About thirteen billion years ago there was only God. But she was lonely and dreamed of a universe to give her companionship.

2   So she caused a great spark of energy, filling space with a chaos of particles.

3   God saw that chaos needed form, so she gathered the particles of energy and with some of the particles she made myriad suns to provide light and flung them into the empty space. 

4   With other particles she made worlds on which the suns could shine.  For some of the worlds she gave rain to erode the solid land and give the worlds a softer form.  The rain fell and became rivers, lakes, and oceans.

5   She then saw that change was needed to make the worlds more pleasing, so she gave the oceans life forms and the land plants and trees.

6   But God was still lonely, so she created a multitude of creatures to live on the land and in the sea.  And she watched the creatures multiply and evolve and occupy every corner of the land and sea.   And so ended the first epoch.

7   God watched the worlds change and she was pleased, but she was still lonely, wishing for a creature different from all the rest, capable of thought and love and able to survive by instinct and wit.  So she created a man and a woman, so that neither would be lonely.  She named them Adam and Eve.

8   She gave the man and woman permission to use temporarily the world’s land and air and water and its creatures, mindful that all life is woven into a tapestry of dependence.  “Beware,” she said to them, “that you protect everything you need to survive, for there will be no more again.”

9   God was pleased with what she saw.

10  During the second epoch God watched as Adam and Eve found food to  eat and things with which to build shelter.  They invented language to communicate and learned all the skills to survive.  And God was pleased with what she saw.

11  Soon Adam and Eve felt a common loneliness and wished there were others like them to share their lives.  In an act of infinite tenderness they conceived their first child, which in time gave them great pleasure.  Over the years to follow other children joined them in a family.    They built communities in which to live and work and rest and grow.   And so ended the second epoch.

 Chapter 2

On a day much like any other, Adam and Eve were walking in the forest and came upon a great apple tree.  It was very old and gnarled, and it showed the scars of fires that had blackened its bark but which it had survived.

2   God knew this tree to be the most splendid tree in the forest, whose trunk and limbs were full of wisdom and intelligence on every subject.  She knew this to be the tree of knowledge, whose fruit contained information on every subject God knew about.

3   God thought Adam and Eve should eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, giving them understanding of everything.

4   So God shook the tree and apples fell to earth at the feet of Adam and Eve.  The apples looked and smelled delicious, so they ate them, leaving only the core which was of a different texture.  God knew the core to contain the fundamental knowledge and wisdom needed to understand and deal with all the other things learned and experienced. 

5   God wished they would eat it all, but the core of the apple seemed too strange and different.   Adam and Eve were reticent and unwilling to venture that far into the unknown.  So they received much of the wisdom and knowledge of the world, but the core questions and their answers remained unknown to Adam and Eve. 

6  Before Adam and Eve died of old age, having lived full and    satisfying lives, grandchildren and great grandchildren joined the family, which grew and spread 

7   Dozens of generations later, the Family of Mankind had expanded to cover much of earth.  God was pleased.    Thus ended the third epoch.

          Chapter 3

For a long time, the men and women of earth lived in harmony with their world and God watched them with pleasure.  Then, during the fourth epoch, God saw one of her worlds begin to lose great expanses of cedar forests across a fertile crescent, cut down or burned by the men and women.  The soil was left to blow away or be turned to mud by rain.  And she was not pleased.

2   She saw men and women killing for reasons other than for food and clothing.  Men and women killed other men and women for seemingly senseless reasons, as if there were not enough land or water or other natural things on earth to meet everyone’s needs.   

3   She saw groups of men and women pushing other men and women off the land and often killing many of them and their children in the process.  And God was puzzled and distressed.  She tried to close her eyes to such terrible things, but each time she opened them it became worse.  God wept.  Thus ended the fourth epoch.

4   During the fifth  epoch, people of the world invented gunpowder and organized wars among themselves that killed many people.  They used many years’ worth of irreplaceable resources without solving any of the  disagreements  about  which they  were warring.  When one disagreement passed, another took its place, year after endless year. 

5   God wondered if she had made a selfish error in creating her universe.  She pondered that question for the rest of the fifth epoch during which she never discovered where her universe had gone wrong.

6   Then some people discovered a part of the initial spark that God had used to fill the empty space with energy.   Knowing what elemental power existed in that energy she was very much afraid that men and women would undo their world and leave it nothing but a cinder in space.

7   Briefly she thought she might intervene, but then she remembered the love and goodness of which men and women are capable.  They must find their own way, she thought.  They would not destroy their earthly home.  And God waited patiently for men and women to find their way.  So ended the fifth epoch.

8   God saw a new organization of the world’s peoples created to prevent more wars, but she watched with increasing concern as men and women continued to make little wars and big wars.  They improved the efficiency of their killing machines and made wars so impersonal those who wage them never see their victims and never even try to discover peaceful alternatives.   

9   Most participants in the wars know nothing about why they fight, spurred on by their leaders who sleep safely in their beds behind guarded walls.

10   God also saw men and women continuing to feed their rapacious appetite for non-renewable resources that once used are gone forever.  As those resources come in short supply,  they  will likely  be the  cause of new wars.  There will be no winners in the long run, she thought.

11   She saw men and women fouling the nest that nurtured them.  The air was polluted with smoke and chemicals.  Rivers ran brown with soil stripped from the land, and rivers even burned.  Streams ran toxic with poisons, bereft of all life forms.

12   The oceans were becoming empty as men and women over-fish some species and kill others as the collateral damage of bottom trawling and fishing with nets and lines measured in miles.  God wept again

13   She saw parts of the earth struggling for survival with too many people trying to live on too little land with too little resources.  She saw lowlands crowded with millions of people whose lives are at risk from floods.

14   She saw people on every continent trapped by HIV and millions doomed to die of AIDS, even while life prolonging drugs are available, but only to some.  She saw a small part of the earth holding more than half the world’s riches and consuming more than twice everyone else.  And so ended the sixth epoch.

Chapter 4

And in the seventh epoch God struggled to understand these events in her universe.  She had witnessed great leaders of men and women who worked against the grain of hate, and killing, and exploitation: Siddhartha Gautama Buddha, Confucius, Lao-Tzu, Aristotle, Socrates, Moses, Abraham, Jesus, and others.

2   And also in the seventh epoch:  Albert Schweitzer, Dag Hammarskjold, Mohandas Gandhi, Charles Dickens, Martin Luther King, Jr., Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Rachel Carson, Margaret Sanger, Mother Teresa, Billy Graham, and others.  She was proud of all these.

3   Other men and women, less prominent on the world scene, also struggled against ignorance, poverty, and disease all over the world, which taken together made important differences in the character and quality of the lives of many people.

4   However, God also noted the terrible effects of such men as Torquemada, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Osama bin Laden.

5   God pondered the good and the bad in her universe, seeing the slow progress being made against ignorance and hatred and hunger and slavery in all its forms.   It took a long view to convince her that she had, indeed, not made a selfish mistake in creating the universe. 

6   There was much to celebrate and much to mourn, and God did both of these.

7   God thought about creating a special place outside her universe into which to put the evil doers and the men and women who despoiled the land and the seas and the air.  But she decided against doing that, believing that living with  the fruits  of their  actions was the better reward and penalty for decisions and actions taken by the men and women of earth. 

Both heaven and hell would exist on earth as a reminder and motivation for change. 

8   God knew it would take a long time to learn and act upon the core values Adam and Eve so long ago had been too timid to consume.  The process of discovering those values one by one would be very slow.

9   And so continued the seventh epoch, without God knowing when or how it might evolve.