Double Helix: Our Spiritual DNA – June 25, 2025

Chapter 9: From the First Creation Story...

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1. Then YHWH Elohim planted a garden in Eden in the east, and there he placed the human he had made.

Genesis 2:8

When I hiked in the Sinai desert so many years ago, our Bedoin guide brought us to a wadi, or oasis. There in the midst of dry and barren land there was this tiny garden of green beauty. Trees, a pool of water, plants. It was unfathomable how this place had come to be! A miracle which could have come only from God.

In this second story, the first thing that YHWH Elohim does is to plant a garden. Whereas the first creation story begins with cosmic events, glorious beyond imagining, the second story begins with hands in the dirt, a simple act of nurturing the soil. Whereas in the first story, God acts using Hebrew verbs such as bara (create) and ‘asah (make), in the second story, we are given the actions of a potter yatsar (to fashion) and those of an architect banah (to build). In the first story, God seems celestial, cosmic and in the second story God is simple and physical, planting seeds and digging in the dirt. It is only when the two stories sit side by side that we can glimpse the immensity of God, who is both transcendent and imminent, higher than the stars and right beside us in the soil. There is no other way to capture God’s paradoxical, incomprehensible nature than to give us two strands of stories which, woven together, give us a fuller picture of how God created the world, from the greatest celestial event to the planting of a seed in a garden.

In 1955, Ray Bradbury wrote the story A Sound of Thunder. In the story a man travels back to the time of the dinosaurs where he accidently steps on a butterfly. Returning to the present, he sees that everything is different: words are spelled differently, people act strange, and the president is a different person. This narrative gave rise to the concept of the Butterfly Effect, a concept that was both embraced and contradicted in the world of quantum physics. The Butterfly Effect is a way to point to the interconnectedness of all things, that a butterfly flapping its wings in California could affect the wind in South Carolina. The smallest of activities, even those that occur on a microscopic level, can impact both the present and the future. The planting of a seed can influence the currents of the oceans. We cannot explain or understand it, but Jesus says a similar thing when he explains that those who have faith the size of a mustard seed could say to this mountain “move” and the mountain would move (paraphrase of Matthrew 17:20). When the world seems to be overrun and you feel powerless, just remember that God created the whole world and began with simple the planting of a seed.

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