“Miraccident”: A portmanteau I just made up of miracle and accident.

In his book, Hell: A Search for a Christian Ecology, academic Timothy Morton makes a radical argument for the beauty, strangeness, and unpredictability of everything we consider a given. His point is cosmic in scope, and decidedly intimate in reality, and it fits into a larger argument emerging in Christian and some secular circles: that frictionlessness and optimization maybe weren’t ever the point at all. 

He (using delightfully weird little sounds and noises, in the interview I listened to) starts his story of life with a single-cell organism, floating along in the ocean when it accidentally absorbs another single-cell organism (“schlurmp”).¹ That’s weird. Possible because of the organism’s permeable membrane, but a bit… weird. What happens now? Would this end them both? Fast forward 700 million years and amoebas would say, no, this is great; that absorbed cell became a mitochondria, your DNA became one and the same, and there are things we can do now that we never would have dreamed of. 

All of life, in Morton’s argument, is the messy and accidental encounter of neighbors. Single cell to single cell, reproduction, symbiosis, evolution, all of it caused entirely by one thing encountering another thing, place, environment, neighbor that is in some way different from itself, and those two things creating something entirely new, entirely by accident. Evolution was a hotly contested topic among religious scholars for hundreds of years (and it still is in some places, I don’t mean to assume your beliefs), but when Morton talks about it, about this messy and beautiful collision of living breathing things, about the unexpected and miraculous emergence of things that have never before existed, it just sounds so decidedly like God to me. 

That God, who we imagine molding us from dirt and breathing from God’s own mouth into our lungs, who anoints with oil, who spits in the dirt and rubs mud on a blind man’s eyes, that calls us to break bread with one another, to love the sick and the hurting, who draws into close encounter with the mess and relationship and uncertainty, would choose to build a world that works this way. A world that is never finished, and whose ever-changing nature follows no set plan, no obvious pathway, but instead, is shaped by every being’s open handed encounter with their neighbor. 

There is something in Morton’s book that I think can radically shape how we see innovation in ministry. Innovation is a term so often associated with the worlds of tech and business, it’s something we imagine as controlled, following pathways and strategies and hitting benchmarks. But when we talk about innovation, what if what we should really be imagining is Morton’s description of evolution? 

Is innovation a strategy implemented by people in control, or is innovation simply the encounter of neighbors? It is true that the future doesn’t have to look like the past, that things change and evolve and grow in directions we never imagined. But maybe that change is much more shaped by the accidental encounter of neighbors, making a connection that previously never existed, maybe the miracle, the evolution, happens in the space between them. That’s where a new thing is made. It’s messy, it’s unpredictable, but it’s also inevitable. Because from those first single-cells right up until the present day, all of life has seemed to have an irrefutable gravity towards each other, a curiosity that draws us to our neighbors, and the constant creation of something new. 

In your community this week, 

• Where is something new already emerging from the meeting of neighbors?
  • What was the connection of people, places, and ideas that created this new thing? 
  • How can you enable it and celebrate it (despite its likely messiness)? 
• Where can you encounter a neighbor in a way you never have before?
  • What conversations with your physical neighbors can you start?
  • What engagement with your ecological neighbors can you try (i.e. start a garden, feed some butterflies, and see what happens)?
• Catalogue the unexpected and messy encounters of neighbors that have shaped your life, here are some questions to get you started:
  • How did your parents meet? 
  • How was your denomination founded? 
  • How did you wind up in your job?
  • What is the story of your pets?
  • What is the history of some plant or animal in your yard (did they come over on the Mayflower, were they bred by indigenous communities, did they evolve from dinosaurs?)

You’ll be amazed by how many miracles/accidents (miraccidents?) have shaped your life so far, and hopefully a little more able to see the ones yet to come. 

1. Suspicious Minds, Season 2, Episode 8 ↩︎