#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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#47. The Growing Edge

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This post is about re-situating the Christmas story in the context of the new Universe Story.

Back in post #28, when I talked about "Where I'm At," I described the three different directions I wanted to move in (all at once!) in sharing my thoughts about the convergence of science and religion. In that post I offered "snapshots" of those three directions. In this post I'm finally getting to share my thoughts about the third one. It's the Christmas story from a dynamic rather than static perspective: what the story of the coming of Jesus looks like in the updated context of cosmic, biological and cultural evolution offered us by modern science.

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In the previous post, Convergence? (with the question mark), the main point I made was that "When we see that the real world is a dynamic process, and that the emergence of new things from previous things is the basic pattern to the process, we can see that the convergence of science and religion in the dynamic worldview of western science frees western religion from the centuries-old prison of static dualism."

My main thought there, and indeed in all my blog efforts over the last two years, is that far from being in opposition to religion, contemporary science serves the religion of the western world by rescuing it from its thousand-year prison of static dualism. Modern science greatly enriches western culture's religious tradition.

After the Dark Ages, western religion got trapped into thinking that the world is a prison. It lost its original understanding of reality as a dynamic process. For many today, it still comes as a surprise to know that evolution is at the core of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition and the evolutionary perspectives of modern science can help western religion re-discover its own dynamic heart and soul.

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As I spelled out in post #38 (Exodus), the western world owes its dynamic understanding of reality to the Hebrews. It began with the experience of the Great Escape from Egypt, and it continued in the subsequent reflections of the Hebrew sages in the Bible's Wisdom literature. I've spelled out those thoughts on Wisdom/Sophia in a number of recent posts (#40 to #45).

I've also frequently referred to the French philosopher of science, Claude Tresmontant, author of A Study of Hebrew Thought. As I noted in post #39, he makes the point that this dynamic-evolutionary perspective is in the greatest contrast to the static worldview that had previously prevailed for countless generations. As he puts it in the language of philosophy, "being itself is dynamic rather than static." It is the nature of whatever exists to be continuously evolving.

Tresmontant refers to this breakthrough in human awareness occasioned by the Exodus event as an "evolutionary metaphysics" and notes that, in humanity's cultural development, the Hebrew idea of creativity and newness is as significant as the discovery of fire.

I've also mentioned many times Teilhard's statement that the dawning of the dynamic-evolutionary worldview "is the biggest change in consciousness since consciousness first appeared on Earth several million years ago."


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One of my main points in the previous post is that "it's not quite correct to say that the Judeo-Christian tradition began in the context of the dynamic-evolutionary worldview." Put more accurately, the dynamic worldview is the very essence of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

I noted in that post that the reason this still sounds like such a strange claim is "because we're not yet comfortable with the idea of a dynamic-- in contrast to a static-- worldview." So we need to keep in mind just what "dynamic" means. It is a synonym for the Latin word spiritus and comes from the Greek word dynamis. Both words mean power and energy. The first chapter of Genesis describes the divine spiritus-- "the dynamis of God"-- as "hovering over the surface of the waters at the beginning" and in the Psalms it is said to "fill the whole world, giving life to all living creatures."

The Psalms and Genesis were written long after the Hebrew experience of the Exodus. Those stories and poems are part of the wisdom perspective that pervades the Hebrew Bible. The entire wisdom tradition speaks of the dynamis-- energy and power-- of God creating us, guiding us, gathering us, providing for us. The whole history of the Jewish people is understood as being brought about by this holy spiritus.

And as Tresmontant notes, this dynamic-evolutionary perspective is the down-to-earth worldview of a people who were farmers and shepherds. Their Wisdom literature sees Divine Sophia, the Wisdom of God, not only delighting in the creation of the Earth and its children-- delighting in the world of human persons-- but also calling us to participate in her creative work in the world.

One other aspect of Hebrew thought which Tresmontant notes also is important to keep in mind here. Not only is the world going somewhere, there is also a unique type of personality in Hebrew culture who is especially able to see the direction in which the world is moving: the nabi (prophet). And the direction is peace, pax, shalom. "The wolf will lie down with the lamb," says the prophet Isaiah. Today we would call it social justice.

