|
| |
Cosmic Questions
A Sermon Given
by
on
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
Reading The Soul of the Night Chet Raymo
The reading is from the book Soul of the Night by Chet Raymo who is an astronomer, a naturalist and I would say also
a theologian. We are going to reflect together today on integrating cosmology, a study of our cosmos, and theology, a
study in the traditional meaning of theos, from the Greek, that is, God, or to the non-traditional, the study of that
which is of ultimate concern. We will explore just a few of the questions in this vast field: what is our relationship as
humans with the cosmos, where is God in all of this, and a bit about how it all began. Hear now these words of
astronomer /naturalist/ theologian Chet Raymo.
Today in the mail, says Raymo, I received a poem that a friend had snipped from a journal. It describes the supposed
effects of a Catholic education at the hands of priests. The poem ends with these Joycean lines:
"They flushed sin from the coverts of our souls with
fear and drove God's sacred plover crying into the upland rain where it remains."
To the poem my friend affixed a note: "Is this what happened to your plover, too?" Well, I don't know what happened
to my plover, but it has certainly flown the coop.
Most plovers are shore birds, sandpiperish birds. But the upland plover makes its home on high heaths . . . and rough
meadows. Its voice is like the whistling of the wind and can be heard even at night. The upland plover is a shy bird. It
is the color of dry grass. In the rare event that one is flushed, it takes to air with a soft, bubbling whistle. "During their
migrations," says one of my handbooks, "one may clearly hear these sweet notes from birds traveling beyond the limits
of human vision." If the poet wanted an image for the absconded God, he could have found none better than the upland
plover.
I can't say, Raymo continues, exactly when it was that the God of my youth took to the upland rains. He was not
driven from my soul. His flight was no fault of my teachers'. My lapse from faith occurred not long after my
graduation from college, at the end of an intense period of belief during which [God's] face seemed palpably near.
Raymo then explicates all the French Catholic and English writers he read, and then says "Sacred plovers leapt from
every page, took to wing in coveys, and made a tumult with their wings that drowned the thin voice of doubt." Emily
Dickinson called hope "the thing with feathers." The plover was our hope.
"Then one day I woke up and the plover was gone . . . [ He watched other birds]." But he said, "the sacred plover
continues to reside in the uplands with the wind and the rain, and something deep inside me knows that it is gone
forever.
In the dark hours of the night, in starlight, I listen for [its] cry. Is it the wind, or the plover there on the hill behind the
house? The plover is invisible because its coat is the color of dry grass and its voice is the voice of the wind . . . And
so does God hide in dry grass and rain and night's faintest light."
Sermon
"The Creation of the Cosmos!!" The booming voice announces, "A dramatic reading "Creation" by that traditional
theologian, the author of Genesis, who of course some of you believe is God. Next our favorite astronomer Chet
Raymo. And finally, the well-known Native American mythologist, Nancy Wood. I introduce to you then: God, the
mythmaker, and the astronomer."
God: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void and darkness was
upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.
Mythmaker: In the old dark days of the Beginning Time, nothing had a voice. The echo of silence rolled across the
dry void of the Universe. Sky was hungry for the fist of fire . . . and the power of mystery.
The Astronomer: In the first moments of Creation, subatomic particles flickered in and out of existence against a
background of radiation. The universe was a seething fireball of matter and energy.
* * *
And God said, Let there be light, and there was light.
And the mythmaker said, No presence except for a Male and a Female Star, so far apart not even the spirits were heard
by them.
One second after the beginning, the temperature of the universe had dropped to a chilly 10 billion degrees, and the
creation of matter ceased. Protons, electrons, and neutrons danced upon a sea of light. Still the universe was filled with
blinding radiation.
* * *
And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.
When Earth sank down, Sky lifted up and both Sun and Moon were born. The Milky Way formed a web of far-extending potential.
When a million years had passed, the universe had cooled to the point where charged particles could hold together
against the pressure of radiant energy, against the flash of the new, against the all-splitter. Electrons linked with nuclei
to form atoms. The hard stuff of the universe was born.
* * *
And God made the firmament and separated the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were
above the firmament.
When the emerging light of First Dawn brought together the Male and the Female Stars, they discovered the delight of
song.
This was light stuff, to be sure, the stuff that floats balloons, but now the universe had a foundation, a bedrock of
atomic matter on which to build, bone and nail.
* * *
And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament . . . And God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light
upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night . . . And God saw that it was good.
This was the First Harmony and the First Unity, the Supreme Connection of the Great Hanging Space of the Universe.
When the Morning stars sang together, the heartbeat of the Earth began and in the Sky, the oldest hunger was satisfied
The reign of light subsided. The universe became transparent. But there was still to be another chapter to the ancient brilliance. Sometime within the next billion years, the galaxies began
to form and not long after, so did the quasars.
