#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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#65. Ritual's Cosmic Roots

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This is the seventh in a series of posts about the connections between religious ritual and evolution; it's also my third dealing with ritual's psychological, biological and cosmic roots.

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The cosmic roots of ritual are considerably more difficult to describe than ritual's biological and psychological roots.

One reason is that understanding ritual's cosmic roots involves the biggest "big picture" contemporary science gives us. It includes not just the evolution of life on Earth but the evolution of the physical universe before the Earth existed and the emergence of human consciousness and culture after life emerged on Earth.

Another reason is that even though modern science's evolutionary worldview came to maturity in the 20th century, our general population still remains for the most part uninformed about it.

Most Americans, for example-- polls say it's between two-thirds and 75%-- claim to not accept the idea of biological evolution. And their awareness of evolution at the level of atoms and stars, on one hand, and of human culture, on the other, is zero.

There are even deeper reasons for this resistance to the big picture contemporary science gives us. Besides becoming aware that the world is not only a lot older and bigger than people used to think it was, we have also become aware that the world is always changing.

And the biggest change 20th-century science has made us aware of is our understanding of change itself.

There's still more. The world is not only constantly changing; the on-going change has a direction-- toward ever-increasing material complexity.

And with the increase in complexity comes an increase in that self-organized "within" which we call the "life" of living things and which, at the human level, we call our "awareness of being aware."

And that reflective self-awareness also adds something new to the world: the evolutionary development of humanity's communities, societies and cultures.

It's a lot for us to take in.

But this idea of constantly appearing newness is the very essence of the New Cosmology. And it is the perspective we need if we are to have a good understanding of the cosmic roots of our religious ritual.

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It's clear enough that ritual's cosmic roots are in both the matter of the cosmos and in the cosmic process by which matter evolves. 

But those roots only make sense when we understand the connections between ourselves and that on-going process of the physical evolution of matter.

We need to look closely at those connections and at some of the reasons why they are so difficult for many of us to understand. 

What follows may at first seem to not have much to do with ritual; bear with me.

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I noted in post #52 ("Exciting Times") that what's "new" in the term "new cosmology" is precisely the fact that we are beginning to see the deep connection between ourselves and the evolving universe. Our new understanding of the physical cosmos has resulted in a totally new understanding of ourselves.

This new understanding-- of the cosmos and of ourselves-- is an immense transition, but our educational systems haven't been much help to us in making it.

For the last two generations, our primary educational system hasn't been schools but the media. And while the media constantly present us with economic, political and environmental problems, at the same time they do all they can to distract us from dealing with those problems in any serious or responsible way.

Most media journalists still see everything in a patriarchal framework-- in terms of competition rather than cooperation-- even though we know from the evolutionary perspective that cooperative activity is the very essence of the cosmic process at every level. Media editors and writers simply aren't helping us move beyond those patriarchal perspectives.

Our religious institutions aren't helping much either. The new understanding of the physical cosmos we have today not only results in a new understanding of ourselves, it also results in a new-- and more mature-- understanding of the world's creative source.

In the perspectives of the new scientific cosmology, the word "God" just doesn't mean what it used to in the old static worldview-- any more than the word "human" does.

Because the churches continue to protect themselves by holding on to the old views and rejecting those who work at updating them, the whole religious enterprise-- humanity's concern for spirituality-- has moved outside the institutional churches.

It's an interesting-- indeed, fascinating-- development. The result, in terms of both science and religion, is that the New Cosmology is a grass-roots activity.

Thanks to the internet, ordinary people are getting together to understand what's going on and are making major efforts to deal with humanity's needs. We recognize ourselves as partners in the cosmic process.

That's the real growing edge of our current situation. It's especially obvious in the concern for the environment-- for being "green"-- that is an essential aspect of any evolutionary spirituality.

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I didn't forget about ritual....

I need to say a few words first about what I think is the most basic aspect of the spirituality of the New Cosmology. What it comes down to, at bottom, is an attitude toward reality which can be described best as trust.

While fear-- of other people, of the body, of the feminine, of the world itself-- is at the basis of the static worldview's religious dualism, the immense transition we're experiencing is an evolutionary movement beyond that attitude of fear.

The claim of patriarchal authorities that they can protect us from the worst aspects of our existence-- on condition that we follow their directives-- may have worked in the past. In the evolutionary perspective, it simply doesn't.

In the New Cosmology, the essence of the human stance is not trust in external authorities but trust in the evolutionary process itself. "Trust" seems to be the right word because, when we recognize that at the human level cosmic evolution is participatory, we also see that we are responsible for taking care of ourselves. And we trust that, in fact, we can take care of ourselves.

This is where ritual comes in. Ritual, as I've said a number of times since I started this series of posts about evolution and ritual with post #59, is the age-old means we humans have for consciously plugging ourselves into the on-going cosmic process-- for aligning ourselves with it.

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But if we are to be conscious participants in that evolutionary process, we need to be clear about the direction in which it is moving. And to do that, we need to keep in mind that the process, as we experience it, has three main stages: "matter, life and mind." 

It's that third stage that we need to take a close look at here.

Even many people who accept the physical and biological stages of Earth's evolution find it difficult to see that humanity's communal and cultural development is also part of the evolution of the universe.

