a little over 365 and one fourth days. So this is adjusted by adding one day every four years. This calendar adjustment was made long ago, in the first century B.C.
But the more interesting fact is this. The earth's orbit takes slightly more
than 365 and one fourth days. Precisely, as I say, 365.256 days, or .006 longer
than can be adjusted simply by adding a day every four years. Over many
centuries, that tiny amount of time added up so much that by 1752, when the
Gregorian calendar was adopted in
This little piece of trivia I find interesting in and of itself. But it is also worth noting how significant something like one six-thousandth of a day can become. In this case, that tiny amount added up to completely eliminate some days in history. Something so easily overlooked can become momentous when looked at from the right perspective.
It is all about perspective, I say, whether something seemingly ordinary can be perceived and embraced as extraordinary.
It is an easy perspective to adopt if someone is willing to do so. Pick up a grain of sand on a beach and consider how many thousands of years of tides going in and out it took to create that one simple grain of sand. Consider what it was at the time dinosaurs roamed the earth. Is it something trivial, or is it something extraordinary that it found its way into your hand?
Look at the design on the ends of your fingers that we call "fingerprints." Do you find it extraordinary, as I do, that my skin, all on its own, took shape to form an artistic design, resembling a maze, that distinguishes me from every other person who ever lived? It would be nothing special if we all had the same designs, or even if there were only five types of designs and each of us fell into one category or another, like hair color. But does it seem extraordinary, as it does to me, that even though I am one of nearly five billion people populating this earth, nature has provided something to establish my uniqueness? And of course DNA prints have been discovered to be significantly more readable, significantly more reliable, confirmations of our uniqueness.
Or think of a cat's purr. Do you find it a little extraordinary, first, that cats do purr, and second, that such a sound can have such a soothing effect on us as we listen? It is hard to imagine listening to the purr of a sleeping cat and being frightened of anything in the world at that very moment.
With regard to the extraordinary hidden in the ordinary in nature, some of you who read the best-selling book The Di Vinci Code may have been introduced, as I was, to the magical, mystery number called "Phi." It seems that this number pops up surprisingly often in nature, and no one can seem to explain it.
Like its more popular sibling known as "Pi," it is a number that expresses a ratio. "Pi," you recall, derives from the ratio of a radius to the circumference of a circle, and is a constant number wherever true circles are found: 3.14159 . . . etc. etc. "Phi," on the other hand, is a bit more difficult to find, but it is also a ratio of a certain line segments to a complete line. Like Pi, Phi is an irrational number that has no end. It begins 1.61803. . . and continues on seemingly forever. Computer calculations have carried out over a million digits without finding its end.
Anyway, the mystery of this irrational numerical ratio is that it seems to appear everywhere in nature. This number represents a ratio of distance between leaves on the branches of trees. It represents a ratio found in the spiral in chambered sea shells. It is found in rose petals and in planetary orbits. It is found in DNA.
This magical number was discovered centuries ago, and many people have discovered it revealed in much of the world's greatest art and music and architecture. It has been shown to be an artistic proportion that is very appealing to the human eye, something imbedded in nature that seems to convey beauty though we never notice it there simply because it is a numerical calculation. Some even say that it was the basis for the design of the ancient pyramids.
There seem to be inexhaustible examples of this number in nature. Its seemingly magical appearance everywhere you look has over the centuries allowed it to be called names like "The Divine Proportion" or "The Golden Ratio."
This phenomenon lends itself to almost poetic adjectives. It is magical. It is astonishing. It is unifying. It is extraordinary. In all its glory, this fascinating aspect of nature is also part of us. We, too, are part of this seemingly magical "divine proportion" that appears everywhere in disguise. It is found in the dimensions of the human body. The ratio of distance between the top of any person's head and their elbows compared with their total height is Phi, and that distance (between the top of a person's head and elbow) compared with the distance between their shoulders is Phi.
I have now informed you of absolutely everything I know, or I think I know, about the number Phi. I am no mathematician, and I have exhausted my reservoir of knowledge there.
Considering this phenomenon, we can look at its meaning for us in one of two ways. Either we can say since this almost magical concept is so universal in nature that when it is discovered in us then we are no longer special. Or, alternatively, we can marvel at a rather spectacular aspect of nature and celebrate that we, too, share in it.
So we are extraordinary after all, and therefore we are special, after all. We are special precisely because we accept our place in this rather spectacular world around us. In fact, it seems to me, there can be made a biological argument that there is something very special about us, even as we see ourselves as part of the larger and astounding context of nature.
The late Lewis Thomas, a biologist and popular science writer, put it this
way:
"Our world is a living system, an immense organism, still developing, regulating itself, making its own oxygen, maintaining its own temperature, keeping all its infinite living parts connected and interdependent, including us. It is the strangest of all places, and there is everything in the world to learn about it. It can keep us awake and jubilant with questions for millennia ahead, if we can learn not to meddle and not to destroy.
"We are not like the social insects. They have only the one way of doing things and they will do it forever, coded for that way. We are coded differently, not just for binary choices, either "go" or "no-go." We can go four ways at once, depending on how the air feels: "go," "no-go," but also "maybe," plus "what the hell, let's give it a try!" We are in for one surprise after another if we keep at it and keep alive. We can build structures for human society never seen before, thoughts never thought before, music never heard before.
"Provided we do not kill ourselves off, and provided we can connect ourselves by the affection and respect for which I believe our genes are also coded, there is no end to what we might do on or off this planet."
So we are special, after all - not in the sense that we are somehow better than any other part of nature, and not in the sense that we are exempt from the rules of nature. We are special if for no other reason because we are a part of that absolutely spectacular universe that continually amazes. If we are special in any other way, it may be simply because we are blessed to have the mental capacity to appreciate how amazing the universe is.
So a Sunday Leap Year Day comes only once every twenty-eight years, only a few times over an average human life-time. I invite you to celebrate today. More importantly, though, is the lesson that something extraordinary can be found in almost every ordinary part of this universe of which we are a part. The task is to look for that which is extraordinary, and see it in the commonplace.
We are embedded within the extraordinary story of nature itself, and
participate in its infinity.
* The slight difference of .006 days is now adjusted by this formula.
"Century" years (1800, 1900, 2000 etc.) have "leap" days
only when they are divisible by 400.