This is the dynamic evolutionary context in which Jesus was born and in which the first communities of his followers were formed.

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That dynamic context is quite explicit in the gospel stories. We easily miss it, because, as I've said, "we're not comfortable yet with the idea of a dynamic-- in contrast to a static-- worldview."

The dynamic consciousness, for example, is the focus of the story of Jesus' baptism. Christians nowadays don't pay much attention to that story, but in the early days of Christianity Jesus' baptism in the Jordan was considered the central event in his life. It was of tremendous importance to his followers.

And although this will sound very odd, it is the baptism of Jesus, not his birth, that was the original Christmas story.

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The second century Christians in Alexandria-- the cultural center of the Mediterranean world at that time-- selected the Egyptian date of the winter solstice and the start of the new year to celebrate the baptism of Jesus. The date was January 6, a high point on the old pre-Christian Egyptian calendar celebrating the manifestation of divinity as the Alexandrians saw it. So it was good choice for the celebration of the manifestation of the divine spiritus in Jesus.

Except for Easter, January 6 was the only feast day on the Christian calendar at that time. A day to mark the birth of Jesus came later. That was added by Christians in Rome-- the political rather than cultural center of the empire-- and they also selected a pre-Christian winter solstice festival, which in Rome was understood to occur on December 25.

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Even today, January 6 is a major date on the Eastern church calendars, and it still has the original word "manifestation" in its name; they call it Theophany. The western churches call it Epiphany. The "phan" (or "fan") part of those words literally means "showing"-- just like what a fan-dancer does.

In the Western tradition two other events were also understood to be epiphanies of the dynamic spiritus manifesting itself in Jesus: the visit of the Magi from the east and Jesus' first "sign," as the gospel calls it, his turning water into wine at the wedding in Cana. On the western calendar the story of the Magi's visit eventually became more important than the baptism, but for many centuries the baptism continued to be celebrated on the octave, eight days later.

Today, on the Roman calendar used in English-speaking countries, the feast of the Three Kings has been moved to a Sunday near January 6 and the baptism is still remembered eight days later, on the following Sunday. (But the wedding feast story is read as a gospel only every third year.)

The Eastern churches, however, both Catholic and Orthodox, still celebrate the baptism of Jesus on January 6. And there is one national church, Armenia-- the very oldest Christian nation-- that never got around to adding December 25 to its calendar. They still celebrate Christmas on January 6.

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I've given all this seemingly trivial information because it helps us to see that the original Christmas story is the baptism, rather than the birth, of Jesus. If we're still functioning in a static and dualistic rather than dynamic worldview, we can easily miss its significance.

That the baptism of Jesus was about the manifestation of the dynamic spiritus which fills the whole world is clear from the ancient Eastern church custom of blessing a body of water each year on January 6. (The Roman church also had a blessing of water on that date, but it had been unused for centuries and was dropped from the books around 1900.) The blessing of water is still a central event in many Eastern churches, Catholic as well as Orthodox, when on the morning of January 6 parishioners go to the nearest stream or river or ocean to bless the waters of all creation.

Water here is understood to be the primal element-- the very substance of the world-- filled with the Dynamis of God. Jesus' descent into and immersion in the waters of the Jordan is an image of the divine energy filling the whole cosmos.

The fact that these customs have been lost to western Christianity is a clear indication of the extent of the loss of the dynamic worldview which prevailed for the first thousand years of Christian tradition. My point in all of this is that, with the help of modern science, the evolutionary perspective at the heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition is being recovered once again in our day.

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When we see the world as a dynamic process, then the core of western religion makes good sense. But to see the Divine Dynamis as the cosmic evolutionary spiritus it's important to keep in mind the basic pattern of the evolutionary process: when the material of the world reaches a certain level of complexity, new things emerge. "Matter, life and mind" is the underlying structure to the entire cosmic process as we Earthlings experience it.

In a static context, individuals feel themselves imprisoned in an alien world from which they need to escape. In an evolutionary context, we experience ourselves quite differently: we experience ourselves as related to all things and blessed to be free participants in the cosmic process.

