The Sistine Chapel

This is an extract from a series of essays inspired by Sri Aurobindo's "The Life Divine"

On the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo painted The Creation of Adam. In the painting, a naked Adam reclines on the Earth, heavy, tamasic. He leans back on one arm, supported from below by Earth's solidity, captured by her gravity. His life force whirls through the mud of his body, breath and blood pumping life into dead stones birthed by stars. Life tentatively lights his eyes, timid under the looming threat of death.

Adam's face is bewildered, lost. His set mouth conceals a burning regret. Alone on the edge of Earth and sky, his heart pulses life and longing, the pain of becoming reaches out through his harm, his hand, his outstretched finger, which wilts under the material burden of his despair. His eyes well with ache, searching for God.

God floats in the air, weightless, free. Surrounded and embraced by angelic beloveds, enclosed in a pericardium of warmth and love. Eternal life courses through God's body, confident in its infinity, radiating through omnipotent muscle. God leans surely through space, reaching assuredly and assertively toward the Son of Earth and Sky. One vibrant, outstretched finger conveys "Yes, you".

Two fingers: one fighting the weight of entropy, defeated by death and loneliness, the other sure as lightning, unwavering and poised. Between them, the last knot of our bondage. There, in that pregnant space between two fingers, length and breadth of the human soul, "the external draws into oneness with the internal, the machinery of ego becomes subtilised to the vanishing point and the law of our action is at last unity embracing and possessing multiplicity". (Sri Aurobindo)

The space between the two fingers is silent and alert. Like the vacuum state that underlies all form, its emptiness conceals everything. Adam looks up and touches a hollow depression in the cosmos. God looks down and touches all.

Creation began with a promise. It was tucked in among the fire and ice, planted in the heart of matter. The promise keeps Adam alive. Otherwise his lungs would collapse and his body would be crushed, like a diver gone too deep beneath the sea. The promise gives structure to his bones and his thoughts, and it lingers always just ahead of him, hovering in the air, luring him on. The promise hangs in the space between two fingers, a tiny space that Adam has moved into for thousands of years, ever advancing, breaking ground, achieving impossibilities, realizing the unknowable. And with every breath, the gap closes, the space retreats, and God leans in, anticipating the touch.