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The following article is offered for free use in your ezine, print publication or on your web site, so long as the author resource box at the end is included, with hyperlinks. Notification of publication would be appreciated. For other articles...
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In The Begining
ABOUT STARS AND SOULS
In the beginning was - hydrogen! Nothing else existed within the cosmos for countless eons after everything exploded in motion during the first nanosecond of the Big Bang. In fact - there was no Cosmos as we know it today. The universe was in chaos for an eternity and then, slowly but with irresistible force, gravity sucked the swirling hydrogen clouds together into gigantic glowing globes that grew so dense and so violent that they cooked off as incredibly vast and powerful nuclear furnaces. Stars were born, lived, died and were then reborn in incalculable numbers. We have trouble wrapping our minds around that initial concept alone for there are more stars in our Milky Way galaxy alone than grains of sand on all the beaches of Earth. And there are up to three or four hundred million galaxies across the void. Perhaps you are beginning to understand what I feel when I use the term mind-boggling, with my statement that this is the greatest story ever told, that God the Cosmic Creator, the Seminal Spirit, the Author of Existence can be welcomed as a loving companion in our lives.
The starter stars in each island universe, such as Andromeda or the Milky Way, spewed off immense clouds of radioactive stardust that is still being transmuted through cosmic alchemy into the ninety odd elements needed to form more sophisticated stars and their planets. Much as uranium is changed into plutonium within a nuclear reactor, so simple hydrogen is transmuted into new elements within the blazing nuclear engines. Then, as radioactive stardust spewing away from each star is compressed through gravity into further generations of stars, it is transformed still more into all the matter needed to support life. God's process of continuous creation continues on this divine scale, for astronomers now have incredible photographs of developing stars popping off like strings of firecrackers along unimaginably long columns of hydrogen based stardust. Every day - yesterday and today and tomorrow, hundreds of trillions of tons of this stardust drift down to earth, growing our planet about an inch in diameter every million years. And if that seems slow, it is because you haven’t seen God’s time frame!
I have often wandered in awe under the stars in the clear, dry nights on the New Mexico desert, trying to picture what the universe is really like out there. Finally, after half a century of study, I only think I understands the Cosmos. I really don’t - no one does fully. There is nothing simple about this god-like alchemy that culminated eventually in the meta-universe in a time frame our flea-bitten, snaggle-toothed ancestors couldn’t possibly understand. Indeed, how do we ourselves describe a worm hole that may open into a parallel reality in an alternate universe? Or a cosmic singularity, a black hole of ultimate density in which time and space cease to exist? Of course, the time span and the distances of the Cosmos are much too vast for our limited human frames of reference to comprehend. As for people watching a movie in which each frozen frame lasts longer than our lives, the universe only appears to be static because we don't live long enough to see much of the show. This apparent lack of progression confused our ancestors, especially ancient theologians and philosophers who tried to understand the God’s Cosmos without any real knowledge of science to guide their assumptions.
In our development into a sentient or thinking species, we left the less complex creatures behind as we developed a deep sense of mystery or mysticism that both satisfies and confuses us at times. We became so complex intellectually and spiritually that we all need a sense of meaning and purpose in out lives - a spirituality that extends far beyond the routine aspects of existence. This is why Jesus reported; Man does not live by bread alone. We live in our present state of existence with the need to mature beyond secular attitudes, expectations and choices or we starve ourselves in the most meaningful ways. We are first and foremost spiritual beings and any failure to meet our spiritual needs leads to frustration, spiritual bankruptcy, intellectual disaster and emotional despair.
Unfortunately, many individuals, denominations and bureaucracies have frozen that illusion of rigidity into their traditions and ideologies where it causes considerable harm when circumstances shift and they and their rigid organizations must adapt enthusiastically or perish.
