#94. Religion "At Its Best"

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This post now contains all three parts which were originally published separately.

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"There's more to religion than it seems."

I've made that statement many times during my years as a teacher. And in the home-stretch reflections that I described in the previous post (#93) about my nearly five-year-long blog-writing effort, I discovered that what stands out most for me is the inadequacy I feel with regard to sharing my thoughts about that "more."

So in this post I'm going to try say, as well as I can, what I mean by "Religion 'At Its Best'."

The very fact that there is a "more"-- an inner core of wisdom at the depths of Western culture's Judeo-Christian tradition-- is difficult for many of us to realize. It's difficult because it's precisely that "best" that got lost.

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Religion's "best" was replaced by body-soul and matter-spirit dualism-- the basic outlook of patriarchal culture and classical philosophy-- which has dominated western culture and religion for many centuries.

I'm aware that I am more personally attuned than many, apparently, to that kind of depth awareness often called "right brain" or "intuitive" perception. But still I have to say that I'm continually amazed that the very fact that there is a "more" to religion-- more than the static dualism of rational empiricism-- remains for the most part unknown to the general public.

The "more" is still there. That inner core of wisdom is preserved in the rituals, customs, art and music, creeds, feasts and seasons of the Western religious tradition. But it's precisely the significance of such things that rational empiricism can't see because of its position at the bottom rung of the Great Ladder.

We need to move up the ladder. It's only when we make use of our intuitive rationality that we can recognize the "more" of the Judeo-Christian tradition and can enter into an experience of that inner core of wisdom which is our Western culture's religion "at its best."

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I have referred repeatedly in these posts to the four-fold way our minds work-- the fact that we don't just think sequentially and we don't just perceive our existence in terms of its surface details. We can, in fact, be aware of our connections with everything; and we can, in fact, see the whole picture-- the big picture of how the world works and how our lives fit into it.

Even though the Judeo-Christian tradition originally gave the world its evolutionary viewpoint, the dynamic and unitive perspective at the base of Western religion was gradually replaced by the static-dualistic outlook of classical philosophy. For many in our patriarchal culture, the word "religion" still means only that world-rejecting outlook of patriarchy's static dualism.

So if we are to get to the heart of our Western religious tradition, we need to move higher up the ladder; we need to see the world, and ourselves in it, from the dynamic and unitive perspectives.

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Everybody know what "dynamic" means in contrast to "static," but hardly anyone is comfortable with either "unitive" or its opposite, "dualistic."

Nowadays, our world is changing so fast that no one any longer thinks that "there's nothing new under the sun." Indeed, we know now that the world has never not been undergoing great changes. We know from science that over billions of years galaxies, planets and the stars have evolved; that on Earth living matter has emerged from the dust of the stars; and that we ourselves have developed from those earlier life forms.

But it's still a surprise to many to learn that that dynamic (emergent, evolutionary) worldview comes originally from our Western religious tradition, and that we even have a biblical name for the "energy" or "power" of the cosmic process: dynamis in Greek, spiritus in Latin.

Spiritus also means wind, air and life-breath; the holy spiritus we understand to be empowering the evolution of the universe is the same dynamis which gives each of us our life and breath and personal self-awareness.

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This dynamic perspective-- that we are not separate from the matter of the physical cosmos, nor from the Earth's biological life-forms, nor from the holy spiritus which empowers the evolution of the universe-- also helps us to understand what's meant by "unitive."

For most of us, it's an unfamiliar word. As the opposite of "dualistic," "unitive" refers both to our union with the natural world and to our union with the world's creative source.

And while "Big History"-- the big picture of the universe we have from contemporary science-- makes clear that we are indeed part of the natural world, we don't yet have something analogous to "Big History" which we might call "Big Religion." The most explicit contemporary perspectives available about our non-duality with the divine come from the unitive views of the Asian religious traditions.

While the spiritualities of Asia have remained more open than have those of the West to the sense of divine-human unity which goes back to Paleolithic times, in Western culture the unitive view was smothered by the static dualism of patriarchy. So the non-Western religious traditions such as Taoism, Buddhism and Hinduism can help us recover the human-divine aspect of the unitive worldview.