And the quasars spoke, May it be so.
As you listened to these words from a theologian, a myth or story maker, and a physicist, did you begin to intermingle
them, not sure where one stopped and the other began? Or did you have an urge to keep them separate? Did you want
to take God out of it? We see in this reading how some theologians, some myth makers, some astronomers might
answer just one question of cosmology: how did it all start. Is one right and one wrong? Or one more right than the
others. Should some be discarded as no longer informing us? Or being applicable to our lives? And what does this say
about God? What does it say about how each one of us does theology or science. Do the twain meet?
If you think about the improbability of our existence, the physical constants, starting with the ones in the dramatic
reading, they may seem to some to have been miraculously contrived for our benefit. Or to put it another way: the
purpose of the creation of the universe is us, the seeming conclusion of the Genesis story and for some, what all
discoveries in physics have lead to: that God exists. Chet Raymo protests, "No such thing, the physicist has proved
nothing . . . [the physicist] only observes that this wildly improbably universe exists, and it is the only universe we
could possibly observe. If that is a mystery that holds us in thrall, then so be it. If you wish, I will give praise to this
improbability in the language of my forefathers and with cymbals and trumpet make a joyful noise . . . I will not
assume that the language of my forefathers encompasses this new knowledge of the Infinite. What the physicist has
learned is no less frightening, or less wonderful, than the mysteries that drove anchorites to desert rocks and Buddha to
the Bo tree. What the physicist has learned enriches and deepens those venerable mysteries; it neither proves them nor
negates them."
The easy God of Raymo's youth,.when a creed informed him of his God, a God of fear, had for him fled. So then he
listened for God in the poets. And the thing with feathers comforted him. But then he became a scientist. And for a
time, the plover fled. He could not see so clearly. The answers were not so easy -- in theology, or in stories and
poetry, or in science. For many of us, we can recognize that journey. The sorting process. A tangled web that yearns to
be explained.
Such a web I have been weaving these last months as I considered the subject of Cosmic Questions. I was asked back
in October, by the conference chairs, members of a previous church I served, to be the Minister of the Week at Natural
History Week at Star Island. Star is an island owned by a corporation made up of Unitarian Universalists and
Congregationalists for the purpose of holding conferences and retreats. Each year the conference invites a minister and a
theme speaker. The minister looks at the questions of science from a theological point of view at a service in the
morning, followed immediately by the theme talk from a scientist. Having been a Biology teacher in a former life, I
asked if it would be possible to invite a biologist. I would then already understand the science and theologize to my
heart's content. They called after a few weeks, "We have good news and bad news. The good news is we found a
wonderful theme speaker and he is even a UU. The bad news is he's not a biologist." I held my breath. "He is an
astronomer." What I knew about astronomy back in October was pretty basic! So, I did what all good students do
when they want to know something -- I went to Barnes and Noble. Amazing! I bought five books. And they sat on my
shelf. Then the Science and Religion class asked me if I'd like to speak sometime. Of course, I said "Yes." and for a
time the subject was "to be determined" but finally, I plunged in and said, "Well, I have this conference, and some
books. How about I tackle something on astronomy or cosmology?" I worked on A Brief History of Time by Stephen
Hawking -- that was great. I knew more than I thought. But then I worked on some other books. Overwhelming topic.
I went to the class a humbled woman. I shared where my thinking as a mystic scientist minister was and what were
their questions about cosmology and astronomy. They warmed to their subject. One brought me magazines. I read them.
The pressure was on. Others sent me articles -- some I actually understood. Others a struggle . . . A head of steam was
building. Then a member gave me the brochure to the American Association for the Advancement of Science
conference titled Cosmic Questions. I went. What an eye opener! Ask me about it!! This past week I met with the
theme speaker, Dennis Wellnitz, who is an astronomer at University of Maryland and a member of the Rockville UU
Church. Now I'm really hooked on astronomy. We talked planets and telescopes, scientific history and great scientists,
theology and cosmology. He showed me slides from various kinds of telescopes. He will be bringing a computer
controlled telescope to Star Island, where we can turn off the island lights and see the night sky, to be followed by
service in the little stone chapel lit only by the moon, stars and candles. He has a filter for another telescope that will
allow us to look directly at the sun in the morning, to be preceded by a 5 a.m. sunrise service on east rock where the
sun flows up out of the sea. Cosmic bliss. The physicist and the theologian.
Now I hesitate to call myself a theologian, having just named God the theologian of Genesis. But in the sense that
theology considers things of Ultimate Concern, we are all theologians. And that is my mission as a minister. How do
we do theology as people of liberal faith, when we don't have a creed or a text that tells us at least some of what to
believe? In seminary, we examined the religious beliefs of the seminarians according to four aspects of the theological
construct of the individual: the sacred text that person uses; the religious and the family history of the individual; the
person's own reasoning; and their personal experiences of the holy.
