CHAPTER 11

The Universe as Divine Manifestation

(2001)

 

THIS CONTINENT is the immediate context of our lives. I speak primarily about North America, not about the planet or about nature or the world or creation. Perhaps we could speak about the Mississippi River, the Delta region, the swamp cypress, the bayous, the marine life that inhabits this area, the oaks, the pines. We might also speak about the wonders of this region of the continent, such as the birds that inhabit it.

The wondrous moments of our lives should be more frequent than they are in the civilization that we have contrived for ourselves. The comforts of our lives have diminished the wonder. Not only do we miss the dance of life on the planet, but we also fail to see this dance in the universe in which our planet Earth floats—the sun, the stars of the zodiac, the Milky Way galaxy.

The religious ceremonies of many peoples of the world were associated with the various celestial phenomena. In China, the coordination of the entire range of human activities was expressed according to the celestial configurations and the sequence of the seasons. The period when the warmth returned and all that had gone into the realm of death returned to life was given the name of spring. Spring means to “burst forth”—just as we burst forth into laughter or into tears when our inner self can no longer be contained.

The cosmological context of life is still with us. The day-night sequence determines when we live our lives and carry out those functions necessary for survival. Planting and harvesting occur in the proper season. When we write a letter, we indicate the day and the year and the place where this is taking place. We are here just now because the sun has moved below the horizon and the mystery of night has enfolded us. This has always been the moment when humans gather around the fireplace and tell their stories. This is the mystical moment when the Earth has completed its rotation around the Sun. At this moment of cosmological change, we pause to consider the basic elements of existence. We reintegrate ourselves with the universe around us, the universe that has to some extent been distanced during the day and now must reintegrate itself. Living beings are exhausted in their physical energy and need to restore themselves. The wonder of the night brings the quietness, the calm, the healing of the fever of the day.

We are placed in the universe by the naming of the days of the week and the months of the year. This cosmological orientation is a linking of time to the planets and the solar system. These days of the week are thus qualitatively different, each day having its own mystique or spirit power associated with it. The seven-day week was invented during the Babylonian period and then adopted by the Greeks and Romans. The days were designated in this way:

Sunday for the Sun
Monday for the Moon
Tuesday for Mars: Tiu or Tyr, Teutonic god of War
Wednesday for Mercury: Wodin
Thursday for Thor: Jove
Friday for Venus: Frigg, a wife of Odin
Saturday for Saturn: Sabbath

The months of the year also have cosmological or historical associations: January for Janus, the Roman god identified with doors and beginnings; February is for Febbrua, a Roman feast of purification; March, for Mars, the Roman god of war; April, from a Roman reference to Venus; May, from the Roman goddess Maia; June, from Juno, wife of Jupiter, the queen of heaven and goddess of light; July for Julius Caesar; August from Caesar Augustus. The closing months of the year are numbered: September (seventh), October (eighth), November (ninth), and December (tenth), since the year began with March.

Morning is the beginning of the day. It is named “sunrise,” as we have not yet changed our thinking and our language to more accurately reflect the turning of Earth toward the sun, beginning a new day-night cycle. Morning is beginning, energy, wakefulness, the period of work. Night is the ending period and the quieting of activity, when the visible world is dimmed and shadows fall over half of the planet. It is the time when fireflies appear and signal with their momentary flashes of light. Night is also associated with dreams and deepened consciousness. However, nocturnal creatures come out and keep the pulsations of life continuing without interruption.

The story of the Western world is the story of how the peoples whose culture took shape through the religious inspiration of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the humanism of the Greek world, the political-legal genius of the Romans, and a brilliant medieval period became so entranced with a secular, scientific, industrial civilization serving limited human needs that it was willing to devastate the entire planet for the immediate benefits received. Their assault upon the Earth has been so violent in modern times, both to its geological structures and its living species, that we face a tremendous crisis.

We see this assault especially on the North American continent. In just a few centuries of occupation, the Earth has become extensively ruined in its forests, desolate in its loss of animal species, diminished in the fertility of its soil, toxic in its atmosphere, polluted in its rivers, diminished in the marine life that once flourished abundantly around its shores, and threatened by radioactive waste without means of disposal.

