I’d like to begin with a story:

“In the ancient days, when the first quiver of speech came to my lips, I ascended  the holy mountain and spoke unto God saying, ‘Master, I am thy slave. Thy hidden will is my law and I shall obey Thee for evermore.’

But God made no answer and like a mighty tempest passed away.

And after a thousand years I ascended the holy mountain and again spoke unto God, saying,  “Creator, I am Thy creation. Out of clay hast thou fashioned me and to thee I owe mine all.”

And God made no answer, but like a thousand swift wings passed away.

And after a thousand years I climbed the holy mountain and spoke unto God again, saying,  “Father, I am thy son. In pity and love thou hast given me birth and through love and worship I shall inherit thy kingdom.”

And God made no answer, and like the mist that veils the distant hills passed away.

And after a thousand years, I climbed the sacred mountain and again spoke unto God, saying, “My God, my aim and my fulfillment;  I am Thy yesterday and thou art my tomorrow.  I am thy root in the earth and thou art my flower in the sky, and together we grow before the face of the sun.”

Then God leaned over me and in my ears whispered words of sweetness, and even as the sea that enfoldeth a brook that runneth down to her, God enfolded me.

And when I descended to the valleys and the plains God was there also.”

 From Inscape: God at the Heart of Matter, George Maloney, SJ

In a conference at Amiens in 1841, St Madeleine Sophie, in speaking of prayer, contemplation, virtue and what is expected of those who claim the Sacred Heart of Jesus, said this:

  The way of ways, the way Par Excellence, is interior spirit,
  that spirit that gives life and fruitfulness to everything.  It is
  interior spirit that makes us another Jesus Christ. . . This
  interior spirit must be the breath of our soul, the soul of our soul.

  That Spirit that gives life
  That Spirit that makes us another Jesus Christ
  That Spirit that must be the breath of our soul

Listen carefully; repeat the words slowly, over and over.

What are we saying?

That the Holy Spirit makes us another Christ.

That the Holy Spirit wants to take us over completely,
to transform us into the very Person of Jesus the Christ.

Real prayer accomplishes this, wipes away all those parts of us that would resist, that would cling to selfishness, that are, as Thomas Keating says, our false self.  All in us is being transformed into the Christ.

“There is only Christ: he is everything and he is in everything.” We hear from Paul in Colossians 3:11.  We have perhaps heard this a thousand times.  What does it mean? Do you claim that truth?  Can you say that you are, or that you are becoming the Christ? After all we eat the Body of Christ and we become what we eat.  Our Amen affirms that we are the Body of Christ. Our Amen claims this.

There is another story I would like to tell you, a true story.  During the Second

World war, during the bombing of Germany, a Catholic Church was hit. When the fires died down the pastor and his parishioners went to the Church to find what was left.  They were concerned about many things but especially the crucifix that hung over the main altar, which was of the triumphant Christ.  Much to their amazement they discovered that the full cross was intact, and the corpus of the Christ with his crown and all, all that is, except the arms.  They undertook a great dialogue about whom they should  hire to replace the arms, and then they decided, “No,” they wouldn’t replace the arms.  THEY were the arms of the Christ and it would be a stark reminder to them of the fact that they are the Body of Christ.  What an enormous reality this is!  We can hardly take it in:

I am the Body of Christ?

I am being transformed into Jesus the Christ?

I am loved as Christ was loved?

    I am to do the work of Christ?  To take my part – whatever that is

      -- in the redemption of the world?

    I am to love as Christ loves?  I am to love with Christ’s love?

    I am to manifest the love of the Heart of Christ to the world?

That is an impossible task for us.  Impossible for us but not for the Christ. When we allow the Christ to live in us, then it is that we make known the love of God to the world, this world that is so in need of knowing God’s love.  That is what we do ONLY when we allow the Christ to live in us.  For “of ourselves we can do nothing.”

And Paul says:  “Now I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.”  These are not mere words; this is reality.

So what has this to do with the emerging universe?  EVERYTHING!

The writer of the Upanishad has this to say:  “the little space within the heart is as great as the universe.  The heavens and earth are there, the sun, the moon, the stars, fire and lightening and winds, for the whole universe is in God and God dwells within our heart.”

