Your creation, my creation, our creation,
science’s creation, God’s creation
Whoever, whenever, whatever
One thing’s for sure
It is a marvellous creation
Full of vibration
Full of attraction
Full of energy
Full of parallels and opposites
Natural laws, manmade laws, religious laws,
spiritual laws
One thing’s for sure
It’s a wonderful mystery
slowly being unfolded
Some feel they have all the answers
Some are still searching and others are
just not interested
A magnetic equilibrium of antitheses
Life and death
Day and night
Positive and negative
Richly abundant and barrenly dry
All exist
While we wonder, why, why, why???
Rurkinder-Kaur Sidhu. Kim10@min.com

When I was growing up, the word ‘cosmos’ wasn’t part of my vocabulary. We heard ‘universe’ and ‘galaxy’ spoken of in relation to the world around us – and those ideas were challenging enough to get your head around. My particular world – and yours – has expanded in more directions than one during my lifetime. We were told in high school that electrons and protons were the smallest particles. Now we know that’s not true. And, as the known particles of creation get smaller and smaller, the cosmos gets larger and larger. Everything is constantly on the move. The stars we see in our night sky are not the stars that our first ancestors saw. I still remember an astronomer friend of mine telling me that she always quite enjoyed telling people who believed in astrology, and who rang the National Observatory to get advice from astronomers, that they were a month out of date with their star signs. That’s how far things have moved in the hundreds of years since people began to tell their fortunes from the signs of the zodiac, never mind how far they’ve moved in the thousands of years of human history.

We can of course, choose to happily ignore the cosmos as it relates to our beliefs. Many people do. But faith and science – which includes cosmology – are intertwined more closely than we care to think. Back in the time before Christ, the Greek philosophers used a three-dimensional model as their way of working out how humans stood in relation to all of their world. They asked themselves; ‘how do we stand beneath the stars? What is our place in this relationship?’ The early Christians imported the term cosmology from the Greeks and used it for their new cosmology that placed Christ at the centre. Everything came from God: everything is related to God. This way of thinking lasted at least until Aquinas.

The dilemma we are in today began to develop as our understanding of the cosmos changed. We began to observe that things are not static. Earth moves, planets move, the sun moves. This was the breaking point for the Church and theology and science, (and we know what happened for Galileo and others). Science moved outside theology and the move from ‘why?’ to ‘how?’ ushered in the concept of mechanical nature.

In the centuries that followed we have moved into a world that many believe has been stripped of imagination and sacred meaning. They move in a mechanistic world, and God is not part of that material world. It’s also true that as technology has developed, our left brain has developed more than the right. We are better at data analysis and at building things that at imagination and creative thinking. We moved into Newton’s world of ‘ordered stuff’ where there is no place for human consciousness, and mind has become detached from matter.  And I have to say that the church is quite good at functioning in this way – all that online and home-based learning technology – and zoom. It’s useful of course, but not if it means that we lose imagination.

Think for a moment about the young – and not so young – people you see all around these days connecting with their cell phones as they are out and about rather than connecting with what is all around them. I have to be extra careful now that I have a hybrid car. It’s so quiet, and I can never assume that someone waiting to cross a street will be aware of my approaching vehicle! And how much free time is spent riveted by the screen when there’s a wonderful spring day outside?

This is the point at which I turned to the work of Ilia Delio, the Franciscan sister, theologian, and scientist with doctorates in Pharmacology and Theology. And a passion for teaching, and for bringing to life new understandings of evolution. Ilia points out that the new science is reawakening our sense of consciousness – or at least, if we pay attention to it, we experience that reawakening. She says, hey, look around, we’re living in the hot big-bang cosmos which is 13.8 billion years old and we don’t even know how it began. It’s more like gumby than lego. (I do like that description!) It takes a long, long time for things to happen. So here we are, for a very, very short time in this very, very large expanding universe. And we have to get our heads around the quantum stuff instead of the materialistic stuff. We’ve known since Einstein (if we choose to acknowledge it) that it’s more about energy than stuff. Matter is pluralistic – it’s both wave and particle -at the same time. It’s a complex relationship, but it what it means is that cosmic life is creational, and particles can interact at a vast difference apart.

This brings me back to a significant moment in my own faith journey. Years ago, in the early 70s, when I was not long back from my years in Canada and England, I was still searching for a way to marry the faith I learned in childhood with the scientific knowledge I had acquired. A visiting Cambridge professor of physics came to Canterbury University, and – surprise, surprise (to me at least) – he was also a Methodist lay preacher. I went to hear him twice; first when he preached at a Durham St service, (he was a good preacher) and second, when he gave a public lecture on the nature of the hydrogen bond. I still don’t know why I went to that – I’m not a chemist or a physicist!  I didn’t take any notes, but I still remember it was the clearest explanation I’ve ever heard or read of the hydrogen bond, and I still remember being told that no matter how or when a hydrogen bond is split between its two particles, those particles remain related to each other for ever, no matter how far apart they have been flung, and no matter that they are still moving.

Scientists today speak of entanglement, the inextricable action of everything on everything else. At our roots, we are wonderfully entangled with creation – and, of course, with each other, even when we act as separate beings. Which brings me to the words of a recent Nobel prizewinner (and I’m sorry but I didn’t note down the name). “The nature of the universe is such that if you pick a flower on Earth you will move the farthest star.” And it’s not simply about the human relating to the flower – the flower is relating to the human. When we look at a tree or a flower or a duckling on the water, we’re looking at ourselves. We are all made of the same stuff.

So – the challenge to us today is to build our faith around seeking for our response to the question: what holds everything together? And we begin by simply being aware of the world around us and the people around us. Remember how Jesus asked his disciples “What do you see? The reign of God is here and now.” Even in the parable we heard this morning there’s the challenge to see – to see Lazarus at the gate and see him as connected to the rich man.  So simple and yet so difficult. Because it’s not just seeing with the physical eye that Jesus meant – not just the surfaces, but what’s within – what’s the true essence of what we see? We’re asked to see the incredible. The whole chaotic world is God-filled. So simple and so difficult – but when I’m most despairing I remember the hydrogen atom!

Years ago, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said that love forms the physical structure of the universe. Love unites and draws observer and observed into a union of life, open to new life. Ilia Delio puts it even better, so I finish with her words which are from “Gazing at a Buttercup” in Tui Motu, Issue 274, September 2022, and from an online lecture I found.

“All of creation is pregnant with the infinite love of God; God is forever loving the world that God is. Since we cannot conceive of God apart from material existence, the whole of life in this Big Bang universe is incarnational; it is thoroughly Christic…..God is active, and alive, here and now, in the very stuff we call matter….God is the great cosmic adventurer who offers a divine invitation to rise from the dead and join in the exuberant celebration of life…..We are created for love, and that’s what keeps pulling us onward. We are loved into being at this moment, just as we are, by the God of unconditional love.”

Rev Dr Barbara Peddie. 25 September 2022