We pounded madly toward the wharf, and under the light that hung above it, and the beam that made a cross. He does not willingly plunge off wharfs at midnight in the monstrous company of amphibious shadows.” Dreyer explains, “Nevertheless their power held me. It was this, I suppose, that startled me back into some semblance of human terror. We were approaching the end of the road, and the road, as I have said, ended in the river. I was leaping with a growing ease.” ĭreyer continues, “It was just then that the wharf lights began to show. Furthermore, certain sensations, hypnotic or otherwise, suggested to me that my own physical shape was modifying, or about to change. My will was in abeyance I could not stop. It was this, I think, that stirred the last remnants of human fear and human caution that I still possessed. He recalls, “The water was pulling them – not water as we know it, but the mother, the ancient life force, the thing that made us in the days of creation, and that lurks around us still, unnoticed in our sterile cities.” Dreyer was being pulled as well, and became a spontaneous participant in the Spring rite: “Even as I leaped, I was changing. In a rare moment, Dreyer, who is usually private and sedate, divulges his experience of being caught up in the Spring rite of the frogs returning to the water for mating and laying eggs. In this piece, a young, unnamed scientist comes across Albert Dreyer, an esteemed and mysterious elder scientist, in a tavern. Nature writer Loren Eiseley’s story, “The Dance of the Frogs,” illustrates this permeability. Burton-Christie sees the literary genre of nature writing as a liminal space in which “it becomes possible to imagine the apparently impermeable boundaries that separate one place from another, spirit from matter, ourselves from other living species, ourselves from God, as permeable.” Theologian Douglas Burton-Christie asserts that poetry and literature play “a crucial role in re-imagining our relationship with the natural world” and in doing so, I suggest, provide insight into Panikkar’s theology. Raimon Panikkar’s word “cosmotheandric” indicates a wholeness through intersubjectivity the cosmos, God and humans participate in the substance and activity of one another.

In the October issue of New Creation, I explored the idea of a cosmotheandric language of belonging and resolved that “without the wild energy of Ruach our religious endeavors are cut off from their very source and destination.” In this piece I would like to take a deeper dive into cosmotheandrism by putting Loren Eiseley’s story “The Dance of the Frogs” in conversation with theology and science.

The dance of the frogs by loren eiseley