The Aneurysm in the Food Chain

Granted sufficient faculties to name all members in God’s kingdom, the human went on to name the grisly process that bound them together. It called it the food chain because it could see what it was. Granted the privilege of occupying the top of that system introduced a troubling consideration: Who wanted to be at the top of that? If God was good, and humankind believed God was, why would He submit all creatures great and small – outside itself – to the hideous imperative of running all their short lives long with violent capture and voracious consumption the only outcome? A particularly gruesome twist was all those lower creatures were forced to eat whatever they caught until the time came for them to serve as the feast themselves. Could God conceive no other use for life than as a meal? According to this abhorrent model, no.

With so appalling a scheme before its eyes, humankind had to wonder if maybe the divine author was not good in the sense the human cherished. But that would be wrong. God provided the Ten Commandments. They reflected the values of human virtue exactly. Clearly, God was on its wavelength when it came to that. And, after all, in giving humankind jurisdiction over all the other creatures God had exempted it from the horrid cycle. On the other hand, that meant it was to eat what was left.

Proud of being the top of God’s deadly food chain, the big cheese, so to speak, humankind remained unaware that it was also the chain’s faulty link, its aneurysm. The appetite of all other members in the writhing sequence of survival was regulated by physical limits in chase, conquest, and consumption, all of which were soon reached. Along with a capacity for naming things, God, however, had endowed humans with supra-corporal appetites and the means to indulge them, hence, the blowout, the aneurysm. Unconstrained by physical limits, the perverse appetites of such creatures are not satiated by feeding, but whetted.

And yet God is good. In felling trees, burning acreage, ravaging countrysides, blighting crops, fouling air, poisoning rivers, contaminating groundwater, humankind may annihilate individuals but cannot end life. At some point, the human, too, is returned to the humble microbe as detritus for dissolution and renewal. Through the constancy of the microbe and its magical burble God bestows His mercy.¹

1. “God Is Good,” Third Son of Thor, Constance McCutcheon, 2023. ↩︎