MEDITATION FOR THE NEW YEAR - Nancy Sylvester, IHM
BIRTH OF THE UNIVERSE
It is 13.8 billion years ago. It is before time and space. There is only darkness.
Then there was a great flaring forth. From this singularity of energy would come forth everything that would ever exist.
BIRTH OF SELF IN THIS COSMIC UNFOLDING
“Baptism immerses us in cosmic evolution in such a way that we have a responsibility to evolve and to participate in the birth of Christ within.” (The Emergent Christ)
Through prayer and contemplation we awaken to the still point within us where divine love dwells. Then we can continue the work of Jesus and of the cosmic Christ living in love and working toward wholeness and greater unity.
Using Teilhard’s words, let us pray with courage to continue to live the Incarnation.
“Just trust life: a great charm, if only one is convinced that the world is going somewhere. It is so easy to be pessimistic or cynical, about the present and the future of Earth. Just trust life: If I can do it, my life will be full and fulfilled — people need constructive hope.” (Teilhard de Chardin, A Book of Hours)
“Above all, trust in the slow work of God. It is the law of progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability — and that may take a very long time.” (Teilhard de Chardin, A Book of Hours)
“A new vision of the universe calls for a new form of worship and a new method of action.” (Teilhard de Chardin, A Book of Hours)
“Is it truly possible for humanity to continue to live and grow without asking itself how much truth and energy it is losing by neglecting its incredible power of love?” (Teilhard de Chardin, A Book of Hours)
“We can never know all that the Incarnation still asks of the world’s potentialities. We can never hope for too much from the growing unity of humankind.” (Teilhard de Chardin, A Book of Hours)
BIRTH OF SELF IN THIS COSMIC UNFOLDING
“Baptism immerses us in cosmic evolution in such a way that we have a responsibility to evolve and to participate in the birth of Christ within.” (The Emergent Christ)
Through prayer and contemplation we awaken to the still point within us where divine love dwells. Then we can continue the work of Jesus and of the cosmic Christ living in love and working toward wholeness and greater unity.
Using Teilhard’s words, let us pray with courage to continue to live the Incarnation.
“Just trust life: a great charm, if only one is convinced that the world is going somewhere. It is so easy to be pessimistic or cynical, about the present and the future of Earth. Just trust life: If I can do it, my life will be full and fulfilled — people need constructive hope.” (Teilhard de Chardin, A Book of Hours)
“Above all, trust in the slow work of God. It is the law of progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability — and that may take a very long time.” (Teilhard de Chardin, A Book of Hours)
“A new vision of the universe calls for a new form of worship and a new method of action.” (Teilhard de Chardin, A Book of Hours)
“Is it truly possible for humanity to continue to live and grow without asking itself how much truth and energy it is losing by neglecting its incredible power of love?” (Teilhard de Chardin, A Book of Hours)
“We can never know all that the Incarnation still asks of the world’s potentialities. We can never hope for too much from the growing unity of humankind.” (Teilhard de Chardin, A Book of Hours)
Amen.
Amen.
The extreme heat from that light burst forth “Even space-time itself was a tossing, churning, foaming out of the originating reality of the Universe. ” (The Universe Story)
“Particles, light, and time emerged in the beginning. Space, too, unfurled out of potentiality and has continued to unfurl each instant of cosmic existence.” (The Universe Story)
Let us stand in awe at the birth of the universe and pray with Teilhard
“Far from light emerging gradually out of the womb of our darkness, it is the light, existing before all else was made which, patiently, surely, eliminates our darkness.” (Teilhard de Chardin, A Book of Hours)
“Divine love is at the heart of the glowing universe. God is the atmosphere in which we are bathed.” (Teilhard de Chardin, A Book of Hours)
BIRTH OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM
“But there is another fundamental force at play in our universe: a force of attraction, pulling things together—a force we call gravity. The universe expanded and cooled, and gravity pulled some of the matter together to form the galaxies and the stars.” (Journey of the Universe)
“The galaxies collapsed hydrogen clouds into stars and the universe once more burst into radiance. Galactic formation was most intense on the surface of great cosmic bubbles housing cold dark matter within. After the fireball ended, the universe’s primordial blaze extinguished itself, only to burn once more in the form of millions of lacy veils of galaxies filling all one billion light years of space-time existence.”
(The Universe Story)
“On one of these gossamer filaments hung the Virgo cluster, a self-contained gathering of a thousand separate galaxies. Bonded to this cluster were a great many clusters, including one pinwheel formation of two dozen galaxies having two poles: the Andromeda galaxy on one side and our own home, the Milky Way galaxy on the other.” (The Universe Story)
“Our sun is one of the hundred billion stars that the Milky Way swirls around itself, each of them spinning about in a bonded relationship with every other one. And the Milky Way remains bonded to all one hundred billion galaxies of the cosmos. The universe and our solar system are part of this bonded community.” (The Universe Story)
Let us pray with gratitude at the birth of our solar system.
