#55. "All we have to do..."

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We take care of what we value. That's the main point of the very different thinkers, Jakob Wolf and Heather Eaton, whose ideas I described in my two most recent posts.

This post is a followup. It's about the importance of personal experience in taking care of the Earth in this time of environmental crisis. From their distinctive perspectives and in very different languages these two thinkers agree that neither western science, with its intentionally rationalist thought, nor the western religious tradition, with its disdain for the Earth, can help much.

As I described in post #53 (Bridging the Gap), from a philosophical point of view, Professor Jakob Wolf of the University of Copenhagen says we need a third thing. He calls it the "phenomenological apprehension of intelligent design in nature."

He makes clear why science can't provide us with a sense of what's important to us. That's simply not what science is about. It's neither what science was invented for, back in the time of the ancient Greeks, nor what science has been doing for the last five centuries.

As I described in post #54 (We Take Care of What We Value), Dr. Heather Eaton of St. Paul University in Ottawa comes from another starting point, but she too agrees that neither science nor religion are sufficient in themselves.

"The ecological crisis has not made much of a dent in the western religious consciousness," says Dr. Eaton. "The Christian tradition has not been able to deal effectively with evolution." The insight that the earth is our home is "an enormous challenge to our ecologically dysfunctional patriarchal religious traditions."

What's needed in this time of environmental crisis, Dr. Eaton says, is the coming together of humanity's ancient religious traditions with the much more recent evolutionary cosmology of 20th-century science. It's their convergence that we need.

Why? Because "we take care of what we value" and what leads us to ethical responsibility is personal experience.

Whether we call it "the apprehension of intelligent design" or "the experience of the sacred"-- or use more familiar words like "reverence," "mysticism," or "contemplation"-- it's that experience that we need if we are to contribute to the healing of the Earth.

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Probably most of us don't respond positively to Professor Wolf's term, the "phenomenological apprehension of intelligent design"-- even though he makes very clear that it's nothing more than a philosophical name for the personal experience of nature's intelligibility.

It's difficult to relate to the idea well, as he says, because the term has been "compromised" by Christian fundamentalists in the USA who use it in support of their creationist views.

For many of us, Dr. Eaton's words speak more strongly when she says that to heal the Earth we need to recover the age-old basis of all religious experience "in the experience of the sacred."

But most of us aren't much more comfortable with a term like "the sacred"-- or even with the traditional religious words such as "contemplation" and "mysticism"-- than we are with Dr. Wolf's "phenomenological apprehension of nature's intelligibility."

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What about "wonder and awe"?

Those are good words. I think we need to hold on to them; they may be the best we have to talk about the experience of the sacred.

But even "wonder and awe" has been compromised in our day by the similar-sounding phrase "shock and awe" used by America's political and military leaders to describe what they hoped would happen when they invaded Iraq.

When it comes to "awe," our only everyday use is the exclamation even my five-year-old grandson says often, "Awesome!" And while we know what the experience of "wonder" is, we also know that it's not what we mean when we describe something as "wonderful."

"Sacred" is the one word we still use to describe things that are important to us. When we hear something mocked or treated more lightly than it should be, for example, we tend to say (or maybe just think quietly to ourselves), "Is nothing sacred?"

Clearly, we use "sacred" to refer to things that are of value to us. So our experience of the Earth-- as sacred-- is important for its healing simply because, as both Dr. Eaton and Dr. Wolf each in their own way say, "we take care of what we value."

In this time of environmental crisis, their point is a very practical one.

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A major problem, however, is that in our culture the experience of wonder and awe is usually considered a purely personal matter. It is "acceptable as a private experience," says Dr. Eaton, "yet it is often belittled, ignored or dismissed as socially relevant."

Obviously it's not a purely personal matter, however-- not if dealing well with the environmental crisis depends on it. Dr. Eaton points this out even in the very title of her paper: sacred awe and wonder is at the nexus of religion, ecology and politics.

As I mentioned in the previous post, her paper, "This Sacred Earth: At the Nexus of Religion, Ecology and Politics," isn't readily available in print form, but she gave me an OK to share it with friends. If you would like a copy, send me a note: sam@macspeno.com.

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One of the main reasons why the experience of the sacred isn't readily understood in our culture is because, as Dr. Eaton says, "the primary mode of knowing in Western societies is analytic" and, as a way of being aware of reality, "analysis has its limits."

The experience of awe and wonder is a different kind of awareness.

The fact that there are different kind of conscious awareness is something I've talked about in many previous posts. Because there are four distinct kinds of conscious knowing, this perspective is often referred to as a quaternary or mandalic understanding. I described it in detail in post #29 (The Four-fold Mind).

I've made use of it (in post #30) to talk about the traditional ways of being religious, in a half-dozen posts (#40 through #45) to describe the Sophia/Wisdom perspectives at the heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and (in posts #35 and #36) to help make sense of the many aspects of the Immense Transition we are presently experiencing.

