|
| |
The Universe Story
A Sermon Given
by Rev. Terry Ellen
on October 5, 2003
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
Sometime in the 1950's a young schoolgirl rounded a corner in New York City
at full tilt and ran smack into an elderly gentleman dressed in black. Picking
himself up without harm and with amusement, he asked her where she was going
in such a hurry. "Nowhere in particular!" she admitted. "Well," he said,
smiling. "Bon voyage!"
Thus Jean Houston literally ran into Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit
priest and paleontologist (he helped discover the Peking Man) who helped bring
the Catholic Church into acceptance of evolution and who realized that the
whole earth, the whole universe, is the sacred body when he found no bread and
wine available for mass one Sunday. He and Jean Houston became good friends
thereafter, and she went on to study with Margaret Mead and Joseph Campbell
and now runs a mystery school dedicated to a fuller human.
She talks about the three great wounds to our sense of dignity which we
western humans have suffered in the last few centuries. The first wound was
inflicted by Copernicus when he displaced us from the center of the universe
and set us off on a planet orbiting around the sun. Most of us have grown
accustomed to this by now, but you can imagine the hurt, confusion,
diminishment felt by the people of that time. We weren’t the center of all
things any longer.
And then several centuries later along comes Darwin with wound number two:
we are not even separate from the rest of the plants and animals. Rather, we
are evolved with them, one of their number. Or, more bluntly, we are an
animal.
And then number three - Sigmund Freud demonstrates that our brains are much
larger than our prized rational consciousness and comprise also our
unconscious, which is not necessarily nice.
Add in a couple of world wars and the rest of a century in which, R. D.
Laing once reminded us, we ‘sane’ human beings have killed perhaps fifty
million of our fellow human beings, and it is not difficult for a person to
feel pretty small.
Human dignity has taken a beating.
But Jean Houston goes on to remind us that any wound to our sense of self
is also equally an opportunity to see ourselves in a different, larger, truer
way. And so the three great wounds to our self-esteem are also our three great
opportunities.
So first, when we got knocked out from the center of the universe, we
emerged from a constricted conceptual context of spheres circling around earth
to find ourselves in a universe of vast, vast, increasingly mind-boggling
dimensions, subtlety, and grandeur. Copernicus was just one step in knocking
us off our puny, static center to enter a changing, evolving universe which
even Albert Einstein could not believe to be true, though his equations
pointed in just that direction. When his math showed the universe to be
expanding, Einstein was convinced he must have made a mistake somewhere and so
threw in a fudge factor, his "cosmological constant," to keep the universe
static. When Alexander Friedman, a Russian mathematician, called him on it,
Einstein really had no answer except that the universe must be
statically stable - Newton, Copernicus, everyone up to his time, assumed so.
Only when Edwin Hubble invited Einstein to Mt. Palomar to actually see
the red shift of the furthest galaxies, demonstrating an expanding universe,
did Einstein believe his own equations.
If Einstein couldn’t believe the universe we live in, I think we all have
something of a right to be in semi-shocked awe, too. After all, in as late as
1929 there was still a vigorous scientific debate over whether what we now
know as spiral nebulas were other galaxies or simply unusual stars within our
own. So in less than a hundred years - an evolutionary blink of the eye -
we’ve moved from a one-galaxy universe to a hundred-billion-galaxy universe.
If you want a wound to your ego, you can find one here and feel diminished by
this expanding expanse. Or you can seize the extraordinary opportunity of this
newly-recognized universe and enter the realm of awe from which all
thanksgiving, all religious impulse, springs.
Likewise, secondly, the wound inflicted by Darwin enmeshing us humans in
the common evolution of the other plants and animals of this earth is also a
great opportunity. For we now know that we ourselves are part of this
miraculous process of change that ties us to all the developments of life upon
this planet. What we lost in losing our former special isolation as unique,
special creations of God we’ve more than gained in becoming part of the
extraordinary texture of life on this planet, kin to all we live with,
embodying in ourselves the whole biological history of this planet. And we are
related not just externally, but in our innermost being, in our DNA, our whole
biological coding of our physical and psychic organization.
For example, many of you probably know how the biologist Lewis Thomas tells
of getting up to take his dog out for a walk. As he’s walking, he starts
thinking about all the mitochondria in his body, tiny organisms with their own
DNA living in our cells that do the actual combustion that releases energy for
us to use. They’re the descendants of the first organisms on this planet that
worked out a way to use the increasing oxygen of the atmosphere by burning it
in a controlled combustion to release energy. Their presence in all our cells
is the remnant of the first symbiotic relationship of life here, where two
separate organisms worked out a way to each live on the refuse of the other.
And Lewis Thomas, knowing this deep inter-relationship within us, begins to
wonder if it is he that has decided to go for a walk, or whether instead the
mitochondria inside him wanted some fresh air and got him to get up and go
outside. Thomas is playful, but the point is that our thoughts do not
originate from our isolated individual brains in a vacuum. Our thoughts arise
out of our this intimate historical relationship we share with all life. Our
mitochondria may not control our thoughts, but they are surely part of them.
We may not be as uniquely separate as we thought, but are we ever at home,
rooted, kindred, and vast in our inheritance. It is reality such as this that
led Allan Watts, the Anglican cleric who went to Zen practice, to say that "We
are not born into this universe. Rather we are born out from it." We embody it
in ourselves. We didn’t just arrive here out of the blue. Or as a Zen koan
(teaching question) puts it, "What was your face before your parents were
born?"