How all this could happen remains unclear, although it seems to have been caused by our exploding population, our technological power, and our entrancement with creating the industrial world. What is especially difficult to explain is that this destructive relationship with the planet Earth has become so institutionalized, so integrated into the cultural structure and functioning of the planet, so integral with its legal principles, and so built into the educational life from kindergarten to university and professional education that it has become a culture of technology with little reference to natural systems. This new situation is so inherent in cultural structures that it seems to be the inevitable consequence of the religious, political, educational, ethical, and economic establishments of Western peoples.

We are aware of the difficulties that have occurred in human relations with Earth. But we are especially concerned that the relationship has become fixated, pervasive, and resistant to remedy. This fixation can be traced back to these very guiding elements. The situation has been so easily accepted by the religious establishment that scarcely any protest is heard from that source. Moreover, the legal establishment is so much a part of the commercial venture that law schools teach the principles that allow these violations of the planet. That the history of Western civilization should still be taught as the way to fulfillment of the human personality, that the human should still assume that the greater the exploitation of the natural world the more fulfillment will be experienced by its human population, that in these early years of the twenty-first century the Congress of the United States should dismiss even the minor achievements toward rectifying this situation—these are all cause for concern.

That schools of management should still be fostering more extensive exploitation of the natural systems of the planet is also cause for reflection. That biologists should still be fostering disruption of the natural life systems through genetic engineering in the conviction that they can remedy the disorders of the present living forms on the planet is disturbing. That the rights of natural modes of being are not recognized by human establishments on a global scale is yet another reason to be concerned.

Scientists are in immediate contact with the phenomena of the natural world. Astronomers observe the stars so as to learn their physical measurements for the benefit of humans. They congratulate themselves that they are able to plot so much of the natural phenomena through their telescopes, but they enter into such limited communion that they often miss the possibility for dynamic relationship.

Analogy is the key to all human communion with the nonhuman, whether the divine or the natural world. The divine has ways of speaking that are not human ways. So too do natural phenomena have ways of speaking that are not human language. The effort to reduce all wisdom to a univocal language is a primary error or failure of our times. To think that the various natural phenomena, such as stars, do not speak to us is to break with natural systems. So, too, to think that the divine does not speak to us is also an error. In early times, this break or separation between human language and the language of other natural phenomena was not evident. This sense of human/nonhuman language goes back to the fact that the divine communicates to us primarily through the languages of the natural world. Not to hear the natural world is not to hear the divine.

Part of the difficulty of not hearing the language of the natural world is that we have limited our understanding of speech to persons, not nature itself. Persons speak; nature does not, except to the poets. A “person” is defined as a living human being as opposed to a nonhuman animal or an inanimate thing. A sense of personhood as a distinct mode of being is identified with having a human mode of consciousness and using language to communicate.

Human language arose, however, not only as a means of attunement between persons but also between humans and the natural world. The belief that meaningful speech is a purely human property was entirely alien to those oral communities who first evolved our various ways of speaking. By holding to such a belief today, we may well be inhibiting the basic function of language. By denying that birds and other animals have their own modes of communication, by insisting that the river has no real voice and that the ground itself is mute, we stifle our direct experience. We cut ourselves off from the deep meanings in many of our words, severing our own language from that which supports and sustains it. We then wonder why we are often unable to communicate even among ourselves. We need the poets and artists to restore this forgotten language.

Ecologically, it is not primarily our verbal statements that are “true” or “false” but rather the kind of relations that we sustain with the rest of nature. A human community that lives in a mutually beneficial relation with the surrounding Earth is a community, we might say, that lives in truth. The ways of speaking common to that community—the claims and beliefs that enable such reciprocity to perpetuate itself—are, in this important sense, true. They are in accord with the right relation between these people and their world. Meanwhile, statements and beliefs that foster violence toward the lands, ways of speaking that enable the impairment or ruin of the surrounding field of beings, can be described as false, because they encourage an unsustainable relation with the encompassing Earth.¹ A civilization that relentlessly destroys the living land it inhabits is not well acquainted with that land, regardless of how many supposed facts it has amassed regarding its calculable properties.