These four functions of the conscious mind were spelled out explicitly early in the 20th century by Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung. Today they are known to almost everyone in terms of the Myers-Briggs personality typology. It's even on Facebook. (You can find "What's Your Myers-Briggs Personality Type?" on the Facebook Apps page-- along with "Which Teletubbie Are You?")

Long before C. G. Jung, Myers-Briggs and Facebook, however, the fact that we have a four-fold mind was known to the people of many earlier cultures.

On the Native American Medicine Wheel, for example, each of the mind's functions is pictured by an animal and associated with one of the four directions, the four seasons and the four times of day. I've made use of that imagery in many posts. I think it's one of the best tools we have for our self-understanding.

It is especially helpful in understanding wonder and awe.

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Our ability to experience the sacred via awe and wonder is pictured on the Medicine Wheel as a shamanic Black Bear. It's an image of the same function of the conscious mind which C. G. Jung calls "Intuition," the famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant refers to as "archetypal intuition," and Jakob Wolf calls "phenomenological apprehension."

Black Bear is located on the west on the Medicine Wheel, directly opposite the Gold Eagle of the east. It's this Gold Eagle awareness-- Jung calls it simply our "Thinking function"-- which deals with the rational cause-and-effect workings of patterns in nature and is the very essence of scientific analysis.

It's because "the primary mode of knowing in Western societies is analytic," as Dr. Eaton says, that the experience of the sacred via our Black Bear (Intuition) ability isn't readily understood in our culture. We need to balance our Gold Eagle (Thinking) ability with our Black Bear (Intuition) capacity if we are to heal our home, the sacred Earth.

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Jung calls Black Bear (Intuition) "the religious function" because it doesn't make distinctions as Gold Eagle (Thinking) awareness does. It makes connections. Native Americans express this experience of the sacred with the phrase "All my relations!"

One of the most helpful understandings I know of the mind's Black Bear (Intuition) ability comes, rather surprisingly, from the eminent 20th-century German Jesuit theologian, Karl Rahner. He calls this capacity we have to experience awe and wonder "self-transcendence."

As a conscious person in the material cosmos, says Rahner, each of us experiences ourselves at a deep level as being utterly open to all things. We don't have any limits; we are connected with everything that exists; we simply do not exist apart from the infinite unbounded reality underlying the whole universe. I've described this more fully in post #34 (Talking About Us).

Obviously, many people in Western culture are not at ease with such an understanding of themselves. But it's much more familiar to people in Asian cultures, and it is one of the reasons why westerners, in this time of Immense Transition, are turning to the religious traditions and spiritual practices of the East.

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So, this is not only a time of Immense Transition due to the discovery of the new scientific cosmology, it is also a time of Great Turning for the world's religions themselves. We live in nothing less, says Dr. Eaton, than a "new religious moment" in the history of the world.

And because of the environmental crisis, says Dr. Eaton, "it is pressing for all religious traditions to reclaim their roots in the natural world."

She notes that, East and West, "Each tradition has an awareness that the natural world is a primary place of revelation and religious experience" and that "it is only in recent history that this has not been so."

With regard to the West, for example, she says that the Christian faith in its recent history "has belittled the earth as a religious reality." And that this "diminished Christian awareness of a sacred indwelling presence in the natural world" is "one of the central causes of the ecological crisis and the excessive domination and exploitation of the earth."

Christians are "faced with the task of allowing their theological understanding to be transformed," and as Dr. Eaton notes, this task is "an enormous challenge to our ecologically dysfunctional patriarchal religious traditions."

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But it's not the western religious tradition alone that's being challenged by the environmental crisis. All the world religions , she says, "need to reclaim their heritage"-- to rediscover their roots in the world of awe and wonder.

If we are to heal the Earth, we have to "reacquaint ourselves with the divine presence revealed within the natural world." Because we take care of what we value, "to encounter the sacred in the natural world moves us to resist its destruction."

The question, then, is a very practical one: How do we "reacquaint ourselves with the divine presence revealed within the natural world." How are we to "encounter the sacred"?

Dr. Eaton says simply, "Awareness of the power of wonder and awe is available to anyone who spends time in the natural world."

Is it as simple as that?

I think it is.

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The experience of the sacred isn't considered socially acceptable but, as Dr. Eaton says, "the capacity for awe remains omnipresent." Awe and wonder is a normal aspect of human experience. It's in our hearts. It's part of our DNA.

C. G. Jung says it. Native Americans say it. Karl Rahner says it.

There's one catch. In Dr. Eaton's words: "To marvel at the natural world requires a transcendence of our superficial worldviews and beliefs."

We may be potentially open to everything, as Rahner says, but we'll never actually experience awe and wonder if we don't literally spend time with nature. We need to "phenomenologically apprehend, " as Jakob Wolf would say, the intelligible patterns operating in the natural world.

Dr. Eaton quotes the famous Jewish theologian who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Selma in 1965, Abraham Heschel, about the difference between what happens to us when we do, and don't, spend time in nature.

"Away from the immense," says Rabbi Heschel, "cloistered in our own concepts, we may scorn and revile everything. But standing between earth and sky, we are silenced by the sight. We can never sneer at the stars, mock the dawn or scoff at the totality of being."

