Ecology-Cosmology

The Psalmist says:

Psalm 8:1, 3-4

"Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory in the heavens... When I consider your heavens, the work of your hands, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what I A humankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?"

It was St Thérèse of Lisieux who said: "I was between six and seven when I saw the sea for the first time. I could not turn away my eyes: its majesty, the roaring of the waves, the whole vast spectacle impressed me deeply and spoke to my soul of God's power and greatness."

“My hand laid the foundation of the earth,

and my right hand spread out the heavens;

when I call to them

they stand forth together.”

Isaiah 48:13

“How important it is –that we learn the Sacred Story of our Evolutionary Universe, just as we have learned our cultural/religious stories. Each day we will begin to do what humans do best: Be amazed! Be filled with reverence! Contemplate! Be entranced by the wonder of the Universe”

Mary Southard. CSJ

“Knowing who you are is impossible without knowing where you are.”

Paul Shepherd

‘Awareness of the divine begins with wonder’

Abraham Heschel

St. Thomas Aquinas said;‘that a mistake in our understanding of creation will necessary cause a mistake in our understanding of God’. Theological Tests 76

Imagine what that means for us who live in an age in which scientific discoveries have taken us far beyond the truths we held in our youth. Our understanding of the universe has undergone a revolution in our lifetime, and if what St. Thomas Aquinas says is true, we must accept the challenge to rethink and reshape our relationship to the divine in a way that resonates with the new discoveries about creation.



Try this exercise to help your reflection: Place a thimble full of sand on a large dark blue circle of paper.

Imagine that each grain of sand is a star. On a very clear night, in the right location, with good eyes and no light pollution, we can see two to three thousand stars.

Pick one grain of sand to represent our Sun. Imagine our solar system with all its planets and planetoids orbiting as they have for about five billion years. Now look at the next closest grain of sand. That is Proxima Centauri, part of the Alpha Centauri system, only 4.35 light years away. Doesn’t that sound close?Yet light travels at the speed of 186,000 miles per second, or 670 million miles per hour. A light beam can travel from New York to Los Angeles in 0.016 seconds. It can pass around Earth at the equator in 0.133 seconds. The moon is 239,000 miles away, yet a light beam can get there in only 1.29 seconds and go beyond to the sun (93 Million miles away) in just eight minutes. Such incredible speed, it takes over four years to reach our closest neighboring star! If we went out tonight, looked into the dark sky and spotted Proxima Centauri, the light that reaches our eyes –travelling at 186,00 miles per second-will have left there 4.35 years ago.

How many gains of sand does it take to represent the stars of the known universe? Try to imagine railroad hopper cars, filled and passing by at the rate of one per second, twenty-four hours a day, seven day a week. It would take threeyears for the sand-filled cars to pass by. Our universe is immense, boggling the mind in any attempt to grasp its expanse. Radical Amazement –Judy Cannatopg. 7-8

All of life –every bit and particle of experience in every arena we inhabit and every level we have awareness –invites us into the experience of radical amazement that is the doorway to the divine’. Radical amazement, then, is the stance in which we are invited to live, a cultivated way of life filled with attentiveness and vision.

Dorothee Soelle maintains that radical amazement is the starting point of contemplation.Often,we think contemplation as a practice belongs in the realm of the religious, some esoteric advanced stage of prayer that only the spiritually gifted possess. This is not the case. Although there are stages of prayer through which anyone who devotes time to prayer will normally progress, the nature of contemplation as I describe it here is one that lies well within the capacity of each one of us. To use the familiar phrase’ contemplation amounts to “taking a long loving look at the real”.

The Invitation to be contemplative is nothing new, but it carries with it an urgency particular to our time. This call to live contemplatively is offered to everyone. The simple truth is that we have all been given eyes to see. We simply need to choose to live with vision. What is becoming more apparent by the day is that we must all become contemplatives, not merely in the way we reflect and pray, but in the way,we live –awake, alert, engaged, ready to respond in love to the groanings of creation. Human life depends on us living this way.

This new world view acknowledges evolution as a creative process urged on from within the very Spirit of God.

Along with our consciousness comes the added responsibility to care for Earth and creation-kind. Knowing that we cannot possibly contribute to ongoing creation alone, we are empowered by the Spirit, mentored by Christ, and lavished with God’s grace.