We need to establish a rapport among the divine, the natural, and the human. These three each have their proper language. We need to understand that the locus of the meeting of the human and the divine is in the natural world. The voice of the natural world is the resonance of the divine voice. Here the human enters into the divine order, since the divine in itself is not directly accessible to human intelligence or understanding. The human in its own structure and functioning is also a manifestation of the divine. But an inner activation of the divine is not possible by humans alone. We need the outer world to activate the inner world of the human.

I have often said that the wonder and beauty of the natural world is the only way in which we can save ourselves. Just now we are losing our world of meaning through our destruction of the natural world wherein the divine speaks to us. The more we are absorbed into our own selves, the less competent we become in our patterns of communication with the outer world. So too the more shriveled we are in our inner world.

The biblical prohibition against communication with false gods has become a way of dissolving our relationships with the powers of the nonhuman world about us. It has lessened our ability to enter into that world, where the divine is manifested in such meaningful ways.

Anywhere on Earth we awaken to ourselves in the midst of a remarkable setting, whether in the luxuriant forests of the Amazon, on Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa, in the jungles of Indonesia, or the shores of Lake Baikal in Siberia. In New Orleans, where the great central valley of the North American continent turns into its delta region, there is the river, the bayous, the flow of the warm air, the variety of vegetation, the wind in our faces, the sight and hearing and feeling of the warmth of the day and the chill of the evening, all of this bringing us into an intimacy with an outer world. The only way of talking about the universe is to speak of the immediacies about us.

Although our surroundings are intimate, we seem constantly to be defending ourselves against them. We speak of conquering the natural world. In the great urban centers of our modern world, we do not initiate children into the mysteries of the bioregion about them; instead we put them into a classroom and insist that they become literate, to read what humans have written. We speak of the Western tradition, the religious traditions, cultural traditions, political traditions, scientific traditions. Human traditions are everything.

Even though we depend on traditional learning for any integral interpretation of experience, we also need the immediacy of experience. The difficulty is in being alienated from primordial experience. To have the interpretation without the experience is the present difficulty. We are alienated from immediacy with the surrounding natural community to which we belong and which is constantly communicating with us. Because we live in a human-made environment, the challenge is how to keep this immediacy with the natural world and to establish a traditional wisdom that deepens our understanding of the experience.

Religion takes its origin here in the deep mystery of what we see, hear, touch, taste, and savor. The more a person thinks of the infinite number of interrelated activities taking place throughout the natural world, the more mysterious it all becomes—the more meaning a person finds in the May blooming of the lilies, the more awestruck a person might be in simply looking out over some little patch of meadowland. While we sometimes long for the overwhelming experience of the western mountains, the immensity or the power of the oceans, or even the harsh magnificence of desert country, we can also relish the tiny stream flowing beneath overhanging willow branches or the sight of the sky at sunset.

Such experiences were more available before we entered into an industrial way of life, with, for example, our electric lights, which do not permit us to experience the night in the depths of its mystery or the starry heavens in any reflective context. In earlier times, the universe, as manifestation of some primordial grandeur, was recognized as the ultimate referent in any human understanding of the magnificent yet fearsome world about us. Every being achieved its full identity by its alignment with the universe itself. Indigenous peoples of the North American continent situated every formal activity in relation to the six directions of the universe, the four cardinal directions combined with the heavens above and the Earth below. Only thus could any human activity be fully validated.

Usually I speak about a wonder-filled intimacy with planet Earth, with the sun, the moon, the stars, and eventually with the universe entire. Here I am focusing on our presence on the North American continent. For the most part, we who reside on this continent have come from other parts of the planet, from Europe, Africa, and Asia.

