and we wax cynical: about silly searches, or about the less than Lancelot-like behavior of some knights on their travels. And yet ... we watch an athlete, rigid and oblivious in concentration before a bar at a height neither she nor any other woman has ever cleared, and we may think, "personal goals," and recall another dictionary definition of "quest,"

and we hear the echo of trumpets, and do not feel cynical at all.

"Personal goals" is, however, a phrase that sometimes evokes another kind of cynicism. It seems overly self-centered, belonging to a "me generation" of Walkmans and carefully metered relational commitments. But, again, "and yet" ... the Walkman supplements the environment rather than blotting it out; the "stop" button is conveniently to hand and is readily used by the courteous; and this technology permits the maximum freedom with the minimum of intrusion on others. And we do make relational commitments today; and when we do, we tend more to really mean them. We are in general freeer in our time, and we undertake to seek our goals, of whatever kind, and more particularly to seek personal love, when we are ready rather than when ritual or pressure dictates.

But we do not forget ritual. We still want what are for most of us our greatest personal commitments, one to the other in love, to be public; and we dress for these as the most formal of occasions, and likely reach back for words to times when language was more ceremonious and knighthood, if not exactly in flower, was at least still taken most seriously. The echo of trumpets is heard again, and we swear great oaths, and I do not feel many of us would feel uncomfortable if the minister or official who married us said, "You have today undertaken together a quest for love; acquit yourselves well on it." Perhaps this is the only time some of us would feel comfortable with such a wording, with cool and cautious language as much laid aside at that moment as cool and cautious feeling. At this time if at no other, we still, most of us - two by two - depart on quests.

To repeat from a few moments ago: our commitments, our quests, of whatever kind, are now more free. They are undertaken not as a "prescribed task" on the occasion of a rite of passage into adulthood, but as and when we choose. We can say that they now begin each at the end of a preparatory journey. And in the journey to the quest for personal love in particular, this day, Valentine's Day, can be an important way station, perhaps the last, as we select a card, a gift, that expresses just how and how much we feel, and realize this time we feel - a lot. That's why, when I was invited to do a Thursday night service this Winter, and when I realized what subject I wanted to develop in my service, I asked for tonight. Besides which, today happens to be the twentieth anniversary of the day I met, in this building, the woman with whom I undertook the marriage quest half a year later in our church; and, romantic that I am, I'm much given to recognizing anniversaries and significant days. Once more, the echo of trumpets.

There's more. A couple of sentences ago, I said I would develop the subject of the quest for love and the journey to its beginning. The journey I want to talk about now is measured not in months or decades, but in billions of years. For I believe that not just our individual human developmental years, but the whole history of our planet, is a journey to what can be the beginning of a quest for love. This is going to take some explaining, not least of what, more generally, I mean by "love"; and since this possible overall human quest in one that I have, in addition to that of marriage, undertaken, I think it will be appropriate for me to make this explanation in the context of how I came to this commitment, of my own individual journey to this quest. Besides, my beliefs, however organized I may or may not succeed in making them sound, are not something I encountered as a whole some evening in somebody's book and then said, "Yup. That sounds pretty logical. I think I'll believe that." They grew out of my life, and sometimes out of quite odd coincidental circumstances in it.

To begin with, I might never have got decently launched on this journey, let alone have completed it, if I hadn't gotten off to a bad start.

Firstly, it helped that certain family circumstances existed that interrupted my education and caused me to begin working for my living. Otherwise, I suppose that I would have been kept very busy in late adolescence and early manhood getting a good organized grip on a technical subject (radio engineering was what in particular appealed to me), and getting launched professionally. Or, given certain emotional warning signs in my late high school work, I might have burned out and bombed out in the attempt. Instead, when I studied in those years, it was what I wanted to study. And what I wanted to study, influenced by the science fiction I devoured, was: no, not science, at first, but philosophy. Characters whom I admired in stories defended ideals and long-range visions of where their worlds could go, against villains who were narrow, ignorant, repressive. The heroes and heroines had philosophies, and I wanted one too.

It also helped that I was socially inept in the worst way. To put it simply, that gave me a lot of time to read; and a correlative lack of commercial ambition allowed the reading to be other than night study for my job.

What came out of this was little formal, organized knowledge of philosophy as an academic subject. Instead, I got hold of basic ideas and acquired a taste for short and simple definitions. That taste for definitions started in a typically coincidental way: I read a story in which the hero, a naval officer candidate, was required in an examination to define "courage" in six words or less. He came up with "courage is fear faced with resolution," and imbedded in me a desire to crystallize my own thoughts by doing likewise.