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I've mentioned in several posts the twentieth-century religious thinker and British monk Bede Griffith. He not only makes the point well that science is helping religion recover its "inner core"; he even left England and went to live in India "to find," he said, "the other half of my soul."

Bede's words may sound confusing, but the unitive view is in fact two-fold, and we need to be especially clear here in thinking about it: there is a human-cosmos unity and a human-divine unity. We need both, if we are to recover the non-dual vision of cosmic-human-divine unity at the heart of the Western tradition.

But while help for seeing the cosmic-human view comes from science, and while the divine-human perspective is clearer with the help of Eastern spiritualities, that's not enough. It's the convergence of these two perspectives-- the cosmic-human from science and the divine-human from Asian religions-- that provides the context for us to enter into and to experience the inner core of wisdom at the depths of our own Judeo-Christian tradition.

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You may be thinking, "All that is just the context? What, then, about the content?"

Well, I have three Greek words which, in addition to "evolution," seem to me to be needed to spell out what I'm calling the Judeo-Christian tradition "at its best." They are eschaton, eucharist and ecclesia.

In the previous post I mentioned that if I were sharing these thoughts in an article for an academic journal, the essay would have a title something like "Evolutionary Eschatology and Eucharistic Ecclesiology."

That's quite a mouthful, but those are the words I have to work with! 

"Eschatology" is a deep-level comprehensive view of the purpose of our evolving universe, "Eucharistic" refers to our human response to that understanding, and "Ecclesiology" is concerned with the nature of the community of those who respond.

What holds all these ideas together is, as I see it, the modern understanding of person-- which, remarkably, is honored both in Western secular culture and by Western religion. In what follows, I will use each of these ideas-- eschaton, eucharist, ecclesia and person, all in the context of cosmic, biological and cultural evolution-- to do my best to spell out my understanding of religion at its best.

If you've been feeling that this post has been heavy-going so far, you're right. But you've got through the worst of it. And while the rest is relatively easy, it's long. So if you're reading it at one sitting, this is a good place to take a break.

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ESCHATON. Eschaton is our understanding of the world's end-purpose. 

In the old static context, "the end of the world" meant its annihilation-- "when God will come to judge the world by fire," in the words of the hymn sung at Catholic funerals for a thousand years.

In the dynamic context, we're not talking about the world's "end" in the sense of its annihilation, nor in the sense of the coming of the "Rapture" repeatedly announced by religious fundamentalists. In unitive (non-dualistic) terms, the world's "end" is its purpose: why it exists-- and why, of course, we exist.

If we are to appreciate our Western religious tradition "at its best," we need to understand the end-purpose of the world in terms of the tradition's own dynamic-unitive insights.

I noted back in post #20 that even those who promote the New Cosmology seem to shy away from this aspect of the Western tradition. 

But as I see it, no matter what we may call the divine creative power-- the ultimate, the numinous, the great Mystery-- we have a profound need to understand-- in terms of the Western tradition's own evolutionary and unitive context-- the tradition's insights into the creative source's purpose.

And this is one area where the rational empiricism of science isn't of help. We simply can't see the "end" or "purpose" of anything-- let alone the purpose of everything-- from the bottom rung of the great ladder. 

Our Sensing function's focus on details just isn't good enough. We need to use our mind's Intuitive ability if we are to see the biggest of all Big Pictures: why there is anything, rather than nothing.

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In writing this blog over the last four-and-a-half years I've worked hard to spell out my understanding of modern Western culture's upward movement to this higher rung of the great ladder-- where we can, in fact, see the Big Picture.

I focused on that cultural transition especially in post #80, where I described the mid-20th-century efforts of the "two mavericks"-- depth psychologist C. G. Jung and atomic physicist Wolfgang Pauli-- to accept and express their understanding of our mind's intuitive capacity in the face of several centuries of its neglect and denial by Western science's empirical rationality.

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In the science of cultural anthropology, any social group's response to the basic human need to understand "our place in the vast scheme of things" is called its cosmology. The "New Cosmology" is new precisely because it replaces Western culture's previous static cosmology. And as 

I've mentioned frequently, in that older dualistic religious perspective we were told that our purpose was to escape from the world.

