The First Lesson
January 21, 2020

     The sun also gives life.  This too is grace.

     * * *

    Here on the blue-green planet, we absolutely depend on the sun.  We orbit our local star in a Goldilocks Zone, where we are neither too hot nor too cold, and we are further protected from the excesses of solar energy by Earth‛s magnetic field and the ozone layer.  

      But what energy comes to us makes all things possible.  

    In physics, "work" is the transfer of energy that occurs when external force is used to move an object.  We humans do lots of work.  We‛ve been busying ourselves for millenia, moving this and that around – all with energy that first came to us from the sun.  If you‛re going to tick down through your to-do list today, then you‛ll need to gird yourself with the solar energy captured in your breakfast through the miracle of photosynthesis.  

    In the last couple of centuries, we humans have greatly accellerated our ability to do work by tapping the Earth‛s stored sunlight reserves: coal, oil, natural gas – those highly concentrated energy packets we somewhat misleadingly call ‟fossil fuels‟.  And we‛ve been spending down the trust fund with great abandon.  It is worth asking whether we will apply enough of the ingenuity enabled by that trust fund to learn – perhaps to re-learn in some ways – how to live off the energy of the sun in something much closer to real time.  We cannot act like trust fund babies forever.

     But that is not my point, at least not now.  My point is – and this is so obvious I hesitate to even write it – we humans did not make the sun.  We did not merit its presence.  We did not earn its  energy.  We cannot congratulate ourselves for it.  We are – and we do and we make – because it was there first.  

     So, by all means, work.  Pull up on those bootstraps.  But don‛t forget: it is by grace that you do so. 

     This is the first lesson.