The most fundamental basic idea I found was evolution. I had been reading fiction in which becoming was more central than being, in which the universe unfolded (whether the universe unfolds as it should, and whether, indeed, there is a "should" are other matters). I wandered through the traditional arguments of philosophy, such as how many kinds of reality there are, and how we know that we know, and I think I was judicious; but I soon settled on the processes of growth as the central phenomena I wanted to understand, and on an informed realism - that is, on science - as the way of getting that understanding. The business of science, and the scientific method, may be complex in the extreme, but science itself is, I found, really quite simple: it consists of just forming ideas about reality and then checking them back against reality to find out what truth they have.

This is evolution in general that I'm talking about. Living things mutate because there is just enough fragility in their genetic material, and the mutations are culled by selection: that's biological evolution. But it was preceded by the slower universe-wide physical and chemical evolution in which stars cook hydrogen into the other natural elements, and planets condense to brew the compounds of those elements up to the complexity of the first life. And it has produced our far faster social evolution, in which ideas and behaviors are innovated and diffused. And a reader of science fiction is unlikely to smugly assume that social evolution is the end of the story.

Fascination with evolution in general goes back quite a way, of course, particularly to the simple syntheses and optimism of the nineteenth century (when Unitarians were proclaiming "onward and upward forever"). But the nineteen-fifties were a particulary heady time to encounter general evolution. We were filling in the gaps - the gaps where it had so recently seemed possible (or necessary, depending on your philosophical inclination) that miraculous jumps occurred. We simulated the early atmosphere of Earth, and watched the precursors of living chemicals appear; then, later, we put the precursors together and made something technically alive. We began to understand the structure of the brain, and how life might produce mind; and we traced the flights of the stars back to the Big Bang, and listened, and heard its echoes. The story became seamless. There was ultimate simplicity in the beginning, and from that moment natural law alone led to a universe of billions of worlds that might harbor life and then, if life survived, mind; and then, if mind survived ... what?

To form an idea of where evolution might go involved first forming an idea of what it - as a whole - is. My predilections drew me to those simple nineteenth century days (not that they always used short, simple words), to Herbert Spencer's "law of evolution", which characterizes whe whole process as one in which matter passes from

an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity
(as quoted in Encyclopedia Americana:25, (481), 1979)

Emergentism was a philosophy that got into a lot of trouble in the nineteenth century. But in the mid-twentieth century I had two big advantages: science could now explain how it all actually worked, so that one no longer had to wave one's arms and invoke divine or other strange external forces to keep emergence going; and we had also discovered indeterminacy. In the nineteenth century, they were locked into determinism, into a universe like a great clockwork that looked marvellous but made freedom very awkward to explain. But we now knew that not only was it ultimately impossible, given the exact state of the universe at any moment, to predict what would happen in the next moment, but that - whether we could predict or not - those next events were not, at the fine, subatomic level, determined. There is a real, very basic uncertainty in what the world does, and the workings of nature that we call evolution are that uncertainty elaborating itself into freedom. ^footnote1 Trying to form some of those simple definitions I so liked, I expressed this as

Freedom is self-control

I may have lost you in various technicalities in the last few minutes, but let me restate my main conclusion, for it one that many people have arrived at (some of them quite opposed to the idea of evolution): this is the moment of the Earth, the crucial time in which, because of the knowledge we have gained, we must decide our planet's future. Where I diverge from some others is in claiming that it is the future of evolution, the source of our freedom of choice, that is the most important thing we have to choose. But where I reconverge with them is in seeing a grim aspect of our freedom and responsibility: our knowledge also gives us the power to destroy ourselves. We might not just choose not to make the effort to evolve further. We might not just choose not take the risk of the unknown - for remember, it is more freedom, not a fully determined future course, that we would be embarking on. We might not choose to go instead, in some distant future and with some dignity, into slow extinction. Rather, we might die much more quickly, at our own hands, and take with us into death every candidate this planet has to replace us.

We could evolve futher, but might not; so the question I now faced was: should we, or shouldn't we? This was a matter of ethics. For some time, I staggered along on what was essentially a copout; in a universe which didn't need God to keep it going, I conceived of its spectacular origin as a kind of suicide, a self-destruction by what might as well be called God in order to achieve some end that only a material universe, set free, could perhaps reach. Not carrying on evolution with this understanding would then essentially be letting down the side. The big problem in this was the act of pure faith needed, in the goodness of this unknown goal, and my not really satisfactory way of dealing with this problem was to look at evolution and to say, in effect, "Look how great it's been so far! It'll probably get better, so let's carry on." Given that, the good was what contributed to our survival as free humans, and to the increase of freedom in further evolution. A workable set of ethics derived from this.