When we spend time in the world of nature and find ourselves aware of our connectedness to everything-- when we experience that all things are "our relations"-- we simply cannot sneer, or mock, or scoff at our own experience. We just need to let the experience happen.

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For many years, my wife Anne and I have included on our Christmas cards a few words from Teilhard de Chardin's essay "In Expectation of the Parousia" found at the conclusion of his early work, The Divine Milieu.

Teilhard's words are his way of expressing the profound idea that Heather Eaton and Jakob Wolf are trying to spell out for us.

His words may sound simplistic. But in terms of taking care of what we value, they are profound.

How do we experience the Earth as sacred?

Teilhard says, "All we have to do is let the heart of the earth beat within us."

sam@macspeno.com

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ARCHIVE TECHNICAL PROBLEM: Since I started this new series of posts, each time I publish one, an earlier one vanishes from my Archives list; they're still there, just not visible. Until tech support can deal with this, I'm putting links to those "missing" posts here.

#5. Alternative to "Human Nature Redux"

#4. The "Biogenetic" Perspective

#3. High School 50th-Anniversary Report

#2. Spirituality Research Symposium

#1. On Recent Developments in Science and Religion

#52. "Exciting Times"

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For readers who did not receive the announcement I sent out about starting a new series of posts dealing with the convergence of science and religion, here's what I said:

If you're receiving this, it's because at some point in the last two and a half years you expressed interest (in one way or another, positive or negative), or because you're attracted to the new cosmology, or because your work (in science or spirituality-- or both) is mentioned, or simply because I know that you're goodwilled and would like to receive this announcement.

It's a one-shot. You won't hear from me again about it-- unless you would like to be notified when a new post appears, as some readers in the past have requested. Let me know if you want to be on the new list.

That's it. We live in wonderfully exciting times. My good wishes for your part in it.

Those last lines resulted in some interesting comments from readers who sent a request that they be put on the notification list.

The comments were primarily about the environmental crisis, and made two main points: that "we also live in frightening times" and that the reason why our times are so frightening is that "people just don't give a damn."

Those comments suggested to me that I should say why I think that we do indeed live in "wonderfully exciting times."

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As I see it, the essence of what's happening in the contemporary world is that humanity is moving out of the patriarchal worldview.

We are in the midst of an immense transition, a great turning away from those long-held static attitudes of the past which are responsible not only for the Earth's present environmental crisis but also for innumerable injustices to the Earth's people.

We are recognizing-- thanks to 20th-century science-- that we live in an evolutionary world.

We can see, now, not only that the universe is developmental rather than static, but that we ourselves are the world coming to its conscious stage of development on our planet. This is the very essence of our new scientific understanding of the cosmos.

But it is also a new understanding of anthropos. That, as the famous British biologist Julian Huxley worded it, "we are the universe become conscious of itself."

Of course, even in the static worldview, it is obvious that humans are uniquely self-aware creatures. But now, thanks to modern science's dynamic worldview, we are also aware that our self-awareness is the self-awareness of the evolving universe.

And that's what allows us to see, in a way that our recent ancestors could not, that we are participants in the Earth's evolutionary development, that we belong to it and are part of it all.

In the most literal sense, all the creatures of the Earth are our relatives. And if they are our relations, then they matter to us. And we know from experience that we take care of what matters to us. As I see it, the fact that we take care of what we value is the only "solution" to the environmental crisis.

I wrote about the idea of our time of Great Turning in several previous posts, specifically #35 (Aspects of the Immense Transition, Parts 1 & 2) and #36 (Aspects of the Immense Transition, Parts 3 & 4). But it is the central idea in this entire blog. Almost every post deals with it in one way or another; for example, #14 (Person as Process), #17 (What is the Universe Doing?), #22 (The Other Half of "Person"), #47 (The Growing Edge) and #50 (The End of Patriarchy).

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While our Paleolithic ancestors understood well, as do the peoples of surviving tribal cultures, that all the living things of the Earth are our relations, an understanding of this "human-Earth relationship," as Thomas Berry calls it, was lost to western culture and patriarchal religion a long time ago.

Its recovery, in this time of Great Turning, is one of the reasons why the Earth-centered spirituality of Native Americans is so attractive to those who are aware of the new cosmology. What's "new" in the term "new cosmology" is precisely humanity's beginning to see again the connection between ourselves and the evolving universe. This new view of both cosmos and anthropos together is precisely what makes our times so exciting.

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I certainly don't deny that our times are also frightening. But life has always been frightening.

We are easily injured and often get sick. Our parts break down or don't work right. Just being born is a major accomplishment; most human embryos don't make it through the nine-month gestation period. And once we're born we begin life totally helpless and clueless. It takes us months and years to become aware of ourselves and the world around us.

Parents usually do the best they can, often in difficult circumstances, but our emotional and psychological development is easily distorted; we readily get scarred by what happens to us-- or what doesn't happen to us when it should. And imbalances in society make for unequal opportunities and unfair availability of decent supplies of food, shelter and education.

