|
 n
the beginning was the seed. The birthing seed of the universe. It is not
known how the seed came to be. Was it created by Creator, great mystery,
or did it simply come to be. Simply come to be by fate, by accident, by
happenstance. This seed, about the size of a tennis ball. Sitting,
waiting, waiting, for what?
It came then.
The beginning. An explosion from power unimaginable. The seed burst
forth. It flared forth, and the universe began.
As the power and
matter flowed outward, ever outward, space and time unfurled. And light.
Photons of light burst forth. Light now 13 to 15 billion years old that
we still can see as we turn our sight skyward.
In the first
seconds after the explosion if the matter had gone a trillionth of a
percent slower the matter would have collapsed upon itself and nothing
of meaning would have happened. If the matter had flown out a trillionth
of a second faster it would have kept flying into nothingness. But the
timing was elegant, it was perfect. The matter began to come into
relationship with each other, nudged by quantum waves, like music, that
flowed across this newly expanding space, time, and matter.
Building blocks
of life were formed. The first atoms including hydrogen and helium.
Hydrogen from this awesome event which is still in existence, which is
still in the bodies of each person in this room.
The mysterious
power of gravity began to pull the matter into clumps of meaning. The
beginning of galaxies. First the disc shaped galaxies incapable of
producing life forms, then the spiral shaped galaxies which hold
pregnant possibilities for the existence of life. Hundreds then
thousands then millions then billions, life begat life.
Stars were at
the center of that evolving life story. The matter would clump and form,
great hydrogen fires would rage then burn themselves out and collapse
into dark concentrated matter, then explode into a great mother of many
more stars and planets and life forms. The super nova, the birthing room
of the universe., spreading hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon
across expanding space.
Billions of year
passed. Billions.
Let Connie
Barlow’s voice speak ... she visited us on a Sunday in May four years
ago.
“Then, 5
billion years ago, our Solar System formed from great clouds of gas
and the remains of the ancestor stars. The sun and a great disk of
matter emerge--all the planets, asteroids and comets of our solar
system.
The story of
our blue-and-white pearl of a planet starts with the Great
Bombardment of dust, rocks, comets and meteorites! Just 50 million
years after Earth originally formed, the Moon was born when Earth
was hit by a Mars-sized body. The impact also caused Earth to tilt
to the side, giving rise to the seasons of the year. Over hundreds
of millions of years, Earth cooled and formed a thin rocky crust.
The crust thickened as cracks and exuberant volcanoes expelled hotly
agitated deep Earth magma to the surface.
As steam
condensed above Earth, the miracle of rain and weather cycles began.
The first rains fell, then torrential rains fell on, and on, and on
until rivers ran over the land and gathered into great seas.”
Soon after the
Earth cooled life in the form of bacteria appeared. Then the cells
invented photosynthesis. Then the cells discovered sex! No more asexual
divisions. The cells worked together in cooperatives. Each small group
had its individual task.
Four hundred
sixty million years ago worms and crustaceans came out of the water on
to the earth. 395 million years ago, the first gilled animal, the
salamander, came onto the land and developed lungs to breath the air.
All the great varieties of animals soon followed. The dinosaurs, some
bringing a nurturing parental presence, burying and protecting their
eggs, keeping their young by the mom’s side until maturation. Then the
meteor hit which brought them to extinction in the cooling climate left
by ash of the great fires.
All the other
creatures of our planet followed over time. From the whale to the
elephant, coyote to horse, lion and tiger, muskrat and flea. Then, and
only then, did humanoids begin to walk upright.
Two hundred
thousand to forty thousand years ago - Modern humans emerged. Language,
oral traditions, art, trade, song, shamanic and goddess religions, and
drumming become integral with human life.
Eleven thousand
years ago - Agriculture was invented and wild animals were domesticated.
Humans began shaping the environment, selecting which species to
nurture, changing the landscape, and hunting other animals, sometimes to
extinction. Population densities began to climb. Communicable diseases
spread. “Civilization” emerged.
