The Cosmos as Permanent Address
O Lover,
From time to time I am drawn, ambush-like, into a zone of awareness of inundating beauty and bounty, one in which my modest vessel is filled and overflowing leaving me awash in wonder. In recent days I have recurringly been so lured, albeit briefly, to, through, and beyond the diaphanous membrane separating me from that zone.
A sampler of triggering experiences, O Cornucopia of being, from the much longer list known but to You:
-being serenaded, amid morning prayers, by a tapestry of avian polyphony emanating from the foliaged confines of our rear deck;
-watching the documentary “Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine” on the envisioning, fabricating and odyssey of the James Webb telescope through space and time, the membrane between cosmology and adoration fading and then, occasionally, falling away;
-sipping languidly an essay on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s vision of the relationship between evolutionary cosmogenesis and Christian mysticism;
-marveling yet again at the gift of music, its tenacious insistence upon being created and shared, its vast yet delicate expressiveness of the exterior and, especially, the interior life: e.g., Roxanna Panufnik’s 1998 Westminster Mass with its entwining of timeless and mystery-saturated text with aching dissonance only rarely achieving resolution, and Duke Ellington’s 1973 “The Majesty of God”;
-becoming aware of the energizing of the separateness, the betweenness, the synapsis with another of my human sort, and of the possibility of disarming reciprocal access to an other.
But wait a minute! What’s with this rhapsodizing of splendiferous plentitude, whether handed to us or of our co-creatorship with You, in an era when we live under clouds both nuclear and climatological? While I ask that question as one whose origins were set to the gospel song “This world is not my home, I’m just a passing though,” I have in recent decades become a permanent resident of my planetary venue. But this at-homeness in materiality, foibledness, and mortality does not have me raging against the dying of the light (a la Dylan Thomas), at least not often, but rather savoring how differently that “world,” now unprecedentedly at risk, rests within my awareness. O You who love the cósmos (Jn 3:16), I know neither resurrection nor salvation apart from our embodiedness, from the physicality of Your created cosmic love-child. Thus my status on the planet is decidedly not that of alien, refugee, or tourist. I’m home! It is my experience that a “world” from which rescue is required or desired simply does not exist.
The “world” which does exist is one which, its inscrutable shadow side notwithstanding, neither is nor ever was separated from You; it is the fruit of Your auto-kenósis (“self-emptying” [Phil 2:7]), a domain with which You have since its inception irrevocably Self-entangled, indeed, ligatured Yourself. The Incarnátus for me is Your decisive and definitive declaration regarding Your relationship with that world, one which the newer testament describes as Your “tabernacling” (Jn 1:14; Apoc 21:3). I have no interest, none at all, in any “heaven” or “afterlife” outside of that tent-pitching! You are Immanuel (“[You] with us” [Mt 1:23]) or nothing at all! O Lover, there is no cosmos but that in which You have Self-embedded; there is no god but You who are Incarnator; Reality at its deepest level is singular: You alone (Tu sólus). The Christ is sacrament of that all-encompassing and love-ligatured convergence in You.
Granted, O Lover, I implied aright at the outset that I am not always “awash in wonder.” All of us, animate and inanimate, human and nonhuman, are in severe jeopardy, “in the balance” (a la In Trutína in Carl Orff’s Carmína Burána). Living in that precarious context in this century has been for me a spiritual battle, a season laced with anxiety and lamentation. But I have at the same time experienced You, O Embedded One, as “in, with and under” (to redirect Luther) all of your finite beloveds, the Tabernacler having never been without permanent residency in every here and now. For me a cosmos of innumerable thin places open to this Your inhabitancy continues to augur that, in the words of Julian of Norwich, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