Our whole existence is fragile. And no matter how healthy and well-off we are, we know that our life will come to an end, just as does the life of every living thing on Earth.

So, as I see it, it's not so much our times as it is our very existence that's frightening.

And yet it's no less true-- specifically because of our growing awareness of the global environmental crisis-- that our times are especially frightening as well, since we are beginning to realize that by destroying the environment we are damaging our home-- our own human habitat, our ecos. Words like "ecology" and "economics" are based on that Greek word for "home."

We know that most plant and animal species become extinct if their habitat is destroyed-- that they can't survive in an inhospitable habitat which isn't really their home. And neither can we.

So what's really frightening is that even though we are more adaptable than most other living things-- that adaptability is part of our uniqueness as self-aware persons-- to not "give a damn about saving the Earth" is the pathological destruction of our own our habitat.

But I think it's exactly that pathological situation that's changing.

We are coming to see that planet Earth is in fact our mother, that we're not aliens trapped in the natural world but participants in it.

Just recently I heard a young person say to her father, "I want to be 'green'." It's exciting when little people, you and me, want to care about the physical world of nature, our mother, our home. They do "give a damn."

And this really is new. After several centuries of the static and mechanistic worldview promoted by 18th-century rationalist science, and the depression, discouragement and despair that characterized much of the 20th century which resulted from it, human existence is once again, and this time thanks to late 20th-century science, becoming meaningful.

Life is indeed frightening, biologically and culturally, but what makes our times so exciting is that for the first time ever we're coming to see not only that we can do something about it but also that that's what we're supposed to be doing.

We are becoming aware, as never before in human history, that what happens to us is up to us. We're coming to see that things like poverty, hunger, racial and gender injustice, war and violence of every kind-- including violence against our mother planet-- are not simply "fate" or "the will of God" or "just the way things are." Doing something about it is our very vocation in the cultural evolution of life on Mother Earth. It's what we're for. It's our purpose, our calling, our role, our task. In Thomas Berry words, it's our "great work."

After several centuries of the static mechanistic perspective, we're coming to see our own significance. And that to me, by any meaning of the word, is exciting.

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Thomas Berry notes that the necessary "transformation of human priorities" won't come easily. But, as he says, from now on “the primary judgment of all human institutions, professions, programs and activities will be determined by the extent to which they inhibit, ignore or foster a mutually enhancing human-Earth relationship.”

When we are aware of our place in the grand scheme of things, we can see that the promotion of "a mutually enhancing relationship" between anthropos and cosmos is indeed our task and that it is our "great work.”

In academic anthropology, a people's understanding of their "place in the scheme of things" is called their cosmology. The new cosmology which results from the dynamic-evolutionary worldview-- the growing awareness of the human-Earth (anthropos-cosmos) relationship which we have in our day from the findings of modern science about our place in the grand scheme of things-- is one that all of the peoples of the world can share in common. And every day more and more people are becoming aware of it.

Ours is the first time in world history that all humanity has a common cosmology. That's at least part of why I can say, "We live in wonderfully exciting times."

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Berry specifies that, in this transformation of human priorities, we need to put our energies into four big areas: "politics, economics, education and religion."

When it comes to evaluating the area of politics-- in terms of whether it is inhibiting, ignoring or fostering "a mutually enhancing human-Earth relationship”-- probably nothing helped us more than the disasters of the American presidency in the first eight years of the 21st century. Even those who lives are caught up in the distractions of so-called "reality" TV such as American Idol eventually became aware that something was drastically wrong, that our political leaders had betrayed us.

And in the area of economics, probably no one in the world remains unaware that in terms of inhibiting, ignoring or fostering "a mutually enhancing human-Earth relationship,” our economic leaders have also betrayed us.

Neither politics nor economics has been a personal focus of my life.

But the areas of education and religion have been-- especially science education and a viable everyday spirituality. The need to share my thoughts about their convergence led me to begin this blog.

Religion never meant for me following a list of dos and don'ts about private behavior that was handed down by authority figures. It was always about understanding the world we live in-- how it works and how it got to the way it is and where it seems to be going-- and of entering into it and enjoying it.

While there's no question that our political and economic leaders have betrayed us, it has taken much longer for an awareness of a betrayal on the part of our religious leaders to become widespread. I think it's simply because religion is such a conservative thing; its patriarchal-institutional forms remain stuck in the old static worldview.

But that awareness has begun to dawn on many. The fastest growing "religious" group in the United States is now made up of those who don't want anything to do with institutional religion.

A question we may ask is, "Why is it that our religious leaders remain so clueless?" My response is that I don't think they're any more clueless than our economic or political leaders. In all three areas, our leaders simply don't know any better. They are ignorant in the most basic sense; their betrayal is due to their lack knowledge about themselves and about real people in the real world.

What they lack is precisely the dynamic worldview of new cosmology, that human beings as responsible participants in the cosmic process.

This is why I think education-- the fourth of Berry's areas of our great work-- is the most central one. You are probably thinking that I'm now going to say that our education leaders have also betrayed us. But I'm not. The fact is that the field of education doesn't have any leaders.