BEYOND THE OBVIOUS
According to researchers Alan Guth, Stephen Hawking some who followed them, the Cosmos seems to function beyond normal scientific principles in a virtual metaphysical or spiritual manner. Nothing shows this better than research into the origins of matter and life - cosmology. God has always functioned on an eternal time scale and that in itself causes some of the needless conflicts between science and religion. I believe, while Islam, Judaism and Christianity originated in Eastern mysticism, the time has come when we must weave Western empiricism in with the mystical to keep our faith from becoming sterile and absurd. Of course, I understand that many within different religions have clung to concepts that are obviously impossible assumptions used by our ancestors to explain events they couldn’t comprehend. Today, thoughtful souls can better understand nature’s laws - but only through long study for which few persons have the time. The laws of life are not simple and very few things are what they appear to be to our unaided senses. And to complicate matters, our understanding of nature through science keeps changing. And if there is anything we humans consistently hate with a vehement passion, it is having to abandon anything we learned once and for all while growing up! We do like our knowledge plain and simple, without any shifting ambiguities to confuse us. We hate change unless it clearly benefits we ourselves in some manner.
To Isaac Newton, matter behaved much as billiard balls that bounce off of each other. Billiard balls still bounce, but now, that Niels Bohr’s quantum mechanics concepts are universally accepted by scientists, matter is better seen as waves of energy, as sub-atomic particles behaving much like minute electronic solar systems whirling in constant motion. In short, most of the apparently solid desk on which I work, is space and energy as empty as the long parsecs between the great spiral galaxies. If I could align his molecules with the desk’s empty spaces, I could ease my elbows right through the wood. In other words, the skeptic who says show me God and I’ll live a life of faith, is much like a physicist who rejects Bohr’s quantum mechanics.
Bohr saw existence much the same way in his brilliant research. Around 1910 in Berlin, he teased his friend Albert Einstein, saying;
"Albert, you must stop telling God what he’s thinking. And you must stop telling the people what you’re telling God. You’re scaring the hell out of them."
The Cosmos isn't some vast clockwork mechanism ticking ponderously along as Newton thought and most persons still assume.
Actually, energy, time, space and matter fuse in a virtually mystical manner which reveals their essential metaphysical nature and that is what Einstein was saying with E = mc2.
I perceive the emerging of countless proto-universes, each one probably teeming with life, as God's vast existential vision of what was and is and forevermore shall be.
If you look far enough back in time through astronomy, you find yourself peering right into the face of God doing a hands-on operation of the first magnitude. When I was lecturing in the Executive Development Program at the University of Arizona, I made a significant discovery. When I openly confessed my faith, it was as if I were giving several other professors permission to discuss their own. They opened up and I eventually discovered that the astronomers and cosmologists working at the Arizona’s Kitts Peak astronomical laboratory, outnumbered psychologists, economists and other earthbound scholars by two to one in the faith communities of Tucson. Like myself, they were filled with awe by the magnificence of the cosmos, and being intelligent scholars, connected existence with the Cosmic Creator. I realize that the processes of creation are incredibly complex but God puts no great premium on ignorance in any form. God is indeed the seminal Lord of the Cosmos but to ignore scientific scholarship in the name of faith, is to deny God's methods used in shaping and using matter and life to great and majestic purposes. Through rigorous study, it has become obvious to all except the most obtuse or reactionary persons, that the Cosmic Creator
didn't wave Merlin's magic wand or snap some mighty fingers once and for all in creation. I am convinced that ignoring God's continuous creation processes is as close to heresy as denying Gods existence! I bow in awe when I catch glimpses of creation and I devoutly worship God the First Cause, the Ultimate Personality of Cosmic Creation. Otherwise, very little in the Cosmos or within our lives makes any sense.
WE KNOW THAT WE KNOW
Here now, are two incredible discoveries that should really make you question any traditional or ideological assumptions about your life and place in the scheme of things.