As humans we function differently from other living species, which are determined in their life patterns and in their association among themselves and with other species and have much less of that psychic development we identify as human consciousness. The genetic coding of the nonhuman species establishes their inner patterns of consciousness, their capacities for acquiring their food, their patterns of mating, their social structures, and their communication methods. Some species do have extensive acculturation processes that constitute learned behavior: bears need teaching as regards their capacity for fishing and insects such as bees carry out remarkable processes to produce honey.

What we have learned during these past few decades concerning the special insights, the functional skills, and the modes of consciousness of various animal species is exceptional. I speak especially of the work of Jane Goodall among the primates, particularly the chimpanzees. From her work and from that of others, we are finding that the power of reciprocal communication in the animal world is far greater than we had previously thought.

Scientific studies of the universe have given us amazing information on the structure and emergence of the universe. Although we increasingly know more about the universe and its evolutionary processes, we have less intimacy with it. We do not celebrate the universe. It has lost for us its mystical dimensions. We live in a less meaningful world than those who preceded us—certainly less meaningful than other civilizations that have had far less information about the universe.

Indeed, one of the most astonishing statements about the universe is Steven Weinberg’s reflection at the conclusion of his book The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe. There he tells us that the more we know about the universe the more pointless it seems to be. How different this is from the poet William Blake (1757-1827), who asked: What do you see when you look out over the landscape? Do you simply see the sun rising or do you see the flaming forth of the deep mystery of the universe?

I remember attending a Global Forum in Oxford in 1988, where some two hundred scientists, religious thinkers, and political representatives gathered to discuss the future of the planet and its relation to the human community. Behind the speakers’ podium was an enlarged reproduction of the photograph of the planet Earth as seen from space—a blue-and-white globe majestically sailing through the dark. Yet one of the most prominent members of the symposium remarked to me with a certain concern that this was not the planet Earth in any meaningful way. That is all he said. I was somewhat puzzled at first by what he could possibly mean. Then it occurred to me that it was the very physical splendor of Earth as presented that he somehow found inadequate. It did not present the soul of the planet. It did not show the grasses, flowers, or meadows of the planet; it showed no deserts, rainforests, rivers, lakes, or vegetation. There were no trees, no soaring birds or butterflies, and no animals moving about on the plains or through the woodlands. Instead it was a colorful marble hung in the sky, a small sphere such as we used to play with in childhood games. This photo showed Earth in such an entrancing way that it distracted from the more particular aspects of the planet and thus of the further implications of the nature and structure and functioning of the universe itself.

It is truly astounding that we have such insight into the functioning of the universe, that we know Earth and its biosystems and the mysteries of genetic coding, that we can manipulate Earth and biological organisms so extensively, that we can deal with electronics and micro-engineering at the atomic level, and that we can set up such amazing communications programs. Yet in all of this there is something that eludes us. There is something completely out of proportion, since our knowledge has not led to an expansion of our emotional feeling, our aesthetic appreciation, or our sense of the sacred. Nor has it increased our wonder.

We have come to know so much about God from our scriptures and our theological and religious traditions that somehow we have lost our sense of wonder. It seemed that we had control of God. God became reduced to our ideas of God, and belief in God became a sterile commitment on our part. Some exceptions are, of course, the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), the romantic poets, and the poetry of T. S. Eliot (1888-1965). There is a sense of the sacred in relation to the universe in the naturalist writers, especially with John Muir (1838- 1914) and with Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), and with many nature writers in the present period. Rachael Carson (1907-1964) roused us to a sense of the mystery of things in her book A Sense of Wonder. While it is true that the music of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Handel, Haydn, and Bruckner carried intense religious expression, this music was disassociated from the formal religious life of the society. It was largely relegated to the concert hall rather than the chapel.

Wonder is that which arouses awe, astonishment, surprise, or admiration: a marvel, a feeling of glory. Glory is described by Saint Thomas as clara notizia cum laude: clear knowledge with praise; to express strong approval or admiration for; to applaud, extol, commend; to exalt. This is the great challenge of the human at present—to recover the language of wonder and praise. Then we can give expression to the deep reciprocity and relatedness at the heart of the universe. In this way we may take up the immense challenge of restoring our world.