|
“If we say that we have fellowship with him while we
are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; but if we walk in
the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another,
and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.”
(The core of the following message is the “New Creation Story” or “the new cosmology,” which has been popularized by geologian Father Thomas Berry and cosmologist Brian Swimme, co-authors of The Universe Story. Preachers could also relate this story to the first creation story of Genesis (1:2-3), Wisdom being with God in creation (Proverbs 8:22), or as a modern Passion story (e.g., on Palm Sunday or Good Friday) with Earth being the Body of Christ. Unless another reference is given, the quotes are taken from The Universe Story.
Both Swimme and especially Berry build upon the work of Teilhard de Chardin, the French priest, paleontologist and theologian who regarded the discovery of the evolutionary universe as the most significant event in the millions of years of human existence.)
“Itís all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story.” (Thomas Berry, Dream of the Earth).
“Unfortunately, for the past 50 years, most of the myths and stories in our culture have been crafted by a small group of global conglomerates that have something to sell. So instead of perceiving ourselves as sentient beings capable of wisdom, compassion, heroism, and humor, we now define ourselves (or are defined) as mindless consumers” (ìTransforming Our Media Dietî in Earthlight Magazine of Spiritual Ecology, Fall 1998).
We encounter the old story hundreds, if not thousands, of times every day, whether we want to or not. We read, hear, and see it in newspaper and magazine, on the radio, on television and the Internet, on billboards and marquees. The message of the omnipresent advertisements and commercials is, “Buy. You are not adequate without our product.”
We encounter other dimensions of the story through the news and frequently also our schools and other basic institutions: “íThe Good Lifeí means to ëbe successfulí which means to live in a large house with two or three cars in the garage and lots of modern conveniences.”
“Earthís resources are virtually unlimited. Unending economic progress is our goal. Because I have investments and savings to get by even if the economy (which refers to quantitative financial measurements like the Gross Domestic Product) continues to sputter along, all is well with the world.”
“As the worldís sole remaining superpower, America (which has more economic clout and has vastly more military weapons than any other nation) has the right to do whatever it pleases.”
This old story is actually one of disconnection. This story doesnít consider the past or the future, other humans or other life forms. Buying our neatly and colorfully wrapped processed food, which has been shipped hundreds or thousands of miles to heat-controlled supermarkets, separates us more than it connects us to the land, the Source of these gifts.
Todayís Colossiansí passage tells a different story, one that connects, reconciles, creates, and knits together “all things” in the unity that lies beneath all diversity. As I re-read parts of the passage, notice how often the phrase “all things” is used, and see if you can let go of your anthropocentric, or human-centered, blinders to behold a world, indeed a universe, which is gloriously permeated with the divine spirit:
“In him (Jesus the Christ) all things in heaven and on earth were createdóALL THINGS were created through him and for him. He himself is before ALL THINGS, and in him ALL THINGS hold together. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in EVERYTHING. Through him God was pleased to reconcile ALL THINGS” (Colossians 1:16-18, 20, NRSV)
This pattern of connection raises new issues and questions. For example, suppose weíre considering buying a product or selecting an energy provider. In addition to asking, “Is it cost effective?” or “Could I get it for less elsewhere?” we might also ask:
What and how many natural resources were required to create it? To transport it?
Under what conditions was it manufactured? How were the workers treated that produced it?
What will happen to the product at the completion of its life cycle? Will it become landfill? Will it be recycled? Will its disposal add toxins to the earth or air?
What effect would this purchase have on future generations?
Asking and living such questions of connection will transform our lives, our economy, and our planet.
Let me tell you a sacred story that combines this passageís sense of the underlying unity and interconnection of all things in Christ (the core experience of Christian mysticism) with the best science of our age. This story connects: science and religion; past, present, and future; you and me with unfolding of the cosmos. Let me tell you the Universe Story, which is Earthís story, which is your story and my story. Indeed, we cannot tell our full story without also telling the story of the universe, for we are bound together in a web of relationships that runs throughout time and space.
As Einstein realized, a theory of the cosmos must inevitably be a theory of how Godís mind works. Both aim at the ultimate source of reality.
The future of this great cosmic drama is in no way pre-determined; we are creating the future of our planet, and what happens on Earth affects everything else.