In this age of the new cosmology when scientists are showing us how nterconnected all created being really is, how dependent upon the earth we are, we know the wisdom of these words, and these of Hildegard, a most remarkable woman of the 12^th century:

  God has arranged all things in the world

  In consideration of everything else.

We are not alone! We are not isolated beings, anonymous beings in an alien, hostile world; we are part of the universe, we carry in our very bodies the stuff of the stars as Brian Swimme says, and thus our prayer rises from the earth itself, from the universe, from the Incarnate Christ.  Our joys and our sufferings are the joys and the sufferings of the universe.  The joys and the sufferings of the beings on the earth are ours as well.  Our lives have cosmic dimensions, whether we know it or not.

Music:  “May All I Do Today”  by Jan Novotka

Since you are one with the universe, since you are OF the universe, and more than that since you are the Christ, everything you do affects the whole world, the universe. Every act of love affects Iraq.

John of the Cross knew this:

A little of this pure love is more precious to God. . . and of more benefit to the Church, even though  it seems to be doing nothing, than all those other works put together. (C.29.2)

And Iain Matthew goes on:  “John learned that from Jesus. And Jesus taught him the nature of that love.  That “pure love” may bring radiant elation. On the other hand it may feel as rough as a splintered cross-  beam. It may come as dryness, darkness, the over-exacting demand not to   renege on one’s integrity.  If it does, John says, know that you are not alone, and that you are helping to save the world.” (The Impact of God, Iain Matthew, p. 131)

Matthew Fox in a recent book said this;  “What did the universe have in mind in spending fourteen billion years of work to bring me (you). . .to be here? Now? “ (Creativity: Where the Divine and Human Meet, p. 22)

Or perhaps we can put it this way:  What does God have in mind, in having the universe spend 14 billion years of work to bring you to be here in this place now?

One of the fundamental laws of the universe is to know who, in fact, we are.  This is,

according to Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, the law of interiority.

For instance, a tree is a tree.  Trees are special. From the moment it sprouts until the day it dies a tree stays fixed in the same spot.  Its roots are nearer than anything else to the heart of the earth, and it’s crown is nearer to the sky.  Sap courses through it from top to bottom, from bottom to top. It expands and contracts according to the daylight.  It waits for rain, it waits for sun, it waits for one season and then another. It waits for death.  Not one of the things that enables it to live depends on its will.  It exists and that’s all.  And because IT exists, WE can breath, and so we have life.  Even a dead tree, a fallen tree gives life.  It has been suggested by one ecologist that if you don’t believe in life after death, look closer someday at a dead tree lying on a forest floor.  Chances are that it is teaming with life – maybe more than when it was standing erect.  It is often more valuable to its forest dead than alive.

We are connected to trees. We couldn’t live without them.

And what about rocks?  A rock is a rock. A rock contains within itself the whole history of the universe. A rock is that from which all things have come – not just the continents and the mountains, but the trees and the oceans and our bodies. Rocks have been in existence for millions of years living through the cycles of the planet’s birth, decay, rebirth.  Rocks know the building up, the breaking down, the fusion, the fragmentation, the mending and the letting go of the 14 billion years of the life of our universe. The rocks remember. But for the rocks, we would not be here. 

So, who are you?  What did the universe have in mind in spending 14 billion years of work to bring you to be here now?  What are you to the universe?  How is the universe gifted by your presence?

Meister Eckhart, the 13^th century mystic answers:

    God’s being is my being

    And God’s primordial being

    Is my primordial being.

    Wherever I am, there is God.

And again:  The seed of God is in us.

    Now the seed of a pear tree grows into a pear tree;

    And a hazel seed grows into a hazel tree;

    A seed of God grows into God.

Or perhaps this might help:

    We ought to understand God equally in all things,

    For God is equally in all things.

    All creatures are interdependent.

These are not just the words of a 13^th century mystic, but rather the expression of what we now know to be true.  But poets and mystics have known this for some time.

  Earth is crammed with Heaven

  And every common bush

  On fire with God.

  But only he who sees

  Takes off his shoes.

  The rest sit around

  And pluck blackberries.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning  (1806-1861)

  I am the dust in the sunlight, I am the ball of the sun. . .

    I am the mist of morning, the breath of evening. . .

  I am the spark in the stone, the gleam of gold in the metal. . .

  The rose and the nightingale, drunk with its fragrance.