Traditional Christian individuals will stress the first two: sacred text and family or religious history. Liberal religion
folks will stress the second two: reason and experience. And perhaps you do have sources you call sacred texts for you,
but they are not proscribed by your church. Unitarian Universalists of course have religious history, though more recent
than some, and perhaps your UU religious family history is recent as well. So how do these things inform your looking
at questions of cosmology? Are you informed by theology, stories, or science? Or do you, as you reflected in our
creation dramatic reading, intermingle them all, lifting up some as more helpful than others, seeing overlaps here and a
common thread there. Some may believe as Pope Pius did who pronounced in 1951, "The Big Bang shows there is a
Creator and a Creation." Some will claim that the new theories of cosmology prove Genesis. This is like the story of
the band of astrophysicists who, in an effort to search for the true meaning of the universe, climbed a huge mountain
only to find a band of theologians had been sitting there for centuries. Or the statement of physicist at the Advancement
of Science conference, John Polkinghorne, who by the way is the only ordained minister in the Royal Academy of
Science and also knighted who said, "Scientists who are excited by the workings of the world don't stop to ask
themselves why they can perceive, for example mathematics. We are taking abstract principles to describe the universe.
Don't shrug your shoulders and say that's just the way it is. It is too profound to delegate to absolute rational
simplicity." Or you can weave the questions of plovers and quasars as Chet Raymo does and let others come to their
own conclusions.
Recently, I sat in your beautiful and sacred Memory Garden. I walked along the path, feeling the soft shredded wood
under my feet, listened to the gurgling of the fountain and took in the flowers on the scented breeze. I sat down on a
rock still warm from the day's sun and looked at the building you had built and furnished, much with your own hands.
I remembered the classes I taught in this building, a place now of history and ritual and meaning making. I looked up
at the ancient trees, moving gently against a blue, blue sky. I gazed over at the wall which will hold the stories of your
loved ones
And I knew that science and stories and theology informed my knowledge of that place. The physics of the sun and
stars, the biology of the plants, the geology of the rocks. Stories of the minister's families who had lived in that
building. Myths of trees and flowers and fountains. And yes, theology. The theology of awe, and wonder, and of
experiencing something greater than myself, knowing in my body self "the thing with feathers." We need them all --
science and stories and theology. We can be informed sometimes by one, sometimes by another. But we cannot take
science or theology exclusively. We are reasoning creatures, with a desire to understand the cosmos in which we have
our being. We need to be informed by physics, and astronomy and all the technologies thereof. And taking theology
away from science threatens to take the wonder we experience of the stars and of the plovers out of our lives, the awe
as an amazing photograph is returned from the Hubble telescope and we feel the majesty and grandeur of our universe.
The cosmic a-ha as two pieces of the unknown click together into new understanding.
These ineffable mysteries, unseen, hidden from our eyes are only a faint, sweet song on the crisp midnight air -- but
they are there. Do we use theology to explain the unexplainable? Perhaps. Do we imagine God, want God, yearn for
God, but cannot explain quite why? Perhaps. Do we feel something as a reality, some experience at the very depth of
our being, that we cannot explain and so say it is religious? Perhaps. Or perhaps all of these and more. We ask the
questions again and again -- is it Rilke who says keep asking the questions and live into the answers. We ask them
because it brings us to the depth of meaning for which we search in this faith, for that which will inform us how to be
in our lives, as well as what we will do with our lives.
Let the quasars and the quarks, the black holes and the singularities tiptoe into your view, messages from the dust of
eternity, the blinding creation that led to our heart's cry of wonder, the pulsing of life. May it be as the cry of the
plover, in the upland rains. May we ponder these things with dawning new light. For as Thoreau says in the last words
of Walden, "The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is
more day to dawn." Let us awake and sing and rejoice in this creation, this great cosmic question..
Closing Words
Simply to be, and to let things speak to us in words and gestures, but also to be as they speak wordlessly from the
mystery of what they are.
Simply to say a silent yes to the stars in the soul of the night, say a silent yes to the passions of the cosmos, say a
silent yes to the miracles of human endeavors, birthdays and celebrations and sweet hellos and tender good-byes, to
pass from one person to another the touch of acceptance and love and rememberings, an answering yes, for this is our
sacrament. May it be so.
[adapted liberally from Jacob Trapp in Rejoicing Together]
References:
Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time 1988:Bantam Books
Hebrew Testament, Revised Standard Version
Raymo, Chet. The Sun of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimige 1992: Hungry Mind Press
Wood, Nancy. Shaman's Circle, 1996: Delacorte Press
|