There are certainly lots of good teachers, and even some good administrators. But they are good at their jobs in spite of the educational system they work in, not because of it. Lack of leadership in the field of education makes even the institutional churches look like growing edge cultural phenomena.

If you think I'm being too hard on education and religion, I repeat again Berry's words, that from now on “the primary judgment of all human institutions, professions, programs and activities will be determined by the extent to which they inhibit, ignore or foster a mutually enhancing human-Earth relationship.” (Italics added, this time.)

Using that criteria, we can see that if there's any area where putting our energies to our great work is a "do it yourself" project, it's the area of education. And no greater gift along those lines has been given to us than the internet. A tremendous amount of the world's knowledge, and even much of its wisdom, is available at our fingertips.

A good example of the promotion of self-education is Ryan McCarl's web site Wide Awake Minds. I first came across McCarl's work while reading his article in the Philadelphia Inquirer about religion and imagination. It appeared on December 10, 2007, the same day I had published post #26 (Help From Uncle Louie). Both deal with the same topic-- although obviously from very different starting points. But even that coincidence seems to me to be one more example of the fact that we live in exciting times.

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When a few paragraphs back I said that religion has always meant for me "understanding the world we live in-- how it works and how it got to the way it is and where it seems to be going-- and of entering into it and enjoying it," you may have thought, "that sounds more like science than religion."

For me, it's a description of both. Obviously they're different, although just how they are different is not as obvious as it may seem, and understanding how they differ is important if we are to see their convergence. I'm planning to write about that distinction in my next post.

Why religion and science are similar is more clear: they are both doors to wonder and awe.

In a strong essay on the connection between the environmental crisis and the encounter with one another of the world's religions, Dr. Heather Eaton of St. Paul University in Ottawa says that wonder and awe are the very basis of that area of human life we call "religion." I agree, of course, but I think they are the basis of science, too. At least that's been my experience.

That's why I called this blog "sharing thoughts about the convergence of science and religion." Those two areas of human life, which seem so utterly different as to be mutually exclusive for some of us, really do converge, as I see it, with our experience of wonder and awe.

Dr. Eaton has some very important things to say in her essay about dealing with the environmental crisis in terms of wonder and awe. Her analysis of how the different views about it tie in with religious perspectives is simply excellent. I hope to share my understanding of it with readers in the very near future. So I have an agenda for the next few posts. Your feedback is welcome.

Sam's Sum: We are moving out of the static patriarchal worldview. We're turning away from those long-held attitudes of the past which are responsible for the Earth's present environmental crisis. And we are, thereby, waking up to our ability to deal with what makes our times so frightening. That's encouraging. And, for me, makes our times wonderfully exciting!

sam@macspeno.com

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#42. Evening Wisdom: Sophia as Architect

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This post is the first of four about the biblical images of Wisdom/Sophia. It is a continuation of the efforts I began with post #37 (What's Next) to look at western culture's religious tradition in the context of cosmic, biological and cultural evolution.

While western science uses the mind's thought processes and religion uses our intuition and imagery functions, both (western) science and (western) religion have the same roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition. We need both to move beyond the lopsidedness of the static, dualistic and patriarchal worldview of recent centuries; and we need both to move toward a better understanding of ourselves as participants in the on-going evolutionary process of the universe. Western religion's wisdom literature especially can help us to do this.

The biblical images of Sophia fall into four main groupings; they constitute a kind of wisdom mandala, with the four sections or quadrants of the mandala corresponding to the quaternary aspects of our four-fold mind which I've spelled out in several earlier posts.

I've called this post (#42) "Evening Wisdom" because it's about that group of images which relate especially to the West on the Medicine Wheel; "west" includes evening, autumn and the Intuition function of our four-fold minds, as well as our openness to the world and to creative ability.

I've added "Sophia as Architect" to the name because this group of Wisdom images especially expresses one of the central aspects of the anthropos-theos relationship: that the mystery of our personal uniqueness is shaped (crafted, forged, built, designed) by Divine Wisdom. I'm aware that "architect" sounds a bit mechanical as a description of Sophia; a better term might be "artificer," the term used by Saint Ignatius of Antioch, a first-century disciple of John the Evangelist. (That fact that we don't have exactly the right word is an indication of our static culture's lack of respect for the dynamic creative process.)

All of these "evening" images of Sophia are expressed with words which indicate the work of a creative artist. The point of them all is that Sophia is not just the creator, in the sense of being the source of our existence (of the fact that we are), but also that aspect of God which accounts for our nature or essence (for what we are). In the wisdom literature, the work of Divine Wisdom-- you and me and everything in the world-- is imaged as the work of a master artist.

And it's one of my main thoughts in these blog efforts that modern science-- especially the fields of evolutionary biology, neurophysiology and cultural anthropology -- can help us to appreciate the artistic masterpiece which the world is. And which, as the "world become conscious of itself," we ourselves are.

The biblical images of Sophia as a craftsperson and our modern scientific understanding of what it is that has been crafted go together.

