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"UNFINISHED FAITH IN AN UNFINISHED UNIVERSE" | John 15.1-8 | May 18, 2003 |
For philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, a long period of skepticism eventually directed him to some connection of faith through his eventual understanding that there is a point to the universe. Purpose means to ‘realize value,’ and to Whitehead, beauty is the queen of all values. Cosmic purpose, he argued, consists of an overall aim–not always successful–toward the heightening of beauty. (Context, Volume 35, Number 10)
Certainly we lose track of the beauty of life when we take life for granted, tripping along as if the world owed us a living, comfortable in our position in life, able to avoid tragedy or difficulty, looking past the simplest beauty because it is so common place. The sunset is merely the end of a day, whether successful or lousy, and the sunrise merely the beginning of another day of boring routine, endless agony, or making another buck. When life, or its routine, is threatened, we tend to dig deeper into the well of purpose to connect to those values that are lasting and which nourish us with the intrinsic beauty of the sunset or the sunrise as experiences of beauty in their own right. The sun, rising or setting on a good day or a bad day, is a thing of wonder and beauty when one contemplates the steady burning of gases millions of billions of light years away, at just the right distance from our planet so as not to burn it up or freeze us out.
Georgetown professor John F. Haught comments on earth’s ongoing story. “ The universe,” he writes, “has an overarching inclination to make its way from the trivial toward more intense versions of beauty.” It is aesthetically directional if we are sensitive to the process of evolution that goes before us and around us each day. (Context, ibid)
But what about the dark side of things–the tragedy in life’s evolution and the moral evil in human existence? And what sense can we make of the dismal scenarios that cosmologists have been entertaining for some years about the eventual demise of the universe? How do we know that all things will not finally trail off into lifeless and mindless oblivion? What about the potential demise of our own country? And the news in yesterday’s newspaper about the regrouping of Al Quida and the terrorist agenda? Will we ever rid the world of terrorists? This notion of clobbering Saddam Hussein, both as a way to rid the world of a dictator and make of him an example of our intolerance of terrorism, is like Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice trying to stop the bewitched broom from carrying water. He chopped the broom in half to stop it, and then there were two brooms carrying water. He chopped those in half, and then there were four brooms, and on the chopping and carrying went, multiplying exponentially, the frantic chopping to stop the evil broom only creating more brooms to carry more water until the room flooded.
Whitehead finally comes down, in the end, to the speculation that ‘things perish’, and he was acutely aware that the most beautiful entities and ideals last least long of all. Organisms all die, and great civilizations sooner or later decay. To find purpose to the universe, he realized that the perishing must be part of the evolution of life, and must have purpose as well. At one time an atheist, Whitehead eventually concluded that there is something in the depths of the life process that redeems its transience, his own search and his own crisis leading him to reach beneath the flux of immediate things to realize that there is something, someone in whose embrace all actualities attain a kind of immortality.
For Whitehead, God “is not only the lure that summons the world to realize more intense beauty, but also the compassionate ‘fellow sufferer’ who preserves everlastingly all of the transient value that the evolving cosmos achieves.”
Jesuit scientist-mystic-theologian Teilhard de Chardin, reminds us that the world is incomplete, that the cosmos continues to evolve, and in that evolution, beauty is being created and sustained each day, in each moment. In this incompleteness, out of this nothingness a world rich in beauty and consciousness is awakened. If the cosmos is an unfinished story, it is also a story that at least until now has shown itself to possess a fathomless reserve of creativity. It has not only been winning the war against nothingness, but in its emergent beauty, feeling, and thought, it has triumphed.
Species of animals and plants, with no other purpose than to be and be beautiful, adapt to the changing universe to evolve newer, hardier species. There are hummingbirds, for example, that have adapted a particularly long, curved beak in order to collect the nectar from a particular plant with a long blossom, and in turn, the hummingbirds pollinate and perpetuate that plant. One could not exist without the other, yet each has evolved for the other, serving no other purpose than to continue to exist, and the world will be the poorer when the cycle dies and this beauty is lost.
Our lives have purpose just as we are. We need not concoct some trumped-up purpose to justify our existence, or to find meaning in the day. It is found in the beauty all around us–each child that asks questions we can’t answer or we find embarrassing; each little nondescript sparrow that flies by without our notice; the setback that slows us down so we can see life more clearly; each little germ that enters our body to develop antibodies to more potent germs; each cut on the finger that heals itself; the ongoing power of the universe to right itself after a devastating war or tornado or holocaust or some other evil that overshadows beauty for a time. And out on the outer edge of our universe, new stars, whole galaxies, are being born each day, born of the same stuff of which our own planet and our own bodies are made. With our evolving understanding of the incomprehensible vastness of space, our discussions are moving from talking about a universe to a multiverse, a word we might also use to describe the God who embraces it all in the palm of a divine hand.
I permeate all the universe
in my unmanifest form.
All beings exist within me,
yet I am so inconceivably
vast, so beyond existence,
that though they are brought forth
and sustained by my limitless power,
I am not confined within them.
Just as the all-moving wind,
wherever it goes, always
remains in the vastness of space,
all beings remain within me.
They are gathered back into my womb
at the end of the cosmic cycle––
a hundred fifty thousand
billion of your earthly years––
and as a new cycle begins
I send them forth once again,
pouring from my abundance
the myriad forms of life.
(Bhagavad-Gita 9.4-8; translated by Stephen Mitchell)
If the unfinished universe has something to do with the uncertainty in our faith, then branches that remain attached to the holy vine will of necessity be pruned to bear more fruit, and the creative resourcefulness embedded in the universe cannot fail to give us “a reason for hope.” Amen.
–Gary L. McCann
John 15
I am the vine and God is the gardener who cuts off every branch that bears no fruit, while every branch that bears fruit is pruned so that it will bear more fruit. Remain in me and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain attached to the vine.
I am the vine, you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.
| Copyright © 2003 by Gary L. McCann. All rights reserved. |