If we were to
place all this on a visual time line, the flaring forth, the explosion
of the seed, would be at the bottom of a long stairwell. As you walk up
the stairs, the evolving stages of growth of the universe would appear
in the order in which they happened. Our solar system would form about
two thirds of the way to the top. The appearance of primal life on
Earth, after another step or two. Then, finally, as you stand on the
very top step, a last two inch or so band would tell of the coming of
humans on the earth.
And we believe
we are at the center of the universe.
Creation
spirituality is the celebration of the creation of life in the universe,
and on planet Earth, and the ongoing evolution of our human lives as
envisioned by three different groups brought together in a single
vision. They consider the universe and our lives on Earth as an original
blessing, just like the early Universalists.
The first group
is made up of the indigenous peoples who were the first to stand and
speak, raise crops and praise the Creator. These native peoples in
Africa and Asia, then later Europe and the Americas literally created
our understandings of the world and the universe. At the core of their
belief and practice was that all things in the universe are related.
Mitakuye oyasin in the Lakota language. It is a belief that resulted in
our seventh principle, the interdependent web of existence. The
indigenous peoples believed, and today still believe, that all living
things came from the same source and thus all are relatives, including
the rocks and trees, the grass and seeds, the four leggeds, those that
fly above the earth, those beings that swim beneath the waters of the
earth, and the two leggeds. We are all related.
The second group
who helped bring creation spirituality into being are the mystics of
many faiths who always saw beyond the models of religion to the reality
of our relationship with the universe. A mystic is a person who has an
unmediated relationship with God, or Great Spirit, or the mystery at the
core of all living things. Rumi is an Islamic mystic. The founder of the
Sufi movement. He writes:
ONE SONG
“What is praised is one, so the praise is one too, many jugs being
poured into a huge basin.
All religions, all this singing, one song.
The
differences are just illusion and vanity. Sunlight looks slightly
different on this wall than it does on that wall and a lot different
on this other one, but it is still one light.
We have
borrowed these clothes, these time and space personalities from a
light, and when we praise, we pour them back in.”
Many Christian
mystics wrote of their ecstatic relationship with spirit in a way that
denied the duality of god as taught by the church, God out there, me
over here, in contrast to mytakuye oyasin. These are voices that were
stilled, or attempted to be stilled, by the church.
Meister Eckhart,
the kindly German Dominican priest who lived in the 12 and 1300s, the
same time that Rumi was writing in Turkey, was eventually excommunicated
for saying things like, “All creatures are words of God. They are gladly
doing what they can to express him.” He believed the spirit of God was
within, as much as without. “God lies in the maternity bed, like a woman
who has given birth, in every good soul.” And finally, “what help is it
to me that Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace?”
Another mother
of creation centered spirituality is Hildegard of Bingen. She, too,
lived in Germany during the same time as Eckhart. Her experience of our
souls as a part of nature, the greening of our souls, was unique. Her
writing was powerful.
“We cannot live
in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted for us by
others. An interpreted world is not a HOME. Part of the terror is to
take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own
light.” And thus to see the interdependent relationship of all life.
The third group
that defines and brings creation spirituality to life are the
scientists. Dating from Copernicus and Galileo, and the astronomers of
the Middle East, those who study “the heavens” have created an emerging
view of the universe that brings physics and shamanism to meet on the
same page. Filled with their own practical sense of awe and mystery,
they teach us to pay attention, to learn the skills of observation and
measurement, so we can better pay attention.
"We go about
our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world. We give
little thought to the machinery that generates the sunlight that
makes life possible, to the gravity that glues us to an Earth that
would otherwise send us spinning off into space, or to the atoms of
which we are made and on whose stability we fundamentally depend.
Except for children (who don't know enough not to ask the important
questions), few of us spend much time wondering why nature is the
way it is; where the cosmos came from, or whether it was always
here; if time will one day flow backward and effects precede causes;
or whether there are ultimate limits to what humans can know."
Carl
Sagan
From an introduction to "A Brief History of Time"
by Stephen Hawking
The book, The
Universe Story by physicist Brian Swimme and religious writer Thomas
Berry brings the scientific story of the emerging universe down to earth
and sets it into the context of our lives.