We can now see, however-- thanks to the evolutionary worldview of modern science-- that we do in fact have a place in the evolving cosmos. And it's this insight which allows us to recover the older inner core of wisdom-- that "more"-- that I've been calling the West's religious tradition "at its best."

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I've noted many times that the very idea of evolution comes originally from the Judeo-Christian tradition. And that to this day, the perspective of an on-going emergence of newness-- imaged traditionally in terms of Exodus, Passover and new life arising in Spring-- remains an essential aspect of its inner core of wisdom. When we think in terms of transformation, we can see that it's not an exaggeration to say that evolution is what Western religion is all about.

Christianity sees this transformation process at the heart of the cosmos as a manifestation and embodiment of the divine source. We even have familiar words for this understanding: "epiphany" and "incarnation." But it is precisely the deeper meaning of those terms which got lost when patriarchy's static dualism replaced the earlier dynamic perspective.

In that patriarchal context, the meaning of "incarnation" came to be limited to one time, one place and one person. As its broader meaning was lost over the centuries, that limited understanding came to be taken for granted and, eventually, it was presumed to be the very basis of Western religion.

But as we recover the earlier dynamic-unitive perspectives at the inner core of the tradition, the entire evolutionary process can once again be recognized as the incarnation of the creative source of the cosmos. We can see, in that evolutionary context, that the embodiment of divine creativity is happening always and everywhere-- and that it excludes nothing and no one.

Here are some examples of this understanding, from three profound 20th-century religious thinkers:

Karl Rahner says, "The Mystery is always and everywhere giving itself to us." It is "always and everywhere making itself known to us."

Sergius Bulgakov calls the cosmic process the "actualization of the divine potentialities."

Raimundo Panikkar-- in his demanding but significant language-- names what's being embodied "the cosmo-the-andric unity." The union of the cosmic (cosmos), the divine (theos), and the human (andros) is what's being manifest by the cosmic process.

Rahner was a German Catholic and Bulgakov was Russian Orthodox. Panikkar had a Spanish mother, an Asian Indian father, and he described himself as "Catholic when I'm in Rome, Hindu when I'm in India, Buddhist when I'm in China."

Each of these profound religious thinkers, with their highly varied cultural backgrounds, is expressing-- in the dynamic-unitive perspectives available to us from modern science-- the same inner core of wisdom at the heart of the tradition. And that is "religion at its best."

My whole point here is that the "more" isn't new. Rahner, Bulgakov and Panikkar are saying exactly what the New Testament's Second Epistle of Peter proclaims, for example, when the apostle says that we are called to be "partakers in the divine nature." That "more" is expressed even more dynamically in Paul's letter to the Ephesians where he describes the end-purpose of all things to be "the fullness of God in everything."

It is a great gift that, in our time, thanks to science, we can understand once again this dynamic and unitive understanding of eschaton as the embodiment of the divine-human-cosmic unity, "God all-in-all."

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EUCHARIST. Gratefulness is the normal response to anything we experience as a gift, and clearly this deep comprehension of the eschaton evokes in us a very deep response.

To this day, Jewish tradition preserves this fundamental human response to the dynamic world in words of thanks-giving over bread and wine. The early Christians continued this form of grateful response when they gathered in homes on the first day of the week in remembrance of Jesus; and this tradition, too, is still continued daily throughout the world.

But just as with the dynamic understanding of eschaton, the evolutionary meaning of eucharist was lost when the static-dualistic-- patriarchal-- view replaced the earlier Judeo-Christian perspective. But also as with eschaton, the shift in our day away from the static perspective to a recovery of the older dynamic understanding is happening with regard to eucharist as well.

I wrote about the recovery of the dynamic view of eucharist in two recent posts. In post #91 (Evolution and the Passover Seder), I described how the seder's central act of thanks-giving is an explicit response to the evolutionary worldview which originated in the historical Exodus from Egypt.

And I wrote about the unitive meaning of eucharist-- our cosmo-the-andric union with all things-- in post #92 (Evolution and Holy Communion).

