Tom's December 2002 article

Article from Epistle to the Presbyterians, December 2002

In my personal list of books that have been most formative and foundational to my faith and life, I include somewhere near the top a book by Brain Swimme entitled The Universe Is A Green Dragon. It is an unlikely title but Swimme, a physicist and cosmologist, writes convincingly about “cosmic allurement” being the bond of all matter, something we human beings experience as love. Let me cite a few paragraphs:

The universe shivers with wonder in the depths of the human. Do you see? Think of what it would be like if there were no humans on the planet: the mountains and the primeval fireball would be magnificent, but the Earth would not feel any of this. Can you see the sadness of such a state? The incompleteness?

I sometimes think the primary deed of a parent is to see the beauty and grace of children. Children are magnificent, gorgeous beyond telling. They themselves have no idea of what beauty they embody. Can you see the tragedy of a child with no one to feel and cherish its beauty? No one to fall in love with the magnificent creature? No one to celebrate its splendor?

The cosmos is the same: humans can house the tremendous beauty of Earth, of life, of the universe. We can value it, feel its grandeur.

Whenever I think about Jesus, the first word I associate with him is life! Oh, how Jesus savored life in all its many forms. Be it the birds of the air or the flowers of the field, a little child being ignored by the adults or an older child who wanders far from home and finds calamity, a mustard seed that grows into a great and hospitable bush or a pinch of yeast that causes a whole loaf to rise, a tax collector for whom Jesus imagines a different future or a widow giving from her heart, Jesus cherished life in all its many expressions. Thomas Berry, surely one of the greatest of our contemporary cosmologists, says that “the universe is not a collection of objects, but a communion of subjects.” John Donne said it like this: “No man (sic) is an island.” Thomas Aquinas maintained that “living beings and things cannot be envisaged simply in their isolated selves because nothing can be itself without everything else.” Aquinas also answered the question, “Why are there so many different living things?” by saying, “Because the divine could not image itself forth in any one being. God created a great diversity of things so that the perfection lacking in one would be supplied by others and the universe together would participate in and manifest the divine more than any single being whatsoever.” Jesus knew all of this to be true in the very marrow of his bones.

It has been figured that, if the entire fourteen billion years of earth’s existence could be compressed into a single year’s time, human beings would have arrived only in the last second of the last day of the last week of the last month of the year! Fourteen billion years of beauty and blessing before our appearance. And the contribution we can make now that we are here? To give voice, reflection, and expression to the cosmic allurement we know as love. To approach all our days with a sense of awe and wonder. To live each day, like Jesus did, toward “the beloved community” in which all of creation, every creature, each human being thrives!

As I celebrate Christmas this year, the celebration of the birth of Jesus, the verse of scripture that is for me most descriptive of him comes from John: “In him was LIFE, and the LIFE was the light of all...!”

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