God's Passion

As anthropologist/priest Tielhard de Chardin expressed so brilliantly, life in the universe is no accident -- no one time collision of random factors that led eventually to humankind's appearance on this lovely planet circling an insignificant yellow star, out on the edge of a very common galaxy, with nothing to set it off from several hundred million island universes.

We can hardly imagine how life established a foothold here, amidst the billions of crashing meteor strikes, millions of rumbling volcanoes and eons of acid rain in a poisonous atmosphere. We do know that free radicals and electricity are colliding continually throughout the Cosmos, creating basic building bocks of protein, under enormous pressure to burst through every seam on every viable world, into existence in every possible environment. Of course, as children of the stars we simply cannot boast that God created the cosmos for us alone, when one planet around an insignificant yellow sun would have been quite enough for our needs.

Everything exists because God's deepest passion has always been life, life in every nook and cranny of our world. From the mountain peaks to the depths of the seas, life of every shape and style emerges constantly. Life seems to ooze out of the very pores of Mother Earth. The six or eight billion year old record of fossils in the rocks is staggering in volume and complexity. When Jard was in graduate school and teaching science in the Cincinnati school system, he’d occasionally take the kids fossil hunting with picks and hammers along the creeks that carved passages through the chalk bed of the vast, primordial Mississippian Sea. The white deposits are hundreds of feet thick with the skeletal remains of creatures that look like everything from twigs to trilobites and a great many one to two inch long beaks of prehistoric squids. One year, a nearby farmer plowed up a giant squid’s beak over four feet long. Even the biology professors at the University of Cincinnati, where we were studying at the time, had trouble estimating how long its arms must have been. Perhaps, one of them finally ventured a guess, tentacles of sixty or more feet! God indeed is the Seminal Spirit and Cosmic Creator of all matter and all that has followed according to the basic principle of Continuous Creation.

Here now is our crucial point about cosmic origins, about stars and humans for men and women who want to make their lives count for something meaningful rather than merely secular and temporal.

When God’s processes of Continuous Creation produced our species through cosmic alchemy, we retained the metaphysical -- the spiritual nature of God and the Cosmos from which we came. No other species became so self-aware, with spiritual yearnings that go far beyond our physical and psychological needs. We are the only philosophical species. Like no other creatures -- we are sentient, we know that we know. We think constantly about thinking and consistent find spiritual sources of meaning and belonging or we go spiritually bankrupt.

We ponder being alive, wondering who we are, why we exist and where we are going. After making a bad choice and receiving punishment, no dog lays awake all night agonizing over what an evil thing he has done. To think about good and evil is a human concept. So is success and failure. It is our conscience, a vital part of the spiritual unconscious of which Frankl wrote, that actively seeks more than bread and circuses, more than power, possessions, prestige and pleasure. We live within the physical and through the psychological. but we dare not neglect our philosophical/spiritual needs or we wither and blow away as rootless tumbleweeds vanish in a barren desert.

Until we connect consciously to God by developing a purposeful and permanent spiritual relationship, we remain fragile individuals trying to navigate our little boats on a desperately complex voyage that stretches from ete ity to ete ity with very little security while traversing the void. And it is from this challenge in an age of incessant change that the many life-style frustrations of our era come to bedevil us!

n n

Fortunately, God, the Continuous Creator and Lord of the Cosmos in whom we live and move and have our being, is the all-powerful, all wise and all-pervasive spirit who knows, understands and loves all persons. In other words; God cares about you and all of your loved ones, although multitudes freeze God out of their lives until they are unhappy, frustrated and in desperate spiritual straits. Then, with their souls wounded, they turn to any number of self-defeating ways in a futile search to make psychology successful.

Karen Horney in her brilliant book, the Neurotic Personality Of Our Time wrote -- "A great many neurotic men and women will do anything to be loved except to become loveable."

God’s obvious passion is life; life beyond comprehension developing continually in every nook and cranny of Earth. Off the coast of southeaster New Guinea, two great tropical ocean currents collide and swirl and intermingle water so warm it is almost like a broth. This vast soup bowl is filled with incredible living creatures, thousands of which have yet to be discovered and classified by scientists. Some of them change from plants to animals and back again during their life cycles. Spiders have been found hunting prey atop Mt. Everest and incredible yard long eel-like creatures make their living feeding on bacteria spewed from the throats of volcanic vents in the ete al night and crushing pressure under two or three miles of Pacific Ocean water. And of course, the faster we create antibiotic medications to slay dangerous bacteria, they faster their strongest survivors adapt to the poison and render it useless as a medication. Nothing in life remains static, although we humans do indeed despise change in almost any form, unless it is to our immediate and obvious advantage. And even then we still have difficulties when adapting to anything new.

There is little doubt, to us anyway, that life forms continuously develop beyond our limited vision to populate the entire Cosmos, according to scientific principles of which God is the divine author. Astronomers have now identified more planets beyond our solar system than within it. And we do understand that God the universe throbs with God's passion for life; life under intense pressure to burst through at every seam in every viable environment, on every borning world. This is no little fly-by-night operation we are invited to join but the very purpose of existence! God’s passion is why there is something here, within our grasp and sight rather than nothing existing at all. If we foolishly reject psychospiritual wisdom and practices or just ignore God through ignorance, we are missing the main element of a successful and spiritual lifestyle. For the health of our souls, we must meet the cosmic needs that we all have inherited through the Lord of Life.

Despite the quarrels of some fearful persons within formal religion and academic research, there never has been any real conflict between spiritual wisdom and scientific knowledge. There is nothing that should cause spiritually minded persons to cower in the stagnant backwaters of research, education, the arts, commerce and government. Of course, science considers the how of cosmic creation while religion deals with the why of our extraordinary cosmos.