Jonathan Eberhart 1942-2003
Lately I’ve been thinking about Jonathan Eberhart. Jonathan was a singer, amateur folklorist, gourmand, polyglot, and widely esteemed science journalist (he was the space exploration editor for Science News, and today there is an award in his name). He was also a family friend who I knew and admired from the time I was born. When I was five, he started teaching me Japanese, and I still remember a few words.
As a songwriter Jonathan was a true poet. One of his best songs, “Dawn,” retells the biblical story of creation – “not for religious reasons,” he wrote, “but simply to suggest the beauty and importance of a long-awaited occasion.” The lyrics are stunningly beautiful:
I’ll tell you a tale of the way the world grew
If I had the power I’d give it to you.
On the first day was nothing, neither left nor to right,
Till a voice rang eternal, saying “Let there be light.”Yet the light omnipresent little wonder did yield.
‘Twas the coming of darkness light’s glory revealed.
One turn of the wheel, and daylight is gone,
But it’s night that enables the birth of the dawn.
That song helped me find a way into a part of the Bible that made no sense to me as a Religious Humanist. When I was younger, and thought of such texts as serious attempts by our ancestors to understand how the world came into being, I thought the creation stories worse than pointless, because they seemed to undermine anything worthwhile I might find in the rest of the book. They were magical, they contradicted each other, and they just didn’t make sense. That some people use these stories as justification for denying the truths of science bothered me even more.
Jonathan, who was in no way religious, found wonder and poetry in that old story, and as I listened to that song through the years, I began to find it too. I learned, as I have so many times before and since, that there are more kinds of truth than facts. There is insight, beauty, a sense of wonder, and an honoring of the world.
Jonathan’s song helped inspire a service I’m putting together this week on creation stories from various traditions, something Unitarian Universalists rarely talk about. I’m learning “Dawn” for the occasion. It feels good, after so many years, to give voice this part of my spiritual journey and our religious heritage. It feels right to find new truths in old stories, to tell them again, to let the mythology be what it is and search for deeper truths. It makes sense in every way to sing the beauty of the dawn.
The Song and the Sigh 