In the Tow of “Big Gravity”
O Lover,
On this fair June day I am pondering the macro meaning of “gravity,” that force causing an object to be drawn toward the center of another object possessing mass. It is a dynamic presumed to be operative throughout the cosmos although we are often largely unaware of it beyond our proximities. A chronological overview of expressions of gravity might include the following: the clumping of pre-atomic energy in the aftermath of the Flaring Forth; the centripetal clustering of atoms leading to molecules and their increasing complexification; stages of star formation including element proliferation ultimately making possible nuclear fusion; the gathering of billions of stars into galaxies, some of the latter into massive galactic clusters; the offsetting of the centrifugal in the separating out and individuating of star Sol’s planets variously rotating around their power source providing shape and stability to emerging planet Earth; the choreography of Sol, Earth, and its moon in both establishing and sustaining Earth’s crust and atmosphere as an environment hospitable to biodiversity and (seemingly) unique. Whether in part or in whole, Your cosmos apart from gravity is scarcely conceivable.
But there is an even more profound dimension to “gravity,” one transcending cosmology and astrophysics. Its antecedents in the cohesions giving rise to the atomic, the molecular, the stellar, the galactic, this dimension hits its stride among bearers of life, mammals in particular. We might call it “mutual attraction.” The varied collective sociality arising from what could be called “reciprocal gravitation” among many mammalian species is nothing less than stunning. This dynamic pervades the mating, propagational, social, and survival patterns of species of diverse derivation. “Love,” whether understood as phílios, comradely, platonic, familial, collaborative, or amorously intimate, is a word humans’ use for this gravitational bevy. Thus throughout Your cosmos, from the galactic supercluster to the quark, from herd-protection to the richest of human love, relationality and interconnectedness are operative. In short, in both the various sciences and our own experience, the microcosmic and the macrocosmic, we are shown that convergence is ubiquitous!
O Lover, this pervasiveness of “gravity” in its largest possible meaning has become for me an image, a sacrament, of Your M.O. in all You have wrought. Sourced in Your Divine Life, and turned loose to proliferate, complexify, evolve and thrive, we finites are simultaneously being gathered and drawn into an ineffable magnificence and splendor which the mystics daringly dub deification, divinization, theósis, or engoddedness. Shades of Athanasius of Alexandria (d. 373): “God became [humans] so that [humans] might become God.” Gravitation, Big Gravity, a subcutaneous interconnectedness embedded fascia-like in the very grain of the cosmos, ever hints of both directionality toward, and destination in, You. It everywhere and in everything portends vision, homecoming and Home. This convergence/gravity, repeatedly intimated in my own life experience, is shown to be a gestalt within all in which You have invested being. Nothing, finally, is only itself.
In our current blighted times the vast implications of gravity so understood are often slighted in favor of more atomistic and exclusionary paradigms like individualism, capitalism, MAGA, cyber addiction, and a solipsistic view of salvation. But these latter choices fly in the face of the profound interconnectedness of our richest spiritual traditions. This gravitational bent toward relationally and reciprocity is hard-wired, one way or another, into all You have crafted. It is Your Presence in this convergence rather than the centrifugal, directionality rather than entropy, which is one of the fingers pointing profoundly to You.