And then, thirdly, the wound Freud delivered to our sense of ourselves as
wholly rational, in control, conscious beings becomes an opportunity to
realize just how vast our mental world is, how it encompasses large realms we
are unaware of and how it, too, is linked intimately with the whole rest of
the natural world. We do incorporate a reptilian brain in our heads, but
rather than taking this a denigrating insult, we can instead acknowledge and
celebrate this amazing organic history within ourselves.
And the recognition of our indwelling ties to the evolution of this
universe and life on this planet only keeps expanding and deepening. For
instance, Timothy Ferris, an historian of science, reminds us that it was only
in the last part of the twentieth century - less than an instant ago - that
the particle physicists studying smaller and smaller particles bound together
at higher and higher energy levels joined hands with the cosmologists to
realize that the structure of matter from smallest particles to larger ones in
fact records the history of the evolution of the universe. The smallest
particles in this room this morning are bound together with such great force
because they were created in the very beginning of the cosmos, in the
extraordinary high-energy environment of the Big Bang, or Flaring Forth. The
increasingly lesser forces binding electrons to nuclei, and then atoms to each
other, and then molecules together, and then larger organic structures
together, record the evolving history of the universe as it elaborated more
complex structures bound together with less intensity. Thus the material
structure of us is the encapsulated history of the cosmos. Thus the Big Bang,
the Flaring Forth, is still present within us as within everything, as is
every other great sequential change in the story of our cosmos.
This is why Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme refer to the universe story as an
irreversible sequence of transformations leading to ever more creative
possibilities as more complex structures arise. For instance, the first stars
and galaxies were composed solely of hydrogen and helium because those were
the most complex atoms that existed. But in the tremendous pressures and
temperatures of their cores emerged all the more complex atomic structures
that we learned in our periodic tables in high school, so that the new
secondary order of stars that would coalesce after the earlier stars had
exploded in huge supernovas would be composed of a far richer, more complex
assembly of elements, one from which life could arise.
And it is this evolving universe that knocks my socks off with its
progression embodied within us. To me it is wondrous. For I grew up in a
conceptual universe of the static empty spaces of Sir Isaac Newton dominated
by the second law of thermodynamics, which asserts that everything is winding
down toward a uniform inert sameness. That is a universe ripe for depressives,
and it is the universe I think most of us here have grown up in. And it is a
universe that is not so. For what we are born out of is not only physically
expanding, but shows an evolution, a history, a story, of an increasing
complexity that is, in, in the real meaning of the word miraculous, wondrous -
not dead, but full of activity, not static, but of constant change, albeit on
vast time scales.
From this we are born. And each one of us, every human being, receives this
vast, majestic, awe-inspiring inheritance in our bones. And most of us don’t
even know it. And I wish we did, for this inheritance gives us vast dignity at
the same time it bequeaths great humility. From it we know the miracle of our
being here and the common inheritance we share with all of life. We need to
catch up within ourselves with what we now know is. In India, not knowing the
specifics as we now do, but knowing that each of us embodies the fullness of
the cosmos, the sages would point to the night sky when the student was aware
of the grandness of the world and tell the young person "Tat twam asi!" - all
of that, thou art! Mystics of all traditions have sensed and been amazed by
this indwelling connection of the macro and the micro. Take Kabir for example:
Why should we two ever want to part?
Just as the leaf of the water rhubarb lives floating on the water,
we live as the great one and the little one.
As the owl opens his eyes all night to the moon,
we live as the great one and the little one.
This love between us goes back to the first humans;
it cannot be annihilated.
Here is Kabir’s idea: as the river gives itself into the ocean,
what is inside me moves inside you.
(The Kabir Book, trans. Robert Bly)
Or take the Buddhist priest Thich Nhat Hanh, who reminds us that our
interrelatedness with the cosmos is such that nothing can ever live by itself.
And so he enjoins us to have our language catch up with our reality by passing
past "I am, you are" to the more accurate phrasing, we inter-are.
Was not this realization of such a magnificent common inheritance behind
Jesus’ looking towards the beauty of the lilies of the field as being more
glorious than Solomon’s man-made garments? Was he not declaring our common
inheritance as far grander than any incidental distinctions between us? Was
not this sense of our shared wondrous bequest behind his enjoining his
disciples to get past their moralistic parochialism by reminding them that the
rain falls on the just and the unjust alike?
In this universe we have dignity and we have commonality.
Vaclav Havel would add we also have universal human rights. For in his
address on that topic at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, he called for a
human rights grounded in transcendence, in our common human recognition of our
being here on this planet as part of something unimaginably grand. It is this
mutual recognition that he finds more unifying and powerful for a universal
sense of human rights than even our culturally-bound Declaration of
Independence.
And Swimme and Berry would add that our human place, as the universe
becomes conscious of itself, implies also an ethic in which the preservation
of the integrity of the life on this planet is the great work we are called to
do, since this common story we are part of is primary, everything else
derivative. And thus they call for the first task of any profession to be the
saving of life upon this planet, for an inter-species law, an inter-species
economics, etc.
The recognition of this universe story does lead to new ways of seeing
human rights and perhaps a new ethics, but for now my essential point is that
we now are just becoming aware of this cosmic story and have the privilege and
opportunity to see ourselves anew within it, ourselves born out from this
wonder, here, together with each other and all our kin.
Office@CedarLane.org
|