I don't feel the need to repeat those thoughts here. But I do want to note just how different was the original dynamic understanding of the eucharist from its later static meaning. In the same way that eschaton in the dualistic worldview came to mean not the fulfillment but the annihilation of the world, so eucharist in the dualist context came to refer not to an activity by a group of persons, but to an object. A sacred object, surely, but an other-worldly sacred object.

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You may be expecting me to say that a similar process happened with regard to ecclesia, the third of the Greek terms needed for understanding Western religion at its best. You are right, again!

Of those three terms, ecclesia is by far the most difficult to understand from the dynamic-unitive perspective. This is not, however, because the meaning of ecclesia is difficult to understand in itself-- it isn't-- but because patriarchy continues to dominate the (essentially unconscious) perspectives of the Western religious tradition's own self-understanding.

That self-understanding is what the following section is all about. It's challenging material in that it requires time and effort to work through it well, so if you are reading this post in one sitting, you might want to take another break.

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ECCLESIA. We don't have a English equivalent for the Greek word eucharist, but the English equivalent of ecclesia is, of course, "church." 

It comes from an Old English word, kirk, which simply means "assembly" or "gathering"-- just as the Greek ecclesia does.

Probably the best contemporary translation of ecclesia is "community"-- not in the sense of a geographic or genetic group, but in the sense of a gathering of persons who intentionally get together for a specific purpose.

In the New Testament, eucharist was the name for an action, what the early Christians did when they gathered; ecclesia was their name for themselves when they got together to do it.

As the perspectives of static dualism took over, however, "church" lost its meaning as community and eventually acquired the patriarchal meaning it has today: a hierarchical institution or sociological establishment, often top-heavy with authority. And as it's commonly used nowadays, especially by journalists and media people, "the Church" has come to mean only those authorities.

This patriarchal, static and dualistic understanding of ecclesia obviously does not represent our religious tradition at its best.

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But just as with eucharist and eschaton, the modern evolutionary perspective helps us in recovering the original-- dynamic and unitive-- meaning of ecclesia. It does takes some effort, however.

We know from contemporary science-- and specifically from the study of complexity theory-- that the 14-billon-year evolutionary process has been continually characterized by the emergence of new levels of self-organization.

We know that stars can produce chemical elements, that some of those elements can combine to form living cells, and that some cells unite to form the kind of brain and nervous system which is needed for the emergence of our uniquely human self-reflective awareness.

That's a greatly simplified summary of the idea of emergence in the evolutionary process, but I think it's good enough to make fairly clear that the natural next step-- beyond atoms and molecules, life-forms and personal consciousness-- would be those groups and gatherings of persons we call "communities."

It's in this context of evolutionary emergence that we can better understand the ecclesia as a community rather than as a patriarchal and hierarchical institution.

In the Western religious tradition at its best, what characterizes the ecclesia is its self-understanding precisely as a community of those who gather to give thanks. Just as in the evolutionary context we can better understand the meaning eucharist in terms of eschaton, so in that came context we can better understand the meaning of ecclesia in terms of eucharist.

A fancy way to summarize these confusing-sounding thoughts is to say that "as eschatology is evolutionary, so ecclesiology is eucharistic." (That's where my imaginary academic title for this post-- "Evolutionary Eschatology and Eucharistic Ecclesiology"-- comes from.)

But those fancy words aren't helpful. In fact, they get in the way of our entering into the deeper meaning of the insights they are attempting to express.

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For me, the two religious thinkers who are most helpful for an understanding of the meanings of eschaton, eucharist and ecclesia in the context of evolution are Alexander Schmemann and Thomas Berry.

I quoted both of these profound religious thinkers in recent posts: #90 ("Returning" the World...) and #87 (Stardust's Imperative). If you haven't read those posts, I hope you will. Here's a very brief summary of some of their main thoughts.

Both Berry and Schmemann begin with the primary evolutionary insight that, in Berry's words, "persons are a cosmic phenomenon," and that it's this cosmic perspective-- that we are "the evolutionary process come to self-awareness"-- that allows us to see "our proper role in the universe."