A Story of the Universe
“Thirteen billion years ago (give or take a day or two, or a billion years or two), in a great flash, the universe flared forth into being, with the temperature being about 100 billion degrees. After three minutes, it had cooled way down to a mere one billion, but even those of us who are comparatively cold-blooded might find that a little hot for comfort. In each drop of existence, a primordial energy blazed with extraordinary intensity. (By the way, when Hubble used sophisticated equipment to calculate the birth of the universe to be 10 to 20 billion years ago, he grew quite depressed. Sometimes reality just doesnít match our pictures of it!) The power of this primordial flaring forth is not simply located back then; rather it is a condition of every moment of the universe, past, present, and to come.”
At first, all was pure chaotic energy. But then the universe began to get itself organized, a process that itís been about ever since. It created laws, or habits, like gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear fields. The universe has always lived on the razorís edge of expansive energy and gravitation. Had space unfurled one trillionth of a percent more slowly, the expanding universe would have collapsed back into itself. If space had emerged more rapidly, the constituents of the universe would have been too widely separated for anything truly interesting to happen.
Throughout the universe, first hydrogen and then helium emerged as dynamic centers of action. Cosmologist Brian Swimme raises this riddle: What do you get if you leave a bunch of hydrogen atoms alone for 13 billion years? The answer is galaxies and zebras and amoeba and iron and human beings and redwood trees and everything else in the cosmos, of course.
“Hydrogen and helium did not enter an established and fixed world; rather, they weaved a new universe. For many of us, contact with helium is limited to bright balloons that sometimes float away from a childís hand, bringing crocodile tears of grief as it flies into the sky. Itís easy to assume that helium is an invisible, ìinertî gas-- just passive stuff. Itís not quite that way: In the time that it takes a human to sneeze, a single helium atom has had to organize a billion different ... events to establish its helium presence in the world.”
After a billion years, the silent universe shuddered with immense creativity and broke itself into a trillion clouds-- and the galaxies were created.
“Some five billion years after the beginning of time, when she could no longer sustain herself against the pressures of gravitation...a star in one of these galaxies, Tiamat, knit together wonders in her fiery belly and then sacrificed herself in a colossal supernova. Tiamatís giveaway of energy and herself expressed an underlying impulse that pervades the universe; in the human heart it is felt as the urge to devote oneís life to the well-being of the larger community” (Brian Swimme, Hidden Heart of the Cosmos). Tiamat, in an orgy of awesome power, creativity, passion, beauty, love, sacrifice, and destruction, became a searing explosion in a weeklong flash of brilliance that was visibly outstanding throughout our entire immense galaxy. Out of the spectacular tensions of her core, she forged tungsten, copper, vanadium, cesium, silver, and silicon, germanium and cadmium, calcium, oxygen, sulfur, and other elements; she had invented cosmic novelties. As Tiamat, our grandmother, carved up her body in this awesome supernova explosion, she dispersed this new elemental power in all directions, ... giving birth to 10,000 new stars of different colors and types. One was our sun, which demonstrated its own self-organizing abilities by blasting out most of the clouds of elements hovering about it, and spinning some into a multibanded disc of matter which became our solar system.
Some of our neighboring planets never complexified; some quickly stabilized to the extent that all significant creativity came to an end. On Earth, matter existed as solid, liquid, and gas; flowing from one form into another provided an incessantly creative chemical womb from which Aries, the first living cell, emerged four billion years ago. Life was born! Like the stars and galaxies, these primal cells had the power to organize themselves. But they also had stunning new gifts as well: The cells could remember significant information, including the patterns necessary to knit together another cell.
In the universeís wild wisdom, Promethio, a descendent of Aries, mutated and invented photosynthesis, the power to feed on the photons of the sun. Lifeís capacity to differentiate exploded thousands of times over.
Aries and her descendants gathered their hydrogen from the oceans and released oxygen. Two billion years ago, oxygen slowly saturated the land and atmosphere and seas. The Earthís system was pushed into an extremely unstable condition, and Ariesí descendants were perishing as their interiors were set ablaze by the oxygen. The life experiment on Earth appeared to be ending.
But instead, life mutated. A bacterium, Prospero, magically not only endured oxygen; it invented respiration. Prospero proliferated madly and splintered into many different species. Prosperoís descendant Sappho invented sex, and the universeís diversity expanded a million fold again as now two genetically different beings could unite and fashion a radically new being. They took the next daring step: millions of them gathered together and evoked Argos, the first multicellular animal. Transformation continues to follow transformation, as living Planet Earth creates, diversifies, and becomes more complex. “Ocean waves left sea plants stranded on the hot rocks; unable to crawl home, they instead invented the wood cell and learned to stand up straight as trees,” and soon trees were covering entire continents with life.
