|
[18 Jul 2008|10:38am] |
At the beginning of The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, you quote Albert Einstein as saying the most important question a person can ask in life is, "Is the universe a friendly place or not?"
Matthew Fox: Einstein's has always been an important question, and it was the question in the first century, when Christianity started. Believing angels are invisible forces that move the planet and move our psyches, the early Christians put it, "Are the angels friends or foes?" The tradition of the Cosmic Christ answered by saying that since Christ has power over the angels, the universe is benign no matter what the angels are doing.
However, as Thomas Aquinas points out, the lion eats the lamb, which lets you know there's a price to pay for being in the universe. Death is always there, especially for a species like ours that thinks about the future and worries about it. That's what makes every day so invigorating and such a miracle.
"Is the universe a friendly place or not?" Notice what a cosmological question that is. In all my years of education, no one ever asked that question. The universe hardly came into my education at all.
That's a result of this awful anthropocentrism our Western culture has burdened us with. It shows in education and religion, and it shows in the sadness of our souls, the cosmological loneliness.
I met an Australian who'd been lecturing in Ghana, I think it was, where they'd translated his talks. At one point he had said, "The number one spiritual problem in Sydney is loneliness." The translator stopped and said, "Repeat that." So he did. The translator thought for a while, and finally said, "I'm sorry, sir. There is no word for loneliness in our language."
That's stunning for Westerners. Loneliness is like food and drink for us, and I think the key is our lack of cosmology.
We have to recover that cosmic sense. Nation-states are not our home. Our home is the universe. And the universe is not just space. It's also time. Not only was the universe one trillion galaxies big before we humans came, but it was 18 billion years old, too. That's why we can't take any of it for granted, and why we shouldn't even take ourselves for granted.
Meister Eckhart says if the only prayer you say in your life is thank you, that would suffice. And Aquinas says the essence of religion is gratitude. How do we teach gratitude? What do you do with your gratitude? That's part of the mystical impulse. Our whole being, our existence, is a miracle.
I don't mean a miracle in the Newtonian sense. During the Newtonian era a miracle consisted of divine meddling into the universe's machinery, an interruption of the absolute mathematical laws of the universe. But in a creation theology, a miracle is not about interfering with nature's laws. It's the opposite. It's about realizing that nature's laws, or what Rupert Sheldrake calls habits, are miracles. What brought about our being here after 18 billion years of a total drama is a miracle. And so existence itself is a miracle. All of us have a right to be grateful to be here.
Authentic self-love comes from the realization that the universe has made a lot of sacrifices and decisions along the way to bring us here.
There's this tremendous experiment called humanity going on in the universe. It's wild - pouring divine energy into this animal, offering it as much freedom, as many options as we have, and then standing back and saying, "What's going to happen?" It's awesome, and we're right at the brink of its being a total failure, because the way we're going obviously is going to kill us and most other life as we know it on the planet.
What we're doing is really embarrassing. It's embarrassing to us and it's embarrassing to the universe. I think the universe on most days regrets our coming.
Especially if you look at it anthropologically. Our species could have developed in very different ways. We could still be swinging from trees and be happier.
Or even as Homo sapiens we could still be connected to the earth. You quote Wendell Berry as saying, "Perhaps the greatest disaster of human history is one that happened to or with religion: that is, the conceptual division between the holy and the world, the excerpting of the Creator from the creation."
Matthew Fox: Religion in the West has fallen into theism, just as science has. Theism is the belief that we're here and God's out there someplace. It's a very Newtonian idea, that God is behind the universe with an oilcan. And of course the next step after theism is atheism. It's very easy to reject a God who's way out in the sky. I don't know any other civilization that has invented atheism except the West. The word does not exist in indigenous languages. The spirit exists.
What I'm talking about theologically is the replacement of theism with panentheism, which is the idea that we're in God and God is in us. And by "we" I don't mean just humans, but all being. The image I have is that the universe is the divine womb. We're all in here swimming together. It's an image of interconnectivity.
And it's a mystical image. By that I mean it isn't something conceptual. People experience the divine in their lives. They always have.
The divine is not separate from anything in nature. Aquinas talked in the thirteenth century about the immanence of God in all beings. The mystery of existence, the goodness, the beauty - all of that is diving imagery, divine footsteps.
|
|
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
cynical
sad
weird
full
yay!
23 (79.3%)
okay
bouncy