If A Child, Why Not A Cosmos?
Poetry By Charles C. Finn
The universe is not out to get me.
It's not, like a stern schoolmaster or a harsh judge,
out to test me either.
It simply wants to use me,
push me to my potential,
pour its evolutionary legacy into the consciousness of me
that I may lend it eyes, ears, hands, heart that sings,
voice that rings!
"Be not afraid of the universe" goes an Eskimo shaman's
prayer
echoing Buddha and Jesus.
"The past is prologue"--
wisdom compressed in a nugget from Lear straight from
the mother lode.
Everything that has gone before feeds this moment.
The rose that we pause to gaze upon with wonder, its
fragrance filling our soul,
is the flowering of the universe!
Affluence is perhaps so impoverishing to spirit
because acquisition is so disdainful of remembrance.
Live out of the deep fed by thousandfold riches
and find yourself carried into the deepening prologue
of the today of your ancestors' dreaming.
If A Child, Why Not A Cosmos?
How sad that evolution is a fighting word instead of a wonder word.
Look at a child.
Reductionists keep looking back, reduce present to past,
find nothing really new under the sun.
But what is an infant crawling, then walking, then
incomprehensibly talking
if not bodymind evolving,
fresh spirit miraculously evolving?
Each new whole--greater than the sum of its parts--
keeps advancing with imperceptible unfolding or rare
prodigious leap.
Is an infant's astounding metamorphosis into an adult human being
so unlike Earth's from matter to life, life to mind, mind to
spirit?
If a child so obviously evolves, why not a cosmos?
If tomorrow brings to us and in us something new under
the sun,
is this a bang less than the big one,
a day of creation less than the first?
How ennobling to participate in a universe that evolves
with imperceptible unfolding or rare prodigious leap.
The wonder of it--evolution!
Creationists can be strident enough to put evolutionists
on the defensive
until the latter remember the advancing cosmos
that science has been singing as it learns
and that religion at last is learning to sing.
For creation to be continuing,
God to be evolving the world over the sacrament of time
from the inside out,
hardly points to less power and glory,
hardly calls for less awe and worship,
than creation long ago over and done with.
See God, Tao, Emptiness-Birthing-Plenitude, or the
Great Mysterious
as creating from a mustard seed a cosmos on the rise!
On Expanding Our Notion Of Scripture
Humanists don't go deep enough or see far enough
which inclines them to grandiosity towards
and therefore devaluation of
the rest of creation
which is why they imperil the Earth.
But beware religionists even more
justifying favored status by scriptures presumed inspired,
inclined thereby to disdain Earth's here for heaven's
hereafter.
When are we going to pore with equal reverence
over sacred pages of Chapter Earth in Book of Universe?
How propelled past awe to worship should be beneficiaries
of natural scriptures
milions of species and billions of years in the inspired
evolving.
Absolutely No Dichotomy
The advantage of making a drastic change
is understanding two points of view.
Even though your perspective has shifted, still you remember.
The old view brough satisfaction, not only security but
incontestable joy.
Now something else brings deeper satisfaction, incredibly
a wider joy.
I used to be a creationist.
I used to accept without question the Genesis account of
creation in six days
with God resting on the seventh and seeing it all good.
Catholics could be biblical literalists too.
But not unlike the universe my view has evolved.
Thanks in part to Teilhard de Chardin a new vision opened,
a new way of looking at the universe--
more congruent with discoveries of science across centuries--
that everything I've learned since has only confirmed.
A French Jesuit priest-plaeontologist,
Teilhard, intensely in love with the Earth, simultaneously
was a man of God,
and a poet at heart to boot.
He looked at the matter of the world and sang,
enthralled by its evolution across aeons into spirit (latent
and directing all along).
Even atheistic scientists (a reminder that not all are)
would warm to Teilhard's raptures for the Earth.
Here was a man whose love of things spiritual
fed and was fed by his love of the world!
To him there was absolutely no dichotomy between God
and evolution, between matter and spirit.
Nothing is not evolving, with God the dynamic evolving it
towards ever greater consciousness and love.
Such is unacceptable to creationists who must pity my
errancy--
I know their rich vision for having been there,
O but the greater richness of the vision I now see!