Each describes "our place in the vast scheme of things" with quite different words, but with remarkably similar meanings.

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Alexander Schmemann speaks in a more traditional and liturgical language. "Our primary role in the cosmos is to be priest," he says. The "first, the basic definition of humanity, is that a person is a priest." And it is the "only natural reaction of humanity, to whom God gave this blessed and sanctified world, to bless God in return."

Returning the world to God in thanks, says Schmemann, is "our common task." Because we are "the world become conscious of itself," we humans are its "spokespersons." We speak as the world and for the world. In Schmemann's words, "We stand in the center of the world and unify it, in our act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from God and offering it to God."

And "by filling the world with this eucharist," he adds, "we transform our life." In a wonderfully Teilhardian sentence in summary of these thoughts he says, "The world was created as the 'matter,' the material of one all-embracing eucharist, and humanity was created as the priest of this cosmic sacrament."

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Thomas Berry's words sound much less traditional, but his meanings are very much the same. Here too, we humans are understood to speak as the world and for the world. It's easy to overlook, but Berry even uses the word "return," just as Schmemann does, in describing our cosmic role. We are "to return the universe to itself and to its numinous origins," he says. And we "return" the world to its source by returning the world to itself.

Berry is especially strong in his emphasis on our need to recognize that "community" is the very goal and purpose of the cosmic process. Eschaton and ecclesia come together in Berry's words when he says, quite explicitly, that "the ultimate community is the whole universe together."

Understood in this way, we can see that ecclesia includes everything: no one and nothing is outside the cosmic process of divine incarnation. 

This-- obviously-- is an understanding of ecclesia utterly unlike the conventional understanding of "church" as an authoritarian patriarchal institution.

And when we do see ecclesia in this way-- as the ultimate community, the whole universe together-- then "church" is simply another way of expressing the meaning of eschaton, as God all-in-all and the fullness of God in everything.

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You may be thinking the meanings of these Greek words are starting to overlap. They are!

Our rational, right-brain, linear Thinking ability just isn't able to produce the words and concepts well enough to express these profound, deeper-than-rational, left-brain intuitions. The religious tradition itself offers an outstanding example of this fact about the limitation of our rational-only minds: since New Testament times, the underlying realities referred to by the words eucharist, ecclesia and eschaton have all been given one same name.

The eschaton as the embodied cosmic community of the fullness of God in everything, excluding nothing... the eucharist as humanity's deepest response of thanks-giving for the evolution of the universe as the manifestation of the divine-comic-unity... the ecclesia as the community gathered around bread and wine in thanks for this divine incarnation of God all-in-all, and for our participation in it-- all of these profound realities are traditionally called the Corpus Christi.

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These are deep thoughts. It's not easy to wrap our minds around them. 

And yet they are in fact what Western religion is all about "at its best."

For me, what holds them all together is the centrality of person. In the convergent perspective-- where eschaton, eucharist and ecclesia are understood within the context of cosmic-biological-cultural evolution-- what stands out most for me is our personal uniqueness.

We are unique from the moment of our conception. The chance that anyone else might have the exact same DNA is said to be one in 10, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000.

We not only have our own inner world from the first moment of our existence, however. Our personal self-awareness is continually being modified by every life-experience. And once we reach the stage of self-reflective maturity, we add to it ourselves by our personal relationships and free choices.

And all of this-- the mystery that we are-- becomes our unique contribution to the Corpus Christi.

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So that's the "more" as I see it. In the simplest words I'm able to come up with: Each of us makes a difference with regard to the ultimate end of the world.

In my previous post about reviewing my almost five-year-long blog effort (#93, The Home Stretch), I said that what stood out most for me was the feeling of inadequacy I had with regard to doing a good-enough job in expressing my thoughts about the depths of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

I think I've probably done as well in this present post as I'm going to be able to do. It's my best in sharing my thoughts about religion at its best. My thanks to you for staying with me through all these efforts!

sam@macspeno.com

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#87. Stardust's Imperative: Reinterpretation

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In our day we have "a new mode of religious understanding," as Thomas Berry says. And it's not thanks to our religious traditions, he emphasizes, but to science.