For about 175 million years, dinosaurs ruled the world. But about 65 million years ago, dramatic astronomical collisions and/or changes in the Earthís atmosphere and climate required all forms of animal life to reinvent themselves or perish. As dinosaurs and many other animals became extinct, the birds and the mammals, among others, proliferated in the wake of the disaster.
Contributing to the ascendancy of mammals in the world order were the flowers, who emerged on Earth one hundred million years ago. With their seeds, concentrations of protein became available in small bundles for animals to eat; with blossoms, their diverse and wondrous colors beautified the earth. Flowers changed the face of Earth.
Mammals developed emotional sensitivity, a new capacity within their nervous systems for feeling the universe. Mothers carried their offspring within them, and a deep biological bond of caring and affection developed between mother and offspring. Other advanced mammals, especially among the primate order, developed another capability, that of conscious self-awareness. Empowered with both emotional sensitivity and conscious self-awareness, the first humans, Homo erectus, stood up on just two limbs four million years ago in Africa, probing for its own distinct niche within the Earth community. They, we, were about four feet tall and hairy.
“Two million years ago humans began using their free hands to shape Earthís materials into tools. Beginning about 35,000 years ago, as if unable to restrain any longer their astonishment at existence, humans began a new level of celebration that displayed itself in cave paintings and festivals and music-making that filled the nights.”
Humans became conscious of the pattern of seeds. Villages, and then urban centers, arose, as did language, religion, cosmology, the arts, music, and dance.
And we are the inheritors of it all. We are the blessed children of the primordial flaring forth, of Tiamatís supernova explosion, of the sun, of Aries the first living cell, of Promethio who invented photosynthesis, of single-celled Sappho who invented sexual reproduction. (The names are mythic, alluding to wondrous transformations.) Within our very being, within our DNA, is the awesome creativity of the universe expressed in these miracles and in flowering plants and shellfish and birds and insects and dinosaurs, in dogs and apes and whales, in human discoveries of how to use tools and create fire and domesticate animals and cultivate plants.
Weíre ancient beings; along with everything else in creation, we are children of the universe, 13 billions years old. The universeís self-organizing powers and creativity and extraordinary wisdom and consciousness flow through our being. Sixty per cent of the atoms in our bodies are hydrogen, since weíre 90% water, or H2O; all our atoms were once inside this flaming inferno of the primordial flaring forth. How absurd to talk as if history began 6000 years ago! If we condense the universeís 13 billion history into a day, 6000 years ago would be 11 p.m., 59 minutes, and 59 and 19/20 seconds--such a rapid blip on the screen weíd probably miss it.
Human beings have come to dominate life on earth for a variety of reasons: First, consider pure numbers. Thirty five hundred years ago, about the time of Moses, the worldwide human population was five to ten million. Today, our planet has about one thousand times more people than existed then. We have become by far the most numerous of the complex life forms on earth.
Second, the development of science and technology give humans extraordinary powers. Unfortunately, our technology has often required extracting large amounts of Earthís resources.
Tragically, we ignored or forgot this sacred story of creativity, of love and sacrifice for the larger whole, of connection and reconciliation, of the divine in all things. We encountered the old story so often that we began to believe it. In our blindness, we humans are wreaking massive destruction on our planet. During the hour of this service, about two species will vanish forever, and part of us will die with them, for what we do to the outer world, we do to our own interior world. A million pounds of toxic and cancer-causing waste from corporate polluters will pour into our air, soil and water. Thousands of tons of topsoil will be lost. About 2,000 acres of rain forest will be burned, cut, or bulldozed.
“That our western civilization should be the principal cause of such extensive damage to the planet is so difficult a truth for us to absorb that our society in general is presently in a state of shock and denial...We ... (have been) unable to move from a conviction that as humans we are the glory and the crown of the Earth community to a realization that we are the most destructive and the most dangerous... Such denial is the first attitude of persons grasped by any form of addiction. Our western addiction is to commercial-industrial progress.”
In 1987, distinguished biologists met and issued a statement that “Nothing this destructive has taken place on Earth in four billion years.” That made page 17 of the New York Times, sandwiched amidst hundreds of advertisements and the daily news of sex scandals, party politics, stock reports, and baseball or football scores.
