The World is a Gift

“The nuns taught us there are two ways through life: the way of nature and the way of grace.” That’s how Malick opens The Tree of Life. And then, instead of defining terms like a professor, he just drops us into a family where you can feel the tension in your bones. Nature is the father—strict, competitive, playing piano with a clenched jaw. Grace is the mother—luminous, barefoot in the grass, half-floating through childhood afternoons. It’s less theology lecture, more living-room cage match: two visions of reality, staring each other down across the dinner table.

The way of nature feels familiar, even necessary. Mr. O’Brien warns his boys, “You can’t be too good to people. People will walk all over you.” It’s the law of gravity: push or be crushed. René Girard would call it mimetic rivalry, Simone Weil called it gravity, and most parents just call it “Tuesday.” Everyone wants what everyone else wants, and suddenly you’re in a contest you never asked to join. (I’ve seen it with my kids fighting over the one blue cup in a cabinet full of perfectly good white ones. Desire is contagious, irrational, and occasionally absurd.)

Grace, on the other hand, looks like weakness until you actually try it. Mrs. O’Brien lets her children run wild, and somehow they bloom under her softness—not despite her gentleness but because of it. When one son crashes his bike, she doesn’t lecture about safety; she kisses the scrape. When another rages, she absorbs the storm until it passes. And here’s the weird part: her “impractical” approach works better than her husband’s iron grip. The kids open up to her, trust her, become more themselves around her. This is Weil’s grace: decreation, the ego letting go. This is Hart’s ontology of peace: reality itself as gift, not competition.

I’ve seen this work in businesses, not just living rooms. The leader who listens instead of dominates, who shares credit instead of hoarding it, who treats power as something to give away—they’re the ones people actually want to follow. Nature says “compete or die,” but grace knows a better game: the more you give, the more you have. Malick makes this look almost gravity-defying, like Mrs. O’Brien knows some secret the rest of us forgot.

And then comes the cosmic flex: the creation sequence. Stars explode, oceans churn, and a dinosaur—of all things—decides not to kill another dinosaur. Blink and you’ll miss it, but that’s Malick’s point: mercy isn’t an interruption to nature, it’s baked into the universe. Violence may be loud, but grace is more fundamental. (If a T-Rex can manage not to be a jerk, maybe there’s hope for us too.)

This isn’t just philosophy, it’s a dare. Because we’re still living by nature’s playbook—competition in business, scapegoating in politics, even tiny rivalries at home. Nature dresses up as control, but it usually cashes out as violence disguised as order. Grace is harder to spot, but it’s the only way to live with the grain of reality. The world isn’t a zero-sum contest; it’s a communion we keep forgetting to join.

Malick closes with a beach scene where everyone—parents, children, the dead, the living—meet again, reconciled. It’s almost corny, except it feels right. Hart would say that’s the infinite beauty of peace: violence finally exposed as a fraud, love revealed as the truth. And maybe that’s the point: every day we’re choosing which story to believe. Is the universe built on rivalry, or on gift? On nature’s gravity, or grace’s weightless mercy?

Malick bets on grace. And honestly, I want to, too. Even if it means giving up the blue cup.