The religious traditions are part of the problem. I quoted Bede Griffith in post #86: "The different world religions-- Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam-- have themselves to recover the ancient wisdom, which they have inherited, and this now has to be interpreted in the light of the knowledge of the world which Western science has given us."

The context for our new mode of religious understanding is the recovery of what Berry calls our "awareness of spiritual communication with the natural world." It was the religious experience of our earliest human ancestors and we remain genetically coded for it today.

While this is obviously not easy for some to accept, modern science is far from being in contradiction to religious perspectives; it offers, in fact, a contemporary context for the re-interpretation of the basic perspectives of our religious traditions.

We are "recovering reverence," says Berry. "Evolution has become our sacred story."

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For a long time, the Western world didn't have a sacred story. We didn't even know we didn't have a sacred story! We were doubly estranged by both religion and science and, as a result, much of the Western world gave up on religion.

Secularists, agnostics, and atheists gave up on it completely, while those who describe themselves as "spiritual but not religious" gave up on its institutional forms. Those who remain in the traditional churches are in a different situation: they find themselves increasingly dismayed by their churches' irrelevance.

And then there are those of us who-- by personal inclination, curiosity, education, or stubbornness-- see something of great value in the old traditions and don't want to discard them. We want to see them in the new scientific context where they can once again be life-giving.

That's the topic of this post. Berry calls "reinterpretation." I've called it "Stardust's Imperative."

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"Stardust" is a faithful reader of this blog; over the last several years she has contributed many good comments to my posts. In response to one of them, I suggested recently she re-read posts #20 and #39. The details are complicated but the main idea isn't: with regard to a view which I'd pointed out to her of the Russian Sophiologist, Sergius Bulgakov, she said, "What a beautiful thought!"

Then she added, "Everything I go back to now gets reinterpreted through a new filter."

That's "Stardust's Imperative": to reinterpret everything-- all the religious teachings that have come down to us-- through the "new filter" of evolutionary science.

As I said in another context, "when the traditional Western religious teachings are reinterpreted in terms of the New Cosmology, the result is an even deeper, richer and more beautiful understanding than was available earlier."

Thomas Berry says that when we look at the data itself, "we begin to see a story of immediate significance." Big History, the largest cosmic perspective, "reveals the mysteries of the universe coming forth from the original flaring forth of primordial energy, then passing through a series of irreversible transformation episodes that have brought into being the visible world around us."

In our day, Stardust's Imperative is the imperative of all of us. We all have to join with Stardust, Thomas Berry, Bede Griffith, Michael Dowd, and many others who are on the growing edge of Western culture, so that we too can have "an even deeper, richer and more beautiful understanding than was available earlier."

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I want to give some examples of the "reinterpretations" Thomas Berry offers. But I want first to share an important thought about the process of reinterpretation itself.

Reinterpretation isn't just something for academics and scholars. It's part of everyday life. We do it all the time, because we know from personal experience that we see things differently when we understand them better. There's no reason to exclude our religious perspectives from this common human experience.

Beyond that, understanding old things in new ways is, for some of us, a special delight. It's exciting when we find that even our understanding itself is evolving. And one of the most significant things we come to understand is that, often, a new interpretation don't negate an older one but puts it in a larger context. It lets us see a bigger picture.

I think that's especially the case with regard to reinterpreting religious ideas in the new scientific context, but religion isn't the only area of life that needs reinterpretation as a result of new scientific findings. Science itself is constantly reinterpreting its own ideas.

Probably the most famous example is Einstein's theory of relativity. It's essentially a reinterpretation of the laws of gravity formulated by Isaac Newton back in the 17th century.

Newton's understanding wasn't wrong; we still experience gravity in everyday life just as he described it 350 years ago. But Newton's 17th-century-formulation is now understood in the larger, more-inclusive context of Einstein's laws of relativity.

That's a key idea to keep in mind with regard to Stardust's Imperative: reinterpretation lets us see older ideas in a newer and bigger context, but it doesn't negate them.