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There is one more point, one which western culture still finds difficult to accept: that the evolutionary process doesn't stop with the emergence and development of individuals. There is what I called in post #22 "The Other Half of 'Person'." It's the idea that our personal relationships and our communion with all else is also an aspect of the evolutionary process.

With the strong sense of individualism that's part of western culture, it's not easy for us to see that the evolution of the universe continues not just in the development of conscious individuals but also in the emergence of communities of persons.

The essence of the New Cosmology is that the developmental sequence of the cosmic process is matter, life, mind and communion. Biological evolution continues beyond the personal level in our connection with all things and specifically in our relationships on the human cultural level.

The fact that humanity's cultural development is an aspect of the cosmic process has become much clearer in our day with the growing awareness that we live in one world, "spaceship Earth," where all of us are mutually inter-dependent.

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When we look at western religion from that dynamic perspective, we can see not only that humanity's awareness of the process began with the Hebrew slaves' escape from Egypt and that it continues in the teachings of the sages and the sayings of the prophets, but also that it continues right into the new testament stories of Jesus and his early followers.

The early Christians saw the world as a process; they also saw Jesus as the embodiment of the divine dynamism of that process; and they saw themselves as the embodiment of Jesus.

To make clear what I mean about "re-situating the Christmas story in the context of the new Universe Story" I need to say a few words about each of the three parts of that sentence.

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They saw the world as a process. Obviously Jesus and his early followers didn't know anything about DNA or natural selection, but the very essence of his teaching was that something was in process in the world. When his followers asked him how they should pray, he told them to say, "thy kingdom come!"

We still call it "the Lord's Prayer" and it's said a million times each day on the Earth. But the words are so familiar that, understood in a static worldview, we miss their meaning. In a dynamic perspective, "the prayer that Jesus taught us" is clearly a prayer for the success of the cosmic process at the level of human relationships.

"Thy kingdom come" is a prayer for the coming of justice and peace-- pax, shalom-- when "the wolf will lie down with the lamb." It's a prayer for communion of persons and for personal relationships-- for the new creation which, thanks to the divine dynamis, emerges at the communal level of human development.

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They also saw Jesus as the embodiment of the divine dynamism of the process. The early Christians saw Jesus as the embodiment of the wisdom and the power of God. While the words sound unfamiliar in a static context, they are stated as explicitly as possible in the earliest Christian writings. At the beginning of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, for example, Paul describes Jesus as "the dynamis of God and the sophia of God." (Those Greek terms aren't a translation; they are the words used in the original.)

We still hear this understanding of Jesus as the dynamis and sophia of God at Christmas time-- in readings and stories, verses from Isaiah on Christmas cards, for example-- but once again it's easy to miss if we hear it in a static context. One especially good example is found in Paul's letter to Titus that is still read, as it has been for centuries, at the Midnight Mass of Christmas. "In him," says Paul, "the charis (grace, love) of God has been manifest to us." The Greek for "has been manifest" is epephane. In a non-evolutionary context, we just don't hear it.

A much more familiar example is the ancient Advent hymn, "Come, O come, Emmanuel." The very first verse begins, "Come, O come, thou Wisdom from on high." In a evolutionary context, we would hear something like, "Come, O come, Sophia from on high."

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And they saw themselves as the embodiment of Jesus. The communities of Jesus' followers understood themselves to be the continuation of his work. They saw themselves as a new kind of community in humanity's cultural development-- at the very growing edge of the cosmic process-- helping to bring about the coming of the kingdom-- the reign-- of divine Sophia.

In the previous post I emphasized the importance of the idea of emergence in understanding the cosmic process. It's also the key to understanding the story of the coming of Jesus and the founding of the communities of his followers in the dynamic-evolutionary context.

A contemporary Jewish source expresses this understanding of the emergence of new communities well. The prophetic American rabbi Arthur Waskow captures precisely this sense of the formation of new communities in the dynamic process of human cultural development. In a letter about the 2008 presidential elections, he says the world is in such a mess that it's like living in an earthquake-- "God's earthquake," he calls it-- and that we have to learn "to dance our way to a new world from the earthquake of the old."