In 1992, a gathering of 1,670 of the worldís most accomplished scientists, including 104 Nobel Prize winners, issued a document entitled World Scientistsí Warning to Humanity. After summarizing the ways in which the fast-growing human population and its expanding industries are destabilizing the Earthís life systems, it concluded, “Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course.”
Itís easy, natural, and I suspect even healthy to feel sad or depressed, ashamed, and/or angry at what we humans are doing to Planet Earth, our home. But even as there is awful destruction occurring now, there also are signs of great hope.
Alternative and new technologies have been or are being developed, such as compact fluorescents and L.E.D. lighting, and solar and wind power. Today, we have gas-electric hybrid automobiles; coming before long, and the sooner the better, cars will be powered by fuel cells. The Hydrogen Age is coming, and hopefully within two decades the internal combustion engine will be exhibited in the Smithsonian Institute as a relic of a by-gone age.
While new technologies will have a very important place in the coming of Godís new age, even more primary will be a spiritual awakening. As Father Thomas Berry said, we need to reinvent the human species with a worldview and a moral commitment to Mother Earth and her nonhuman children.
In The Universe Story, which has been the core of this message, co-authors Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme describe the challenge before us with these words:
“The future of Earthís community rests in significant ways upon the decisions to be made by the humans who have inserted themselves so deeply into even the genetic codes of Earthís process. The future will be worked out in the tensions between those committed to the Technozoic, a future of increased exploitation of Earth as a resource for the benefit of humans, and those committed to the Ecozoic, a new mode of human-Earth relations, one where the well-being of the entire Earth community is the primary concern.”
As Iím sure you know, lots of people, all kinds of people, are waking up and participating in the pattern that connects, the energy which holds all things together, the Spirit which reconciles all things, the One who unites all things. To live ìin Christ,î which is Paulís expression of new life, is to participate in the work of “reconnecting.” (Not all who participate in the work of reconnection describe themselves as Christians.)
I believe that the divine spirit has chosen us, just as it chose Queen Esther, to live “for such a time as this,” a time of great peril and of extraordinary possibility. We have been chosen to allow our Creatorís love for all creation to flow through us, that our love might be deep and wide, extending through both time and space.
Fred Banfman, writer and director of the For Generations to Come Project, urges us to consider the legacy we will leave future generations with these words:
“We are the first generation of humans, through our newfound ability to manipulate the biosphere without and the gene within, to pose a greater threat to people who will live centuries from now than to ourselves. As six billion humans pursue a U.S. standard of living, humanity has reached a critical mass in material consumption. We are heating our climate, decimating plant and animal species, fouling our oceans and rivers, poisoning our fish, and depleting our water aquifers, forests, soil and ozone layer. We are introducing thousands of chemicals into our air, water, and bodies, and weíre using biotechnology in ways that amounts to a dangerous and uncontrolled experiment on the lives of billions who will live in the centuries to comeÖ”
“We (baby boomers) are the first humans in history who have had to answer this simple question: ëHow much do I care about future generations?”
“Much is riding on the answer to this questionónot only the quality of life of tens of billions of our descendants, but also our own quality of life in the short time we have left. There is something worse than dying. It is to die knowing that we have failed all who will follow us.”
“We can begin this process (of personal transformation) by summoning to our imagination a single face from among the billions who will follow usóperhaps our grandchildís great grandchild. We can give her or him a name, a voice, a laugh, a personality. Reflect on and meditate upon this person.”
“This desire to tend the garden of the future can give birth to an impulse that will save not only the biosphere but ourselvesÖWe will be able to take satisfaction from how we have lived because we will know that we will survive in future generationsí grateful memories. And the pain of accepting our deaths will be eased by a deep love, the love we feel for them and the love that we know they will feel for us.” (From Banfmanís essay ìLegaciesî in IMAGINE What America Could Be in the 21st Century: Visions of a Better Future from Leading American Thinkers, edited by Marianne Williamson, pp. 17, 26-27)
Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, our source and destiny, that pattern that connects past, present and future, that energy which unites us to all that has gone before and all that will follow us. May we honor, with great appreciation and wonder, all that has gone before. And above all, may we live deeply connected to future generations, always asking how our actions today will affect them.
Being “in Christ,” we are part of the web of creation. Now, letís act like it! May future generations look at us with admiration and appreciation, for in critical times of massive destruction, we lived and acted courageously, with their welfare in mind, and transformed our Industrial Growth Society into a Life Sustaining Society, our tired old world into Godís New Age. Amen.
|