So we don't need to be afraid to look at earlier teachings in the larger context of modern science. Just as Einstein's laws of gravity don't contradict the earlier ones formulated by Newton but give us a better understanding of them, so the perspectives of the New Cosmology don't contradict the basic teachings of Western religion but put them in a much larger and more inclusive context.

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In his 1985 essay "Christian Cosmology," Thomas Berry lists several big ideas from the Judeo-Christian tradition which can be reinterpreted in light of the New Cosmology. Here he's speaking to a Christian audience and so uses familiar Christian terms: "biblical revelation, the incarnation, redemption and the shaping of the Christian community."

Because the idea of community applies equally to all the Earth's religious traditions, East and West, I want to describe Berry's ideas about community first. From my experience I know that a sense of community is especially relevant to those who describe themselves as atheist, agnostic or secular or who think of themselves as "spiritual but not religious."

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Sociologically, we know that community is a fundamental human need, and that our understanding of community, Christian or otherwise, centers on the idea of person.

Asian cultures are often criticized for not valuing human individuals as much as the Western society does, but both of the Earth's largest cultural groups, East and West, have something of importance to learn about persons in light of the cosmic perspective provided by modern science.

In Berry's words, "Persons are a cosmic phenomenon-- both a part of the process and also the process itself come to self-awareness." And it's this cosmic perspective, he says, which allows us to see our proper role in the universe. It allows us to see what persons are "for."

That role (our job, our common task) is, in Berry's words, "to return the universe to itself and to its numinous origins." And he points out that in doing this work we are dependent "for every aspect of our intellectual insight, spiritual development, imaginative creativity and emotional sensitivity" on the findings of science.

Berry's terms for the three main aspects of the cosmic process are differentiation, subjectivity and communion. And he notes that while differentiation-- the diversity of persons, "individuation" in Jungian terms-- is a central aspect of the cosmic process, our industrial society requires standardization. So do our religious institutions.

From the point of view of cosmic evolution, however, persons simply are not subject-able to standardization. So it's only when we have a clear understanding of the individual person as a cosmic phenomenon that we can have good sense of a community of persons.

It's in this perspective, says Berry, that the idea of "community" can be recognized as nothing less than the very goal and purpose of the cosmic process. In his words, "the ultimate community is the whole universe together." And in an extremely significant comment, he adds that "it is the task specifically of the Christian community to articulate and move the world towards the achievement of this purpose."

What a profound understanding of Christian community this is! For me, it's an outstanding example of the recovery of a buried treasure. It's an understanding of "church" utterly un-like that of the authoritarian patriarchal institution to which that name is usually given.

It is the sacramentum mundi of Karl Rahner and the mysterion tou cosmou of Raimundo Panikkar which I wrote about in several earlier posts. It is the Christian community's ancient understanding of itself as a sacred sign, a sacramental symbol of the ultimate community which the New Testament calls the "recapitulation" of the universe, "God all-in-all," the fullness of God in everything (Ephesians 1:10).

This is, indeed, a profound understanding. And Berry's understanding of the idea of "redemption" in the evolutionary context of the New Cosmology is no less profound.

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Berry observes that at every level of the cosmic process-- from sub-atomic particles uniting in stars to form atoms of the chemical elements... to single-celled life-forms uniting to form the Earth's plants and animals... even to parents sacrificing themselves for the sake of their children-- "redemption" or "sacrifice" in some sense is always made at one level "for the emergence of a higher level."

In the static-dualistic worldview of the past, redemption was understood as a legal, even a financial, agreement: "a price must be paid." But in the dynamic evolutionary perspective we can see that "sacrifice"-- Berry even says "self-immolation" at one point-- is "a primary necessity in activating advanced modes of being in the cosmic process."

From the world's creation described in the book of Revelations as the sacrifice of "the lamb slain at the foundation of the world," to the life-story of Jesus, and to every parent changing a diaper at this moment anywhere in the world-- redemptive sacrifice is understood to be a primary necessity. It's a totally valid understanding of how the world works. We don't need to limit our understanding of redemption to the work of one person or one group of persons.

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The same is true with regard to our understanding of "incarnation" and "revelation." In the perspectives of the New Cosmology, we can see that divine incarnation doesn't need to be limited to the life a single individual, nor does divine revelation need to be limited to the sacred stories of only one of the Earth's cultural groupings.