“Instant by instant the universe creates itself as a bonded community.” (The Universe Story) We are not alone in this vast space, we are part of it. We are bonded together. “The eye that searches the Milky Way galaxy is itself an eye shaped by the Milky Way. The mind that searches for contact with the Milky Way is the very mind of the Milky Way galaxy in search of its inner depths.” (The Universe Story)
BIRTH OF OUR EARTH HOME
Often referred to as the goldilocks theory, our planet Earth, in relationship to our sun, was not too close; not too far; not too hot; not too cold; not too big; not too small. Our sun is converting millions of tons of its mass into energy every second. Earth, 93 million miles away, receives a tiny sliver. That energy brings life to our Earth home. Without our sun, photosynthesis and green plants would not have happened and so no other life forms would have evolved.
For 4.55 billion years, our Earth has been home for the emergence of life: from single cell to complex organisms toward higher levels of material complexity and consciousness. From worms and jelly fish, to insects and trees, from dinosaurs and flowers to birds and mammals. Our earliest hominid ancestor emerged some 4 million years ago in Africa and modern humans appeared around 300,000 years ago. Since that time a new stage of evolution is occurring, the human consciousness is evolving. (Evolution Meditation by Margaret Galiardi, OP, from Enter the Chaos: Engage the Differences to Make a Difference.)
Let us pray in Teilhard’s words with humility that we can encounter divine love in our evolutionary journey.
“We awaken to the light for the world is full of God!” (Teilhard de Chardin, A Book of Hours)
“The Earth has a face. We are just beginning to decipher its features.” (Teilhard de Chardin, A Book of Hours)
“The fact is that creation has never stopped. The creative act is one huge continual gesture, drawn out over the totality of time.” (Teilhard de Chardin, A Book of Hours)
“Without leaving the world, plunge into God. There, and from there, in God and through God, we shall hold all things.” (Teilhard de Chardin, A Book of Hours)
BIRTH OF JESUS WITHIN THE COSMIC STORY
For many, Christmas is an event that took place long ago which we remember yearly. That static understanding is insufficient to embrace the dynamic, potentially multi-verse universe, which continues to evolve and of which we are a critical part.
For Teilhard “Evolution is an ongoing event, and the coming of Christ is also a continuing process and event a “Christic advent”, which has not yet come to a stop or found its true fulfillment.” (Christ in All Things) “…but he understood the incarnation as a universal, ongoing process that must always be linked to the specificity of context and experience.” (Christ in All Things)
“God’s word to humanity…is a word that is incarnate, not only as a human being, but present as an element in all beings, in all created reality, all of which needs completion, fulfillment and redemption. God is incarnate in matter, in flesh, in all of creation, in the cosmos.” (Christ in All Things)
For Teilhard, “Christ is inclusive not only of all of humanity, but of all of creation, all of life, of all beings and elements in the cosmos. Christ is not exhausted by the human Jesus but means ever so much more. He is the fullness that embraces and contains the immense richness of creation in his mystical and cosmic body.” (Christ in All Things)
Using Teilhard’s words, let us pray with openness to encounter Jesus within the cosmic story.
“In Christ there was not simply a human — there was the human; not only the perfect human, the ideal human — but the total human, the one who gathered together, in the depth of his consciousness, the consciousness of all.” (Teilhard de Chardin, A Book of Hours)
“In virtue of this, Christ’s experience had to extend to the universal. Let us try to gather together in one single ocean the whole mass of passions, of anticipations, of fears, of sufferings, of happiness, of which each of us represents one drop. It was into this vast sea that Christ plunged, so as to absorb it, through all his pores, in his entire person … and therein lies the unfathomable secret of his agony, and the incomparable virtue, too, of his death on the cross.” (Teilhard de Chardin, A Book of Hours)
BIRTH OF SELF IN THIS COSMIC UNFOLDING
“Baptism immerses us in cosmic evolution in such a way that we have a responsibility to evolve and to participate in the birth of Christ within.” (The Emergent Christ)
Through prayer and contemplation we awaken to the still point within us where divine love dwells. Then we can continue the work of Jesus and of the cosmic Christ living in love and working toward wholeness and greater unity.
Using Teilhard’s words, let us pray with courage to continue to live the Incarnation.
“Just trust life: a great charm, if only one is convinced that the world is going somewhere. It is so easy to be pessimistic or cynical, about the present and the future of Earth. Just trust life: If I can do it, my life will be full and fulfilled — people need constructive hope.” (Teilhard de Chardin, A Book of Hours)
“Above all, trust in the slow work of God. It is the law of progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability — and that may take a very long time.” (Teilhard de Chardin, A Book of Hours)
“A new vision of the universe calls for a new form of worship and a new method of action.” (Teilhard de Chardin, A Book of Hours)
“Is it truly possible for humanity to continue to live and grow without asking itself how much truth and energy it is losing by neglecting its incredible power of love?” (Teilhard de Chardin, A Book of Hours)
“We can never know all that the Incarnation still asks of the world’s potentialities. We can never hope for too much from the growing unity of humankind.” (Teilhard de Chardin, A Book of Hours)
Amen.