Don’t look down. You are blessed.

Scientists, paleontologists, and Harvard cosmologists be damned. I have abandoned their tedious theories of Creation. Adam and Eve, evolution, and the Big Bang are all well and good, but they overlook the greatest event in human history.

The arrival of Elvis Presley.

My theology comes from John Almighty, better known to his disciples as John Lennon, whose congregation once exceeded that of practically every organized religion on Earth.

According to the Sacred Scriptures of Rock and Roll, the true story of Creation goes something like this:

In the beginning, there was darkness.

Time dragged on. Existence existed, but hardly anyone noticed. People had ears, but nothing worth listening to. They had feet, but nowhere worth dancing.

Then, without warning, the heavens opened. A deafening electric guitar split the darkness.

And Elvis appeared.

And Elvis said, “Let there be Rock.”

And there was Rock.

And the people heard that it was good. Very good. Especially the teenagers.

The Dark Ages ended. Hips began swiveling. Parents trembled. Teenage girls screamed. Civilization, which had been limping along since the Greeks, suddenly discovered the meaning of life.

Then came John Almighty and his fellow apostles, bearing the Holy Word on millions of little plastic wafers, each with a hole in the middle. Their revelation, “Hey Jude,” spread across the Earth, and billions joined the congregation.

Hallelujah! We had been saved.

I offer this theological nonsense for a serious reason.

We were there. We witnessed the Creation.

Those of us still upright and reasonably articulate lived through World War II and its aftermath, the Atomic Age, the Age of Aquarius, and now the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

We witnessed revolutions in civil rights, medicine, music, science, and human expectations. We watched old prejudices crumble and new ones arise to take their places.

The Church of Elvis in Las Vegas is good for a chuckle. So are UFO abductions and the occasional claim that the King is still alive and working at a convenience store in Arkansas.

But we were eyewitnesses to something more remarkable than any religious miracle.

We saw humanity repeatedly stumble toward a better world, often while doing its damnedest to destroy the one it already had.

There were wars, massacres, pollution, nuclear threats, political madness, and heartbreaking disappointments. Human beings demonstrated an inexhaustible capacity for stupidity, cruelty, and self-deception.

And yet, through all that turmoil, something else kept happening.

People reached higher.

They fought injustice, cured diseases, created beauty, composed music, explored the universe, and occasionally even learned to get along with their neighbors.

The triumphs never erased the tragedies. But they gave us reasons to keep going.

And that is what I want younger generations to understand.

We, elders, are the dwindling eyewitnesses to one of humanity’s most astonishing centuries. If we spend our remaining years merely complaining about our ailments, the government, and the price of groceries, we will have squandered a priceless opportunity.

We have stories worth telling. Not because our generation was wiser or more virtuous than those that followed. Heaven knows, we weren’t.

But because we saw how much could go wrong—and how much could still go right.

So don’t spend your life staring down at the potholes. Look up occasionally. There is a remarkable amount of sky overhead.

I have lived long enough to become skeptical of just about everything, except the human capacity to reach beyond itself.

We never found paradise. We frequently made a hell of things. But we kept reaching for heaven.

And every once in a while, we got close enough to hear the music.