By whatever name-- the familiar Logos of John's Gospel, the less familiar Greek terms such as theosis or Raimundo Panikkar's cosmo-the-andric unity, even the quite unfamiliar Bogochelovechestvo of the Russian Sophiologists-- the divine-human unity expressed in the gospel story of Jesus makes good sense in terms of the New Cosmology.

So does the Passover story, the story of the Great Escape from Egypt recorded in the book of Exodus. Berry calls this biblical revelation "the historical unfolding of the divine in human history." He also notes that, as I've mentioned in several previous posts, it is the very source of our contemporary evolutionary cosmology.

Isn't this a fascinating thought, that Western religion gave us science, and western science is now returning the heart of Western religion to us!

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The main thought I want to share in this post is that "Stardust's Imperative" really is an imperative. We simply cannot go back to the older dualistic religious perspectives-- any more than we can try to understand the universe or our human world without Einstein's ideas about relativity and Darwin's understanding of natural selection.

And just as Einstein's 20th-century theory of relativity doesn't invalidate but deepens our understanding of the law of gravity that Newton formulated in the 17th century, the same is true of Berry's understanding of our need to see traditional Christian teachings in the larger context of the New Cosmology.

Berry sums up these thoughts nicely: "We need to see that revelation, incarnation and redemption are primarily for the entire universe," he says. "And not," he adds, "for any [specific] individual or group."

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That sounds good, but does "Stardust's Imperative"-- reinterpreting everything in our religious teachings through the "new filter" of evolutionary science-- really result is an "even deeper, richer and more beautiful understanding than was available earlier"?

I think it does. The new scientific cosmology helps us recover the most basic aspects of the Western world's religious traditions as they were understood before Western society became "doubly estranged" from the natural world and our spiritual communication with it.

One example that immediately comes to mind is the earliest known description of a gathering of a Christian community. The ancient text says that when the early Christians got together, they began by reading the scriptures and sharing news of the lives of their fellow believers. "And then," it says, "we stand up and pray for all the world."

This ancient practice is explicitly continued in the Christian communities of the Eastern churches. When they gather for what they still call their service of thanksgiving-- "returning the world to its numinous source" in Berry's language-- they pray, "We offer You what is Yours, on behalf of all and for all."

So from a traditional Christian point of view, the Eucharist is quite literally a work (a "liturgia" in Greek) done "for the entire universe." 

From the point of the view of the New Cosmology it is no less. An awkward but I think helpful way to say it is that it is the actualization by a community of cosmic persons of their cosmic role in the cosmic process.

We don't need to refer only to ancient texts and liturgical practices to appreciate this central understanding of service and its sacramental expression in the Eucharist. A contemporary example appears in a recent (January 27, 2011) New York Times article by a two-time 

Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, Nicholas Kristof.

Kristof is reporting on a complex situation in Phoenix where a bishop excommunicated first a nun, and then an entire Catholic hospital-- by refusing permission for the eucharist to be celebrated there. He quotes Jamie L. Manson, columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, who expresses beautifully the ancient understanding of eucharist and its connection with service "on behalf of all and for all."

"Though they will be denied the opportunity to celebrate the Eucharist, the Eucharist will rise out of St. Joseph’s every time the sick are healed, the frightened are comforted, the lonely are visited, the weak are fed, and vigil is kept over the dying."

Clearly, the "new mode of religious understanding" which is ours thanks to science helps us to recover even the most basic teaching of Jesus.

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The New Cosmology also helps us recover the confidence and trust that is the very essence of our personal lives when lived according to the religious perspective of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

When we recognize that "evolution is our sacred story" we see not only that creation is still in process and that we are co-creative participants 
in it, but also that we have an especially good way to understand our personal participation in that story: "passover."

As the text of the Passover Seder says, "this story holds true for us today." The Passover story tells us that we have nothing to lose in the long run, that we don't need to be afraid.

As I see it, Stardust's Imperative-- reinterpretation in light of the New Cosmology-- isn't something to shy away from. It's exciting.

sam@macspeno.com

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