FIRST - Despite sounding manifestly impossible, minute bubbles of matter, smaller than the period at the end of this sentence, contain enough hydrogen to form vast spiral galaxies, each one containing billions of stars, galaxies that expand exponentially for billions of years. These cosmic bubbles of inconceivable density flow out of God's heart and mind to form entire island universes in countless dimensions. They are not only isolated from each other in space but also within time. There is no way to get from one to another even if we could travel faster than light. Sorry, all you Trekkies. I also enjoyed the adventures of Jean Luc Piccard and later captains in the Star Trek saga, but warp speeds aren’t going to occur in the real cosmos. Not without mastering some exotic principles of nature we haven’t even glimpsed yet.
SECOND - If those galactic bubbles aren’t beyond comprehension, try to understand a vastly more complex processes. The poisonous radioactive elements and compounds spewed off by the stars, the few dollars worth of chemicals that form your body, were transmuted into thinking and loving persons who once brought to life, perpetuate their species. My wife says that she has trouble understanding a flea, to say nothing of the way children are conceived, programmed genetically to mature and grow to adulthood with seldom a glitch. And she had three of them -- children, not fleas!
No wonder Guth, Hawking and others now say that the Cosmos seems metaphysical in nature rather than simply a physical entity. It appears to transcend its own laws in complexity, seems almost to live and breathe as if the personification of its Creator. No doubt they are right. I certainly cannot accept the development of life and love without accepting the existence of a Lord of the Cosmos.
I cannot believe for one moment that the appearance of living creatures across our earth and sea and sky is the result of blind chance. There is unimaginable intelligence, vast wisdom and limitless power behind the arrival of we the products of that eerie looking, green-glowing stardust - and that entity is the God who enters into a covenant relationship with every human who connects contritely and commits his or her life to spiritual growth and generous service to humanity.
There is something here rather than limitless emptiness for one major reason. We exist - because God's deepest passion has always been life, life in every nook and cranny of the world. From the mountain peaks to the depths of the seas, life of every shape and style emerges and vanishes 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 I was in graduate school and teaching science in a Cincinnati school, I’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 one or 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 professors at the University of Cincinnati, where I was a graduate student 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!
Here now is my crucial point about cosmic origins, about stars and humans.
When God’s processes of Continuous Creation produced our species through cosmic alchemy, we retained the metaphysical 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 know that we know that we know. We think constantly about thinking and must find consistent spiritual sources of meaning and belonging or go spiritually bankrupt.
A PASSION FOR LIFE
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 isolated planet. Rather, life's forces of free radicals and electricity are bubbling continually throughout the Cosmos, 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. God’s obvious passion is life; life beyond understanding in every nook and cranny of Earth and probably extends beyond our limited vision to populate the entire Cosmos. Astronomers have now identified more planets beyond our solar system than within it. We believe that God communicates with each person through the written and the living word, through the Scriptures and through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. God also speaks to humans of reality within the ever-maturing, ever-enlightening knowledge of the different scientific disciplines.
Fortunately, God, the Continuous Creator and Lord of the Cosmos in whom we live and move and have our being, is the all-powerful and all-pervasive spirit who knows, understands and loves all persons. In other words;
God loves you and all of your loved ones, although multitudes shut 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 find meaning.
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. We ponder being alive, wondering who we are, why we exist and where we are going. To think about good and evil is a human concept. So is success and failure. It is our intelligence, a vital part of the spiritual unconscious of which Viktor Frankl wrote, that instinctively 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 and 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 covenant relationship, we remain fragile individuals trying to navigate our little boats on a desperately complex voyage that stretches from eternity to eternity with very little security while traversing the void. And it is from this challenge in an age of incessant change that the many existential frustrations of our era come to bedevil us!
If we foolishly reject conscious spirituality or just ignore our crucial needs through ignorance, we are missing the main elements of fulfillment. For the health of our souls, we must meet our cosmic needs through the Lord of all 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.
Jard DeVille; Psychology Dept. Chair at Westminster College; Director of the Kenosha Child Conservation; taught leadership psychology at the University of Arizona at Tucson. He’s published psychology books, seminars and psychological assessment instruments. NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST was a best seller. He’s considered by many to be America’s foremost leadership scholar.
Visit http://www.fulfillmentforum.com for Free E-Book Courses and E-Biz Tools.
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