    I am the chain of being, the circle of the spheres,

    The scale of creation,  the rise and the fall.

      I am what is and is not. . .

        I am the soul in all.

Rumi  (1207-1273)

  What I know of the Divine

  I learnt in the wood and fields.

    I have no other masters

  Other than the beeches and the oaks. 

St Bernard (1090-1153)

  All things by immortal power

    Near and far

      Hiddenly

    To each other linked are,

  That thou canst not stir a flower

    Without troubling a star.

Francis Thompson  (1859-1907)

What the poets and mystics knew, we are beginning to believe.  The “new universe” story, explained by theologians and scientists alike, is challenging us to open our minds, to listen with new sensitivity to one another and to the earth, to open our eyes to beauty and to suffering, and thus, to make choices about how I view myself and the world in which I live.

As you know the physicists of today are carefully explaining how all that is was originally contained in the matter of the Big Bang.  They talk about an EMERGING UNIVERSE, one growing over time, unfolding over about 14 billion years.  No longer are they speaking about a universe created at the beginning of time, created by God out of nothing and all at once.  The word “created” stresses the transcendence of God as well as the continuing presence of God; it implies a God who creates and produces the creation from the outside as the efficient cause of everything.  This God rules the world through a plan called “Divine Providence”  and creatures are secondary causes in carrying out God’s plan.  Here is implied a certain separation between God and the created world.

As Thomas Berry, the theologian says:  “God is not constantly running the show as though the universe were made up of puppets. It is not a puppet show; it is a reality, functioning from within its own spontaneity.”

Now, when we speak of an EMERGING UNIVERSE we are describing a process in which the whole universe is emerging in a time-development sequence from within.  This kind of language stresses the immanence of God; it implies a God who acts from the inside out with internal causality. There is an immediate internal presence of the power, energy, and love of God as the source of all things.

In Matt Fox’s words:  At these times we are asking truths about who we are and what our purpose is for being here. We are no longer taking our existence for granted – nor are we taking our ancestors for granted.  These ancestors, we are learning, include the original fireball, the hydrogen and helium atoms that it gave birth to, the galaxies that birthed the supernovas that birthed the stars that birthed the earth that birthed the waters and the continents and the plants and the animals and the ozone and the sun and the moon and the seeds and the trees and the flowers – all of which were necessary for our presence to occur.  (Creativity p.22)

Another thing we need to recognize if we are to know ourselves, is that we are intimately connected with all that it.  That I am already part of a vast community.  That statement:  no man is an island  -- is more true than the writer realized, than anyone realized.  We are beginning to realize now as the physicists make clear to us, that all, ALL, things are connected.

“The fundamental insight of twentieth-century physics has yet to penetrate the social world: RELATIONSHIPS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN THINGS.  At all levels of life, “writes Capra, “from the metabolic networks inside cells to the food webs of ecosystems and the networks of communications in human societies, the components of living systems are inter-linked in network fashion.”

We are one with all that is! The very foundation of our being we owe to the universe. Our birth is from all that went before us!

As Brian Swimme, the physicist, says it: “ The rocks are Mozart!  The rocks are Picasso!  The rocks are your ancestors!” And, once in class, he held up an orange and said, “Do you know that when you eat an orange you are eating the universe?”

We are connected.  The physicists are beginning to explain how true this is.

In 1950 David Bohm predicted that when an atomic particle is split in two and the spin of one portion of the split particle is altered, the spin of the other portion would also change – instantaneously, regardless of the distance that separated them. Years later Bohm wrote: “It is an inference from the quantum theory that events that are separated in space and that are without possibility of connection through interaction are correlated, in a way that can be shown is incapable of a detailed causal explanation.” This reveals a level of interrelatedness that defies common notions of cause and effect.

“Today, scientists are engaged in many experiments to explore the extent to which such interdependence exists at more “macroscopic” levels beyond atomic particles. For example, a recent study has shown that random number generators (RNGs) around the world behaved in highly nonrandom ways on September 11, 2001. RNGs are computer programs that generate numbers that meet statistical conditions for randomness, as required for various research applications. They are shielded from electromagnetics, telecommunications, and all other known forces that could cause systematic biases. In other words, these are computer programs that are supposed to be insulated from all external influences and are tested regularly to assure that this is so.”

