The Golden Calf of Certainty: Trusting the Mystery of Creation | 06.19.2025

Yesterday, on my way to yoga, I was listening to a podcast with Dr. Ellen Langer, a Harvard mindfulness professor, as she unapologetically dismantled the illusion of certainty. She said something that stayed with me:

“Certainty is often a mindless state.”

I didn’t think much of it at the time. I finished the episode, parked the car, moved through my practice. But in hindsight, her words unsettled something in me—not because they dismissed faith, but because they exposed how easily we confuse faith with control.

When I got home and in the backyard watching the morning light flicker between treetops, the wind stirring the branches just enough to be noticed, a question rose up in me, clear and insistent:

What is the Vedic creation story?

It came not as a challenge, but as a beckoning—an invitation to remember that there are many ways the beginning has been told. I had already completed a 31-session classroom Bible study on Genesis and had been musing on the Ruach of God in recent blogs—so now it was time to explore, what does the pre-creation state look like in the Eastern traditions? How do their cosmologies shape the way we understand the Divine—not just in origin, but in ongoing presence?

If you know me, you know I’ve long wandered through global faith traditions. Since my teen years, I’ve traced a constellation of beliefs across the sky of my soul—Buddhism, Hinduism, mystic Christianity—always seeking the thread of the Divine. That thread has led me, again and again, back to Christ—but with new eyes, new reverence, and a heart softened by paradox.

What comforted me as I revisited the Rig Veda—the oldest known sacred text in the world—was how much it echoes the Genesis narrative. Both begin in darkness, in waters, in a formless void. Both speak of a stirring, a creative force. But where Genesis unfolds in confident cadence (“Let there be...”), the Nasadiya Sukta concludes with something far more open-ended:

“Who knows whence it has arisen? Perhaps even He does not.”

There’s something profoundly human—perhaps egoic, perhaps sacred—that drives us to know where we came from. To be without an origin story is to feel unmoored, unanchored, unclaimed. So we reach toward certainty like a child reaching for a mother’s hand in the dark. But what if that reaching, though innocent, becomes distorted over time? What if, in our demand to know, we begin to make gods out of our answers—and build golden calves of certainty?

Our longing to know isn’t the problem—it’s holy, even. A sacred ache seeded in the human mind. But when that longing turns into control, into dogma, into closed-loop explanations... something in us calcifies. We stop listening for God’s voice in the wind because we’ve already decided where He’s allowed to speak. We stop noticing the divine pattern unfolding in real time because we’ve locked the beginning into a single version of events.

Our ego, eager for clarity, often acts as a bouncer at the threshold of mystery—turning away any question that might unseat its illusion of control.

In this way, our certainty becomes an idol. It makes us feel safe. But safety and truth are not always the same thing.

The golden calf wasn’t built by people who had rejected God. It was built by people who were tired of waiting. Tired of mystery. Tired of not knowing where Moses had gone or when he’d return. So they melted down what they had, what they could see, and shaped it into something they could control. This is the ego’s demand for resolution—the craving to replace uncertainty with something solid, even if it’s man-made, even if it pulls us away from the living God.

We do this, too. Not with gold, but with answers. With tidy theologies. With origin stories we insist must be literal, complete, infallible.

But the irony is: the moment we become certain we know how the world began is often the moment we stop noticing that Creation is still happening. Right here. Right now. In the breath. In the becoming. In the holy dance of the unseen. We fail to recognize the birthing pains of mother Earth as we continue to desecrate her and drain her of her resources—forgetting that Creation was never a closed chapter in the past, but an unfolding story we are still inside of, still responsible for.

We forget that we are still being written into the story—that the pen has not been set down, and we are invited to write with the Spirit through our living. The call, then, is not to prove the story—but to live it with love. Not to defend our doctrine—but to embody Christ’s presence here and now. To be so aligned with the Spirit that we become vessels of Truth, even in uncertainty.

What might change if we lived with that awareness? Maybe we'd speak with more care, tend the land with more reverence, or choose presence over productivity. Maybe we'd recognize that how we live is the story. When we forget this, we not only abandon our agency—we distance ourselves from the One still writing.

If certainty is mindless, as Dr. Langer suggests, then wonder is what returns us to mindfulness. Not just presence, but attentive surrender—a willingness to stay in the question without rushing to resolve it.

Faith, at its root, was never meant to be a map with every turn labeled. It was meant to be a path walked barefoot, where even the detours are divine—a path the ego often resists, preferring certainty over surrender, direction over trust.

The more I sit with the idea that we weren’t meant to know the full Creation story, the more I wonder if not knowing is a mercy. Maybe the mystery is what keeps us humble—just as the Rig Veda suggests with its final cosmic shrug. Maybe it's what keeps us soft and listening, willing to receive rather than assume. In a world obsessed with answers, there is something radical about saying, “I don't know—but I trust the One who does.”

Not as a cop-out. Not as spiritual laziness. But as an act of deep reverence.

As mothers, as seekers, as soul-bodied beings—we practice this every day. We don’t know how our children will turn out. We don’t know what tomorrow brings. We don’t know how the story ends.

And yet, we show up as love embodied. We hold space. We listen. We trust in the unfolding. This, too, is what it means to live in the image of the Creator: to hold the unknowing with tenderness, to let mystery midwife new life.

Maybe we’re not meant to fully know the beginning. Maybe the mystery is the point. Maybe faith was never meant to be a statue to defend, but a river to step into—ever moving, ever holy.

We live in a culture that rewards certainty—especially when it comes to faith. But when we demand concrete answers about things that were never meant to be boxed in, we risk turning our beliefs into idols. We trade relationship for control. We stop seeking. As Paul says, "Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up" (1 Corinthians 8:1).

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that even our education systems are designed to reward certainty and discourage sacred questioning. From an early age, we’re taught that the right answer matters more than the wonder that birthed the question in the first place. And so, over time, our natural capacity for spiritual awe gets replaced with a desire to perform correctness. (More on this to come...)

Mindfulness, as Dr. Langer puts it, invites us back into the moment—into a deeper kind of noticing. Noticing what’s moving now. What’s being created now. Not needing to explain it all.

So I’m learning to let the mystery be. To trust that I don’t need to hold the whole story in order to be part of it. And that not knowing doesn’t make me less faithful—it makes me more present.

We don’t need all the answers to stay in wonder. We just need to stay open—to the mystery, to the unfolding, to the truth that the pen is still moving, and the Author is still writing.

In love + light,
April