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It may seem strange to start with evening, but on the Judeo-Christian calendar each day begins at sunset. You may remember the words from the creation story in the first chapter of Genesis: "And there was evening, and there was morning-- the first day." Probably the most familiar examples of the day beginning in the evening are Christmas Eve and the first night of Passover.

This same idea is found on the old agricultural calendars with regard to the cycle of the year: the agricultural new year is considered to begin with the end of the autumn harvest time. The Jewish New Year, for example, begins in autumn; Rosh Hoshanna is considered the world's birthday. In the Celtic world, winter and the new year begin together on that unique evening we still celebrate today as All Hallows Eve.

Whether it's a daily or an annual event, we're talking here about an in-between time; what anthropologists refer to as a limen (doorway or threshold): an end which is a beginning.

And with that awareness we are already well out of the rationalistic perspectives we've inherited from the Enlightenment period and 19th-century science. Our great need for a more-than-rational worldview is evidenced by the fact that Halloween has become an holiday for adults. In the United States more money is spent on the celebration of Halloween than at any other time except Christmas.

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The mood of the human mind and heart at the daily and annual "end which is the beginning" is described especially well by one of my favorite writers and thinkers, Raimon Panikkar; it's found in his section on Twilight in Part VII of his anthology of the early literature of India, Mantramanjari: The Vedic Experience.

Panikkar describes early evening as a "prayer time when the experience of our limitation is fresh and yet the desire for perfection and for the infinite has not yet subsided." His English text was written before gender-sensitive language became common, so in what follows it helps to substitute "person" for "Man" and "us" for "him."

Panikkar says that at twilight "Man represents the whole universe; the Gods are with him and the material world is gathered around him." "Gods" here means the good energies of the Earth and life-giving energies of the cosmos that are described in various cultures as animal powers, ancestral spirits, angels, archetypal energies; it's also the "chi" of tai chi.

Native American traditions understand the spirit-powers to be "out there waiting to help us." Jung says we should talk to them. Shamanic personalities have the ability to "call in" the spirit-powers and to make them available to others. Intuition is our human capacity to be in touch with these good energies of the earth, and in every culture except our own sacred rituals are understood to be the normal way people come in contact with them. All this is what Panikkar means when he says that at evening time "the Gods are with us."

He spells it out a bit more. At evening, he says, "Man is concentrating in himself the whole stuff of the world and condensing in himself all the desires and dynamisms of the entire universe. It is the time of stretching up to the very ends of the world, not by a mere effort of imagination but by the power of the Spirit permeating everywhere, even to the four corners of reality."

One more quote: "Were it not for these moments Man would not be Man, but only a moving machine, doing many things but not becoming anything, not condensing in himself the whole of reality, not discovering his unique place and thus the uniqueness of his own mysterious being."

Scotch, Welsh and Irish (Celtic) people still refer to Halloween as the year's "thin time," when the spirits of our ancestors are especially close to us and the divide between our everyday awareness and the depths of our connectedness with them and whole universe is especially "thin."

Science hasn't yet figured out just why this mood is so intense in autumn, but we know that it is. At evening each day and in the autumn of the year we more easily experience ourselves as precisely what the modern sciences of evolutionary biology and neurophysiology say we are: the universe become conscious of itself. It is an experience rooted in millions of years of our past primate and mammalian history.

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It's this same experience that Karl Rahner is talking about when he says that one of our primary "existential" experiences of being a person is that we experience ourselves as open to all things.

Rahner calls it "transcendence." One of our deepest personal experiences is that there's more to us than the awareness we have when we are carrying out the normal everyday aspects of living. As "a person in the world," to use Rahner's words, we experience ourselves at a deep level as being utterly open to everything that exists.

As I noted in post #33 (Talking about God), this experience is what Thomas Aquinas meant when he said that a person is "that which can become all things." We are potentially open to everything. We don't have any limits. We participate in infinity.

And this is just what Panikkar is saying. At the liminal time of evening twilight we experience ourselves as "representing the whole universe." The spirits are with us and the material world is gathered around us. We concentrate in ourselves "the whole stuff of the world" and condense in ourselves "all the desires and dynamisms of the entire universe." We "stretch up to the very ends of the world... even to the four corners of reality." And, as Panikkar points out, it is this which makes us human. It is by this experience that we discover our "unique place and thus the uniqueness of our own mysterious being."

As I said in post #34 (Talking About Us), "nothing exists outside the realm of our possible experience. We really are open-ended. We are in some way one with all things. We experience ourselves as infinite, unlimited, unbounded, present to all of reality, participants in infinity. We "stretch out" to the four corners of reality. We do not exist apart from the infinite unbounded reality underlying everything."

Science and Sophia, Rahner and Panikkar, our hearts at autumn and evening-- all tell us the same thing.