And then one of those odd coincidental things happened. Gary Cooper died. The following weekend, the TV stations hauled out many of his old movies for memorial showings. One of them was Ayn Rand's screen version of her novel, The Fountainhead. I was transfixed by the spirit of her writing and thoughts, ^footnote2 and quickly ploughed into her novels. I've found much since to disagree with her about, but from her I received one priceless gift: she showed me how to derive my fundamental values - life, truth, and freedom - strictly out of my nature as a human. She also gave me a pride in my own nature and individuality I hadn't had before, which led me to leave home (none too soon) and come West to make a life for myself here. In making friends here who were also interested in her ideas, I was led incidentally to finish my formal education and, not less important, to find this Church with its unique fostering of my till-then so non-religious values.

At the other end of my abortive theory, the mysterious Big Bang that began our universe had become - probably - explained as resulting from a previous collapse in an endless pulsating cycle of expansion and contraction. This question is still partly up for grabs, ^footnote3 but it is in any case now a scientific debate rather than a religious one; in the traditional sense of "religion", anyway.

At this point, there was no place in my essentially integrated ideas for a concept to which the name "God" might reasonably be given. But now my journey was ready for its final stage, which had another, if not odd, at least unusual beginning. My increasing interest in religion (and in this church, it's quite possible to be religious without being theistic) flowed together with the sixties' enthusiasm for human potential and meditation, and led me to another book, a rather strange late-Victorian work by the Canadian doctor, Richard Maurice Bucke, titled Cosmic Consciousness.

Bucke enabled me to resolve for myself the nagging question of why, in a universe that runs itself, sincere and honest humans still claim to experience God. His suggestion was that people who have spiritual experiences - and he had one himself - are not contacting another, eternal, universal reality, but are participating in the beginning emergence of a new stage of human evolution; and that the inexpressibility of such experiences in words reflects not a regression to a more primitive level, but the encountering of an upper bound on the capabilities of language, and of something which is truly beyond us and which we hence call infinite. His concepts accounted for the phenomena, and fitted into the remaining hole in my ideas. Here was the entity that could emerge from us and become our successor. Here, in the sincere unanimity, of those who had achieved spiritual transcendence, about the goodness and holy nature of the reality experienced, was the ethical reason for choosing to participate in and promote the new entity's emergence. And here, with a little investigation and thought, was the method; here was the forming relation in which we as the forming entities at our level could engage in order to continue to bring this new entity - the entity for which we had coined the name, God - into being. This relationship, said so many of the holy ones in their various ways, was love.

The idea that God is reached through love, or is love, has considerable antiquity. For example, it's been in plain language in the Christian Bible for almost two millenia, along with a set of instructions which I, a non-Christian, don't hesitate to pass along:

One more odd circumstance in my journey: the drain tiles around our house clogged, and before we could get help to clear them I had to spend a sleepless night of steady rain, bailing. I used that time to come close to a synthesis, and then later, walking home from a movie, finished my definition:

Love is consciousness of unity

To rightly meditate is thus to make love; to have close fellowship can be to make such love; to make love in the usual sense of the term can be, if it meets the criterion of this definition. to make also holy love. And to make love in this high sense is to make God.

To the values which derive from my nature - life, truth, and freedom - I added the chosen one of love. My journey to this choice was done; and if ever a choice deserved, in the halls of my soul, not merely the echo but the sound of trumpets, and the name "quest", this was it. Along the way, this journey had incorporated the beginning of my quest for personal love. And to complete it necessitated understanding the long evolutionary journey which is the history of our planet, and which leads to this moment when our species might choose together to undertake the religious quest for love and so to bring God fully into being. I think we should. It's certainly better than some of the alternatives.

The odd events that punctuated my journey need not have had that function. What they have in common is that they were opportunities, that I happened at those moments to have sense enough to take advantage of. There were probably horribly many more that I missed. When I'm talking about meditation (which is a way in which I pursue my quest), and I'm pointing out how some wastable moments and annoyances can be turned instead to spiritual use, I like to say, "everything is an opportunity." This moment of the Earth is an opportunity, too. I think we get it once.

Shall we risk, and shall we try? Shall we love, or shall we die?

¹ It's only since 1985 that I've discovered chaos theory, which suggests an actual mechanism by which freedom emerges in evolution. To quote from James Gleick's "Chaos: Making a New Science" (New York, 1987, but I didn't discover it until the mid-90s): "'Evolution is chaos with feedback,' Joseph Ford said" (page 314). Click here to return to the text that referred to this footnote.

² Ayn Rand's novels are usually easy to find, her other works less so. In early 2003, there are several good web sites concerning her and her ideas. One site with a biography and a helpful collection of links is aynrand.org (click here). Alternatively, click here to return to the text that referred to this footnote.

³ In early 2003, the prevailing view seems to be that there is not enough matter in the universe to cause it to stop expanding and subsequently contract. Furthermore, there is doubt that a cycle of expansions and contractions could keep going indefinitely without degradation. On the other hand, there is one theory that there may be a mechanism by which the universe, very old, cold and scattered, would be explosively renewed anyway. And so it goes. Click here to return to the text that referred to this footnote.