@briansmith
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Registered: 1 year, 5 months ago
I watched him, waiting for his face to relax, indicating we were done here and I could get back to Thomas Berry’s talk.He was still wearing the wrinkle on his forehead.If there had been a cliché answer in my mind for why there are holes in Cheerios, I would have tossed that at him as well.With Thomas Berry’s story from the Middle Ages in the air, I realized that same story had just happened.I had answered in the tradition of the man who said he was carrying a stone.Obviously a Cheerio is wheat, but it is also energy.Energy from the Sun, even from the birth of the universe.In my unthinking reply, I was putting him in a strictly human world.If he had asked me where Cheerios came from, would I have said, The yellow box in the kitchen?Stars a million times the size of Earth blew up and scattered their atoms that would eventually become that Cheerio.Every morning when you have Cheerios for breakfast, you’re eating a star. I watched him, wondering how he would take this in.Or maybe it would be nothing to him, nothing but words.The pause brought a look of alarm in his eyes.He was only five years old, but he was skilled at reading faces.Did he recognize the look in my eyes as an admission I had no answer?He squirmed in the pew, as if in physical pain.It’s hard to think about, he said.Not even as an embryo.And yet it was all happening again, the profound questions of metaphysics.To become human, it is as necessary to churn with those questions as it is to breathe air.As much as I wanted to provide an answer that would take away his pain of not knowing, any pretend answer that I offered would only dampen his passion to forge his own perspective out of existence.The words filled the entire cathedral with vibrations that complexified as they echoed off walls and folded back into themselves, and then damped down to make room for the next wave of sound to emerge from his mouth.I was electrified by his notion that a supernova was the greatest spiritual event of all.There was no easy way for me to fit such an idea into the story I had learned from my religion and my school and my family.Theories of Death at the Hudson River PalisadesI was a split person.As a child I had learned that the Mass was where the sacred lived.The Mass and prayer.Also in actions of visiting people in prison, following the Ten Commandments, giving money to people in poverty.Those ideas and activities gave life its ultimate meaning.And then there was the world beyond all that, especially the world as discovered by science.When I was nine, my family and I watched the televised images of the dark side of the Moon taken by the Luna 3 probe.Since Earth holds the Moon in a tight gravitational grip, it is always the same side of the Moon that faces Earth, so no humans had ever seen the dark side.I sat on the couch enthralled.We were gazing on lunar mountains no human eyes had ever experienced.If there was a way I could become part of this adventure in deepening our knowledge of the universe, I would take it.But I had never been asked to think of this as being spiritual.Reynolds had recently lost his wife and had taken a turn toward a more fundamentalist form of Christianity.He and his wife had been inseparable.Bob was struggling to commit to life again.As I listened, I wondered what Thomas’s own understanding of death and afterlife were.It seemed too coarse to ask him outright, so I came up with something nearby.Can cosmogenesis offer the same solace that traditional forms of religion provide?Concerning death, I mean?Thomas kept his eyes on the road ahead of us.He squinted and said nothing for a moment.This was an expression I knew well.It meant he was embarrassed by my question.Is it hard to say how?In the traditional cosmologies of both the West and Asia, the universe is understood as complete.As I’ve remarked upon before, Dante is a clear example.These heavenly spheres are understood as having been constructed at the creation of the universe, and they will continue through time without foundational change.That is to say, the geometry of the universe as a whole remains the same.Beings in the universe can change, but the universe itself does not change.The meaning of human life for Dante is given by these unchanging structures.If one lives a good life, one rises up from Earth at one’s death and lives in one of the celestial spheres.All of the traditional cosmologies, including Dante’s certainly, need a radically new understanding of time, eternity, and holiness.This is undoubtedly a bold statement that needs to be modified in various ways.Even so, it has to be stated.The cosmology of Aquinas and of Dante needs to be replaced.I describe the change as a cultural transition from a fixed cosmos, where the human agenda is the ultimate meaning, to a cosmogenesis, where the creativity of the universe is the fundamental meaning.But how does that help with death? I said.Eternity is no longer understood as being up in the heavens.There is no ‘up.’ When a Norwegian looks up, it’s the opposite direction from when an Australian looks up.Up and down are relative terms in an expanding universe.So how are we to understand eternity?Ahead .That would put the eternal realm way, way off in the future.Maybe trillions of years.Is that how you think of it?A realm way off in the future?
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