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Jung refers to our ability to be open to everything as the mind's intuitive function. He calls Intuition "a direct pipeline to the unconscious." Intuition looks to the future and opens us to healing, wholeness, possibilities, the future, creativity, our co-creative activity as "persons in the world." Intuition is our pipeline to all that has to do with our identity and purpose, the meaning of our lives, the significance of the existence of the cosmos. So it makes sense that autumn and evening are times when our sense of awe, wonder, reverence and mystery are especially strong.

As I described it in post #29 (Four-fold Mind), Intuition is one of the two perception functions of consciousness; it is the one by which we see the big picture and perceive the whole of things, the forest rather than the trees. On the Medicine Wheel this wholistic perception ability is imaged as the Black Bear, the medicine animal which with its sharp claws digs up healing roots and herbs from the earth.

One more link: the primal element associated with the West is water; west is the direction from which summer storms come. In North American they are sent by the Thunder Beings, in Africa by the Lightning Beings. Their heavy rains bring flowing waters, washing and healing.

Whether it's water from the skies or herbs from the earth, these images indicate a central focus of the west, healing, the healing of our vision of the world and of our place in it. How much our lopsided culture needs this kind of healing!

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Jung also calls Intuition the "religious function." Since western culture's rationalistic emphasis hardly allows it to even acknowledge the reality of Intuition, this also means that we have little understanding of the way of being religious associated with west and Intuition, Myth and Ritual. It is the most difficult way of being religious for contemporary secular people to understand.

As I noted in the post on Ways of Being Religious (#33), sacred story and symbol--"archetypal symbols, liturgical rites, art, poetry, philosophy and myth," as Merton says-- are the very means of the healing and wholeness which empower our participation in the cosmic process.

Ritual is the most fundamentally human way of being religious. It was known through most of human history as the very essence of what today we would call "religion. Ritual is so basic to human life that in still-surviving pre-patriarchal cultures they don't even have a separate name for it. But they know it by experience to be the very means by which we are empowered to participate in the life of the universe.

The very idea that life has meaning is still mocked by rationalists and cynics. One of our greatest needs is for some people with wisdom-- with the shamanic ability-- to share that inner experience of life's meaning with the rest of us. Our religious institutions have dropped the ball; to the extent that they have ignored Divine Wisdom they have become failed traditions. It's precisely this Black Bear function of ourselves that western culture most lacks.

Our amazingly expensive and energetic celebration of Halloween points out how much we need to recover this Intuition function of our conscious minds and hearts. How much we need to understand ourselves better! And this is what Sophia is all about.

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In Chapter 2 of Hal Taussig's book, Wisdom's Feast, Sophia in Study and Celebration (which I recommended in the previous post), Taussig notes that for many "It is tempting to greet this discussion of Sophia as she is portrayed in the Hebrew scriptures with irony, or even scorn. Our first inclination is to protest. Surely, we say, Wisdom is a minor figure in the scriptures. How can such a minor figure have any real importance in this exploration?"

But, Taussig says, "A second glance brings us up short. There is more material on Sophia in the Hebrew scriptures than there is about almost any other figure. In all of these books only four persons have more written about them than Sophia. Only God (under various titles), Job, Moses, and David are treated in more depth... There are more pages in the Hebrew scriptures about Sophia than about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Solomon, Isaiah, Sarah, Miriam, Adam, or Noah."

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Here are some thoughts from Taussig's book about the wisdom literature which are especially interesting and relevant with regard to this evening, autumn and liminal aspect of Sophia.

The Book of Wisdom (chapter 7) describes Sophia as the creator: "She is a breath of the power of God... Although alone, she can do all. Herself unchanging, she makes all things new."

In the previous post I quote from Proverbs 8 where Sophia speaks of herself as present at the beginning, cooperating in the creation of the world and humanity: "When God established the foundations of the earth, I was by God's side, a master craftswoman."

Her presence at the beginning is also described in Ecclesiasticus 24: "I came forth from the mouth of the Most High, and I covered the earth like mist. I had my tent in the heights, and my throne in a pillar of cloud. Alone I encircled the vault of the sky, and I walked on the bottom of the seas."

Sophia is a part of the ongoing creative process; she is the source of all good things. The author of the Book of Wisdom says (again, in chapter 7): "Her radiance never sleeps. In her coming all good things came to me, and at her hands riches not to be numbered. All these I delighted in, since Sophia brings them, but as yet I did not know she was their mother."

And in the next chapter that same author describes how the ongoing creative process happens through her: "She deploys her strength from one end of the earth to the other, ordering all things for good... Her closeness to God lends luster to her noble birth, since the Lord of all has loved her. Yes, she is an initiate in the mysteries of God's knowledge. She makes choice of the works God is to do."

The Book of Ecclesiasticus (chapter 1) says: "She was created with the faithful in their mother's womb."

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Taussig notes that the creative process as described here doesn't make a clear distinction between the creator and the created. This is similar to the text of Saint John's gospel which says not only that "The logos was with God and was God," but that it is through the logos that "all things came to be."

Taussig notes too that the Hebrew tradition which described Sophia at the heart of the creative process "was aware of the ongoing nature of creation." That's another way to express what I've quoted Claude Tresmontant as saying in several recent posts: "It is the nature of whatever exists to be continually evolving." As I mentioned in those posts (#39 & #41), Tresmontant says that in the static worldview of that time, this breakthrough on the part of Hebrew thought was "as significant as the discovery of fire."