"Modern' civilization is devouring itself," says the rabbi, "turning its towering control of the world, of the earth itself, into self-destruction. The certainties of Modern life are quaking, and our country as a whole does not know what to do." He notes that while some seek to hang on to the old certainties, it "takes even more courage than in the past to renew the ancient bubblings of Truth and Transformation." It means, he says, "jumping off into a world we cannot remember."

"To shape these new communities, broader and deeper than we have known, will take not force of arms but hearing of the heart. Maybe only 'YHWH,' the Interbreathing of all life that appears in every human language and in the lives of every life-form, can do it."

Rabbi Arthur's main point is that "God's Great Dance is between Control and Community, A great leap forward in Control must be followed by a great deep warming of Community." And that, he says, "is what happened when the West-Semitic tribes faced the power of Imperial Egypt and Imperial Sumeria: They went deep into the Spirit, and arose with Torah, a new form of community. That is what happened when the conquered Jews faced Imperial Rome: they went deep into the Spirit, and arose with Talmud and New Testament, two new forms of community."

Notice where those new forms of community come from, when we're caught in the earthquake of patriarchy suppressing everything new for the sake of power and control. Rabbi Arthur says it twice: "They went deep into the Spirit." New community emerges from the dynamism (spiritus) of the cosmic process. (It is a good letter. If you'd like to be on the rabbi's mailing list, you can send him a note at The Shalom Center: www.shalomctr.org.)

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Once again, it's the idea of emergence that's the key to understanding what the coming of Jesus and the founding of the communities of his followers looks like in the evolutionary context. In the emergence process we see that at the biological level, DNA can do things that its chemical components can't; and at the neurological level, a human being can do things that brain cells can't. In exactly the same way, at the cultural level, human communities can do things that individuals can't.

Historically, communities have used words like "gathering," "assembly" and "meeting" to name themselves as something more than individuals. Buddhists still use the Sanskrit word sangha. Greek Christians used the word ekklesia.

The main point of this post is that the formation of such gatherings is the growing edge of the cosmic process on Earth, and that, in the context of cosmic, biological and cultural evolution, the essence of the Christmas story is our awareness of the Growing Edge.

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The very earliest Christian communities saw themselves this way. At first they were exclusively Jewish. (Remember their question I mentioned in post #37: Would non-Jewish males who wanted to become Christians have to be circumcised first?)

But those Jewish communities fairly quickly opened themselves to anyone of good will who wanted to join, women and men, circumcised or not. And it wasn't long before they began to use the Greek word katholic to describe their gatherings; they saw themselves as world-wide or universal. Probably the best words today to express what they intended by katholic would be "global" and "all-inclusive."

And at their best, the contemporary expressions of those communities still understand themselves as a generative force in the world. At their best, they still see themselves, as the early Christian communities saw themselves, as continuing the work of Jesus in bringing about the new creation of peace and justice. At their best, they exclude no one. (At their best.)

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So, here's the Christmas story in the context of cosmic evolution:

Once upon a time, long ago, the growing edge of the cosmic process was the formation of galaxies, stars and planets. Later, when planet Earth was new, the growing edge was the formation of living things and their development-- from sponges, worms and fish to birds, mammals and primates-- by way of natural selection.

Two million years ago, the growing edge was the emergence among the primates of self-reflective consciousness. And twenty-five centuries ago, the growing edge was the emergence among the Hebrew people of an awareness-- "as significant as the discovery of fire"-- of the cosmic process itself; their sages saw it as the manifestation of the energy and wisdom of God.

Two thousand years ago, the earliest followers of Jesus saw him as a personal embodiment-- and saw themselves as the communal embodiment-- of that same wisdom and power.

And today, we are coming to recognize that every gathering of good-willed persons working for peace and justice-- even if it's just two or three, as Jesus himself said-- is an embodiment of that Energy of God which moved over the face of the waters at the beginning of creation.

I think the best thing about re-situating the Christmas story in the context of the New Cosmology is seeing that it's not something that happened long ago. It's going on right now.

sam@macspeno.com