“Fifteen
billion years ago, in a great flash, the universe flared forth into
being. In each drop of existence a primordial energy blazed with an
intensity never to be equaled again. Thick with its power, the
universe billowed out in every direction so that the elementary
particles could stabilize, enabling the first atomic beings of
hydrogen and helium to emerge. After a million turbulent years, the
frenzied particles calmed themselves enough for the primeval
fireball to dissolve into a great scattering, with all the atoms
soaring away from each other into the dark cosmic skies opening up
in the beginning time.”
Swimme and many
other physicists echo the creation stories of indigenous peoples from
around the world as they come closer and closer to discovering the true
nature of reality as explained in the Cosmos.
Well. All of
this is interesting, you say, but what about our lives here in the daily
world. How do we sustain meaning in our lives beyond looking up at the
heavens?
Matthew Fox had
a vision about that. He believed that we needed to imagine the spiritual
path differently than we had if we were to live fully within the
consciousness that is evolving out of our changed perception of life on
Earth and in the universe. He calls it the Four Paths of Creation
Spirituality. If we follow these paths with passion, he says, we will
move from acedia, laziness or the fear of trying new things, to radical
amazement.
The first of
those paths, using language taken from medieval spirituality, is the Via
Positiva. Living life in the light. Praising all that is good,
celebrating life in its seasonal, unfolding manifestations. Experiencing
gratitude for life in this beautiful universe, this wondrous home,
mother earth. And loving each other. Celebrating together.
The next path is
the Via Negativa. Grief. The depth of darkness. Often we whine and
complain as victims rather than accepting that life is naturally both
light and dark. When we enter this path we grieve authentically. We
wail. We sob. We cough up darkness. Then the light can return.
Via Creativa. We
are meant to create. To come alive with the gifts we have been given. To
channel the graces we are given. To be a hollow bone. We release our
gifts into the world. We channel the light.
And finally, the
path of the Via Tranformitiva ... to be transformed as a result of
following this spiritual path, taking on this spiritual journey in the
middle of this stunning universe. We are then ready to do the work of
justice.
Leave it to Mary
Oliver to summarize, to bring a sacred way of seeing life’s journey to
us. If we are to choose to live the via positiva (understanding that we
will always cycle through all the paths, then come back to the via
positiva as a result of walking all the paths) ... if we are to choose
to live this way, in “radical amazement”, then we must pay deep
attention to the world around us. We must be fully alive in each moment.
Here is how Oliver says it.
“Every day I
see or I hear something that more or less kills me with delight,
that leaves
me like a needle in the haystack of light.
It is what I
was born for….to look, to listen, to lose myself inside this soft
world, to instruct myself over and over in joy and acclamation.
Nor am I
talking about the exceptional, the fearful, the dreadful, the very
extravagant, but of the ordinary, the common, the very drab, the
daily presentations.
Oh, good
scholar, I say to myself, how can you help but grow wise with such
teachings as these ...
The
untrimmable light of the world, the ocean’s shine,
the prayers
that are made out of grass?”
The choice is
ours, yours and mine. Do we walk the sacred way of life, the deep,
conscious way, in which we are in awe of a wondrous universe and see we
live in sacred relationship with all other beings on this beautiful blue
planet? If we do, if we choose to live fully in this way, let us lift
our eyes skyward and behold the magical, awesome universe, the nearest
manifestation of God any of us are ever likely to see.
A PRAYER FOR
THE UNIVERSE
Great Spirit
We pray for the universe.
For the rushing outward never ending universe
which is our home.
We celebrate its mysterious birth.
We call to Great Mystery and say thank you.
Thank you for
the dance of
protons,
helium,
hydrogen,
black holes,
pulsars,
spiral galaxies,
exploding novas,
and blue dwarfs.
Thank you for
the elegant system which binds our planet to the sun
in our tiny solar system.
Few can grasp your enormity.
You are all there is.
Thank you.
We celebrate the enormity of your soul.
|