The wisdom literature keeps pointing out Sophia's central role in the creative process. And it's from this dynamic worldview that we can better understand our own co-creative participation in the world's continuing evolution.

The writer of the Book of Proverbs says (chapter 4): "What I am commending to you is sound doctrine, do not discard my teaching. Acquire Sophia, acquire perception; never forget her, never deviate from my words. Do not desert her, she will keep you safe, love her, she will watch over you."

Taussig points out that in this text Sophia is described as being one with perception. "Wisdom means learning," he says; and, as he notes, "an important question is just how human learning is connected with that Wisdom which is at the heart of the creative process."

The Book of Wisdom (chapter 6) pictures Sophia as the very process itself of knowing and understanding. We gain wisdom in our efforts to understand anything: "Quick to anticipate those who desire her, she makes herself known to them."

Sophia, then, is wisdom as both the content and the process of learning, so that our relationship with Sophia is the same as our relationship with the process of understanding. To be a conscious person-- to be "the universe become conscious of itself"-- is to be one with Divine Wisdom.

As the One who is at the heart of the process of things coming into being, Sophia "pervades and permeates all things" (Wisdom 7). Taussig points out that, according to these texts, the way to encounter her is "not through any kind of piety or communal resolve." "We do not encounter her by praying or by deciding," he says. "We meet Sophia by disciplined study."

And of course our name nowadays for "the disciplined study of all things" is "science."

Chapter 6 of the Book of Wisdom proclaims that at the heart of all that science studies is Divine Wisdom: "By those who love her she is readily seen, and found by those who look for her... in every thought of theirs, she comes to meet them."

Isn't that a delight! In every thought, in every scientific concept-- in astronomy, biology, quantum physics, anthropology, psychology-- even biogenetic structuralism!-- Sophia comes to meet us.

As Taussig says: To study what is-- to study all that comes into being-- results in a personal encounter with the wisdom of God at the heart of the creative process. And it is also a direct encounter with the mystery of ourselves. Karl Rahner helps us to understand ourselves in terms of our deepest existential experience; science helps us to understand ourselves in terms of cosmic, biological and cultural evolution.

In the view of the Bible's wisdom literature, it's not prayers or devotions but our study of scientific concepts that helps us to understand how we have been "fashioned" (shaped, built, forged, designed, crafted) by Wisdom/Sophia.

Can science and religion converge more explicitly?

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One more point. It's about the New Axial Period or Great Turning humanity is currently experiencing that I described in posts #35 & 36. A significant aspect of this Immense Transition which characterizes our contemporary moment in the history of western thought is the "turn to the subject." It includes not only an awareness of the importance of personal consciousness to a degree which our ancestors lacked but also a focus on our openness to and our relatedness with all else that exists.

The Immense Transition is indeed immense! And to very a great extent, it's the sciences-- not the religious institutions-- that lead the way. It's science that has allowed us to be open to the world and to love the world, and it's our love of the world that allows us to take our place in the cosmic process.

I mentioned in post #35 the quote from Rudolf Ritsema in Michael Conforti's book about the love of the world. Ritsema describes love of the world as "an overflowing fullness of heart which cannot but be shared with whomever comes in contact with it." He also says that it includes a sense of one-ness "with everything and with the origins of creativity."

A major aspect of the Immense Transition is that we are coming to realize that creativity is the realm not only of artists, musicians and poets now, but of all human beings. Being creative is how we participate in the cultural development of humanity on Earth. And it's this recognition-- by putting us in communion with "the origins of creativity"-- that our openness to and love of the world empowers us to take our place as co-creative participants in the evolutionary process. It makes clear that what happens on our planet-- in terms of peace, justice, equality and ecology-- is up to us.

At their best, this is what both science and religion are all about. Together, they help us to understand that, in the language of the Bible's wisdom literature, this is the way the Wisdom of God has "fashioned" us.

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In practical terms, probably the most significant aspect of the Immense Transition for western people is, as I mentioned in post #35, "the opening which the experience of self-transcendence affords us to the unitive worldview of the Asian religious traditions." They too, like the Bible's wisdom literature, see humanity and the world as one with its creative source. And fundamental to that Asian view is meditation practices such as Zen sitting, yoga and tai chi.

The word "meditation" comes from the term "middle." It simply means "centering" or "focusing," "paying attention." While we don't have a traditional meditation practice to go with the biblical understanding of divine wisdom, the Eastern "centering" practices serve well. Which one works best for each of us seems to depend on our personality and cultural background. For me, tai chi works especially well; I shared some thoughts about it in one of my earliest posts (#6).

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The point of all this is that Sophia fashions us to be who-and-what we are. As Creative Artist, Architect, Artificer, Designer of our identity, the Mystery gives itself to us.

The question is, as Karl Rahner says, "Are we willing to make the effort to be sensitive and responsive?"

sam@macspeno.com