However, on September 11 these RNGs, in thirty-seven countries around the world, went crazy, starting at 5:00am Eastern Standard Time (US) and reached a height around 11:00am. They conclude that the terror, the love, the heroism, the tragedy that occurred in New York on that day somehow caused this effect. “It is highly unlikely that (known) environmental factors could cause the correlations we observe” and that, barring demonstrations to the contrary, “we are obliged to confront the possibility that the measured correlations may be directly associated with some (as yet poorly understood) aspect of consciousness attendant to global events.”

Bell’s theorem and current research such as the RNG studies suggest an interdependence that extends beyond the “external” world, linking thought, emotion, and measurable phenomena, potentially on even a global scale.  (Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future  by Peter Senge, C.Otto Scharmer, J,Jaworski, B.S.Flowers, pp. 200-201)

We are one with all that is!

Nothing is separate. All is CONNECTED. We do not create community.  We ARE community.  This is the third of the fundamental laws of the universe. (Interiority, differentiation, community)  Everything we do affects everything else in the universe.  This you know, I’m sure:  that a butterfly landing on a lotus plant in India affects the winds coming off the lake in Chicago. That’s a physical fact, physicists tell us.  Thus, what we need to do is learn to recognize what already is, to honor our interdependence, our connection with every created being.

This interdependence does not lessen our value, does not wipe away our uniqueness.  Rather it enhances it, for the universe counts on the creativity of every created being, and what’s more, God counts on our uniqueness and creativity as well. As Eckhart says:  “There where God speaks the creatures, there God is.” And again, “God becomes as creatures express God.”

How often do you reflect upon the fact, the truth, that you are a unique expression of God in the world,  that you reveal to the world an aspect of God that no one else can or will reveal?  That you are unique, not just as a human being, but as an individual within the species?  How often do you reflect upon the fact that every other living being reveals something of God that only that person can reveal?

Then, having reflected on this, we see the necessity of EVERY created being, because all together they reveal more and more of God.  There is no plan that we all be alike!  There is no desire that we imitate each other!  The Divine plan is that each created being become what it is meant to be and thus to reveal something new about God.  Then as we gather together, free to be who we are, we can celebrate the God that comes to life in us, in our community.

A tree is all it is meant to be, a tree. But even every tree is different from every other. A rock is what it is meant to be. Are you? Are you free to be who you are? . . . another thought to consider as part of the “Who am I? “ question. Am I really who I am?  Am I in touch with the real desires of my heart?  Am I growing into the person I am meant to be, I was created to be?  Am I honoring my differences? Am I honoring the unique revelation of God that I am?

And also, how am I partaking in the on-going creative emerging of the universe?  What is my part in the creating of the universe?  Or in other words, how am I helping Jesus in bringing about the Kingdom?

How does what I do affect the universe? The example of 9/11 tells us one way that humans affect the world. But there are other examples. We are all aware of the ecological crises brought about by the careless use of the environment, the destruction of the rain forests etc.  But it is not just the destruction of the planet that is the effect of the human’s existence.  Do we have a purpose within the larger web of  life?  If so, what is it?  Too often we think only in human terms, of how to make things better for us. We don’t wonder how we are meant to contribute to life as a whole.  The ancient peoples, the Anasazi, believed that they needed to conduct their dances and ceremonies in order to maintain balance in the universe.  They believed that if they neglected this duty, not only they but countless other forms of life would suffer. We think them crazy.  But is there a truth that we are missing?  In the October 2004 issue of National Geographic Magazine there is an article about people who live like that today, and a Dr Dave Hilton, Emory University Chaplain, says “I saw things there (in Africa) – what we would call miraculous healings – that didn’t fit with what I was taught in medical school, but the Africans had faith because they had never been taught such things were impossible. I learned that you don’t have to see to believe. You have to believe to see.” (“Mind of God,” p.83)

So, what is our real purpose in life?  Who are you? What did the universe have in mind in spending 14 billion years of work to bring you to be here now?  New research is helping us recognize that perhaps we are part of this living, generative field – that we influence it as it influences us.