In the previous post (#64) I described some basic concepts available from the fields of neuro-science and ethology that help us to see that ritual, at the biological level, is about the communication of information for the sake of cooperative activity.

From those scientific studies of the brains and behavior of animals, we can see that the purpose of ritual in animal life is nothing less than life itself-- the survival and thrival of individuals and species.

Human ritual is no less rooted in neurology and ethology. It, too, is about cooperative activity for the survival and thrival of life.

The difference is that, at the human level, we focus on relationships and community.

In our highly individualistic society, we need to keep reminding ourselves that the cosmic process at the human level doesn't stop with the emergence of individual persons. It continues on, to what I called in post #22 "The Other Half of 'Person'."

Community-- persons in communal relationships-- is the direction in which the cosmic process is moving at the human level.

Our individualistic streak keeps us from being open to the insights of the New Cosmology; our rugged individualism keeps us from recognizing community as the further direction in which cosmic evolution is proceeding.

Yet it is only that very biggest picture we have from the New Cosmology that allows us to understand community in the largest cosmic sense: the inter-connectedness of all things.

Western people can hardly handle the thought that all humans are related to one another-- let alone that we are related not only to animals and plants but to everything else that exists in the physical universe.

The New Cosmology helps us to see that we are, in fact, related to the totality of reality. And this is one place where our global religious traditions can also help; it's one place where science and religion converge explicitly.

There's no religious tradition on the Earth which doesn't teach some version of the golden rule: to be happy (content, complete, fulfilled-- indeed, to survive and thrive as human beings) we need to treat others as we want to be treated.

And every religion has some word for our relatedness to everything. In Greek, it's ekklesia. In Hebrew, qahal. In Sanskrit, sangha. They all mean "community" in the broadest sense. Native Americans say it most explicitly: "All things are our relations."

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So for a good understanding of the cosmic roots of ritual, we need to see not only that ritual's roots are "in the cosmic process itself," but also that they are in the direction of that evolutionary movement-- toward community.

One way to express these thoughts is to say that we are genetically wired for communion with all other persons and things. And when we put it that way, we see immediately that war, violence, indifference and injustice are disruptions of that cosmic process operating within us.

We can also see that our religious rituals are the opposite of those disruptions-- that ritual empowers us to creative participation in the process which is moving in the direction of peace, justice and equality.

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These are heavy thoughts. Helpful, I hope. To round them out, there's one more idea about the cosmic roots of ritual I want to share.

Besides understanding the connections between ourselves and the on-going cosmic process, we also need to be aware that ritual's cosmic roots are in matter itself-- in the very stuff of the cosmos which emerged in the primordial flaring forth of the Big Bang.

There's no ritual without that stuff.

There's no ritual without movement and sound. No ritual without physical activity. No ritual without drumming or dancing or singing. No ritual without food and drink.

Thanks to 20th-century science, we know that matter isn't the dead, life-less atoms and molecules that the rationalistic worldview of recent centuries presumed it was.

The elements of earth and air and fire and water are "sym-bols" in the old sense; they are things that "put us together." They unite us-- with ourselves, with the things of the world, and with the creative source of the world.

We can see today, better than ever in the past, that matter itself is unitive: the physical world, by its very nature, is sacred, symbolic, sacramental.

We need those traditional religious words like "unitive," "sacred," "symbolic," and "sacramental" to express the most basic of all humanity's religious insights, that each of us, at our deepest personal level, is not separate from the creative source of the world.

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That sense of our personal union-- via matter-- with the dynamic source of the creative process is what's missing from the patriarchal worldview's religious dualism.

It's that absence which accounts for the fear that's at the base of the political perspectives of patriarchy; there, the evolutionary drive to survive and thrive is understood only in terms of competition rather than cooperation.

We don't need to be academic historians or theologians to recognize that absence.

We can see it every time we turn on the TV-- when we hear Americans saying with regard to other Americans: "We can't afford to take care of everybody-- they don't deserve it, anyway." And when we hear, with regard to people of other countries: "They are out to get us; we have to bomb them before they bomb us."

It would be nice if what I've just said was a caricature. But it's not. Those political attitudes are based on a fear of reality which is intrinsic to the dualistic worldview's sense of alienation from matter. They are the opposite of the evolutionary understanding of the material world as sacred, symbolic, sacramental.

And it's our understanding of the sacramental nature of matter that allows us to take care of ourselves, of one another and of our environment-- in trust.

In Greek, the sacramentality of the world is called the mysterion tou kosmou. It's that mysterion tou kosmou that is the ultimate root of all 

ritual.

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I started this post with the thought that the cosmic roots of ritual "are considerably more difficult to describe than ritual's biological and psychological roots." Now I'm thinking that maybe it's not just more difficult; maybe it's impossible to adequately describe ritual's cosmic roots.

Of all the 65 posts I've written, this one feels the most unsatisfactory. Not the whole thing; just the ending. I feel that I haven't said enough-- or that what I did say wasn't said well enough. I think I've reached the limits of my ability.

So the final thought I want to share here is simply that, even though I can't put into words what's needed, there's more.

sam@macspeno.com 

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