One of the vanishingly few experiences I've had with organised religion over the course of my life happened when I was ten or eleven, attending a friend's congregation and Sunday school because I'd slept over Saturday night and my parents couldn't pick me up until the afternoon. I think their church was Baptist. I know that this happened just after spring equinox, because of what the sermon was about.
(At least I think that's what the speech bit was called. You'll have to forgive me for getting any of this wrong. Like I said, this story is about one of, like, four times I've set foot in a church in a non-sightseeing capacity my entire life.)
Anyway, in the sermon the lady talked about the changing of the seasons and weather, something something nature something something Jesus, everything's as it's meant to be. And then she said something that's stayed lodged in my brain for probably eight years now: she said that the reason we have any of this, the reason we have sunsets that change times as the year goes on and seasons that are hot and seasons that are cold and solstices and equinoxes and so on and so forth, is that God in his wisdom made the earth and set it on an angle of 23.5° and that's how it's meant to be.
I don't think I had, at eleven, any deep reaction to this, other than maybe vaguely scornful surprise at someone trying to spin a billion-year-old geographical fuckup into part of some divine plan - what are they on about? Why would God have made a world that didn't spin on a perfectly vertical axis, what kind of crappy design is that? But evidently something did resonate, because I still remember sitting with my friend on a beanbag (this was a very liberal, modern church, one that cared less about traditional formality than it did about people showing up and listening) on the hall's carpeted floor, as a spring rainstorm lashed at the windows and someone rustled around behind the podium setting up an old-fashioned light projector for the hymns that were about to happen and a woman I'd never met before told me that everything about the creation of our planet went exactly as it was meant to.
And I'm not - I'm not religious at all, much as I've tried to be over the years in various ways (I wasn't raised in religion and I haven't had any serious crises with which faith could help, and essentially I've reached the conclusion that I've ended up just too damn cynical to really believe in any higher power), but there's something about that sentiment that's just ineffably flat-out lovely to me. The idea that there is some aspect of intelligent design to our universe, to our planet, and that whatever intelligence was designing it beheld the earth and thought hang on, it's missing a little something and tipped it over a bit, just so, twenty three point five degrees exactly, and in doing so gave us daylight savings and Yuletide and month-long nights at either extreme and small talk about how cold it is for this time of year, I thought my fingers were going to freeze and drop off on the way to work this morning, bloody weird for November isn't it? and sat back, satisfied, and thought: there. Perfect.
I no longer remember what the painting was or whose hand painted it, but in the notes I took while I was travelling, of things I couldn't really take a picture of but didn't want to forget nonetheless, there's a quote I found in an art museum somewhere, in the little explanation for one of the pieces. We're a relatively young, largely untamed country, us, and as such a fair chunk of our art history is made up of depictions of wild places unseen by the European eye until that moment. (Now I think about it, the painting might have been a waterfall?) I think I'm going to close out with that quote, because it articulates how I feel about that sermon I heard eight years ago much more clearly than I ever could. Suffice it to say I'm not a believer, not by any stretch of the imagination, but I might just believe in this.
"I serve my God in studying nature," he wrote, and every brushstroke in this painting is fired by the romantic faith that nature is the canvas of God. It is a painting about being overwhelmed by nature, by God and by art, which for him were one and the same.
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