There is a Japanese scientist, Masaru Emoto, who has been working with water. He is fascinated by water because, as he says, we are mostly water, some 85% of our body weight, I think, the same percentage of water on the surface of the earth.  But anyway, he has been freezing water, photographing it and studying the crystals formed by the water. He has also used distilled water which is almost biologically inert and therefore forms very simple crystals, or crystals that are so underdeveloped that they have almost no distinct structure.  Then he has examples of distilled water crystals after the water has been exposed to music – exquisite crystals as a result of the music, and all very different according to to the music that is played. The crystals reflect the essence of the music – Bach, Mozart, folk songs etc.  It’s as if the water were not only influenced by the music but absorbs and reflects its character.

This scientist has also taped words on the vials of distilled water. For instance the word “beautiful” produces exquisite lacy crystals; the word “dirty” produces undeveloped crystals that you could only call ugly.

Water is alive, he says, and the world is more interdependent than we realized.

Another experiment:  water taken from a highly polluted reservoir, frozen and examined – no crystal structure whatever. Then an elder Buddhist monk sat next to the reservoir and prayed for an hour for the well being of the water.  When they took new samples of the water and froze it, the crystals were stunning.  What’s more they found crystals unlike any that they had seen before: seven-sided crystals rather than the usual six-sided. When they asked the monk about his prayer, he told them he had prayed to the Seven Goddesses.

So, who are we, and what is our place in the universe? What did God have in mind to have the universe work for 14 billion years so that we, you and I, could be here in this place at this time?

Powerful question worth pondering.

Am I fully who I am meant to be? Or as Brian Swimme says: “… manifesting the interior reality of my being, creating my soul?”  It is one aspect of the ultimate aim of the universe, a universe created by God as an expression of God’s overwhelming love and deep desire to share this love.

Reading Teilhard is one way to help us to know these truths more deeply.

“Teilhard,” as Ursula King explains, “was looking for a God of evolution, a God whose image is truly commensurate with the complex dimensions of our universe; a  God who is not an outsider, a prime mover, but is deeply involved with the entire cosmic process of which we form an integral part; a truly living God, with us here and now, fully incarnate in matter and all-becoming.”

For Teilard the world was a miracle of wonder, revealing a beauty barely glimpsed by the rest of us. For Teilhard it revealed the interconnectedness of all things, it revealed the face of God; it revealed the power and the energy, the incomprehensible love of our Creator God.

Even Einstein recognized the power of wonder: “There are only two ways to live your life,” He said. “One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is.”

Teilhard knew, as we are beginning to discover, that earth is spiritual, that o it knew all along that life, conscious beings, consciousness was coming. Many years after Teilhard’s death, Freeman Dyson, a professor of physics at Princeton University,  said, “The more I study the structure of the universe, the clearer it is that the universe must have known from the beginning that we were coming.”

One of the amazing things is that Teilhard came to this understanding before the physicists saw it, before the scientific facts that are available to us today. For Teilhard lived as he told us:

      To understand the world knowledge is not enough.
      You must see it, touch it, live in its presence
      And drink the vital heat of existence
      In the very heart of reality.

The very heart of reality, of that which happens, of that which is going on, of the very movement of the earth, of the universe from the beginning. Such a mystery this all is!  There are forces moving in the universe that have moved for 14 billion years, that have conspired, in a way, to bring you, me, into being.

Nevertheless, scientists say that were the process to be repeated it is HIGHLY UNLIKELY that anything resembling a human being would emerge. For the chance of life emerging as it did is zero probability. The chance of consciousness emerging is the same. Scientists like Sir Bernard Lovell tell us that if the universe had emerged a fraction of a second faster or slower it would have exploded in such a way that it could never coalesce into galaxies at a later stage or it would have collapsed back on itself. So in its initial moment, a sacred moment in the epics of most peoples, the universe came into existence at a slim – almost zero -- margin of possibility.  This fact, and the many other extremely important transformations, like that from non-life to life, which again took place at almost zero possibility, tell us something about the fragility of the universe.

And we might add: something about the mystery of God, of creation, of our place in this creation.

Teilhard thought that to come up to full measure, the human being must become conscious of an infinite capacity for carrying himself/herself still further; . . .must realize the duties it involves, and. . .must feel its intoxicating wonder.  The human must abandon all illusions of narrow individuals and extend self, intellectually and emotionally, to the dimensions of the universe; and this even though the mind reeling at the prospect of this greatness, the person should think that he/she is already in possession of the Divine, is God’s Very Self, or in oneself the artisan of Godhead. (Writings in Time of War, 1968)