Our Place in the Scheme of Things
Rev. Kenneth Read-Brown
First Parish in Hingham (Old Ship Church)
Unitarian Universalist
October 29, 2006
Preached at Second Parish Unitarian Universalist
February 4, 2007
Reading
from “The Universe is a Green Dragon” by Brian Swimme
We are the self-reflexion of the universe. The universe is aware of itself through self- reflexive mind, which unfurls in the human. We allow the universe to know and feel itself. The creative work of the supernovas existed for billions of years without self-reflexive awareness. That star could not, by itself, become aware of its own beauty or sacrifice. But the star can, through us, reflect back on itself. In a sense, you are the star. Look at your hand - do you claim it as your own? Every element was forged in temperatures a million times hotter than molten rock, each atom fashioned in the blazing heat of the star. Your eyes, your brain, your bones, all of you is composed of the star's creations. You are that star, brought into a form of life that enables life to reflect on itself. So, yes: the star does know of its great work, of its surrender to allurement, of its stupendous contribution to life, but only through its further articulation - you.
When we deepen our awareness of the simple truth that we are here through the creativity of the stars, we begin to feel fresh gratitude. When we reflect on the labor required for our life, reverence naturally wells up within us. Then, in the deepest regions of our hearts, we begin to embrace our own creativity. What we bestow on the world allows others to live in joy. Such a stupendous mystery. . . !
Sermon
325 years ago right about now, in the autumn, our First Parish forebears were about halfway between raising the frame of our Meeting House and finishing the job of closing it in and readying it for worship in January. Yet though we sit under the very same beams that they had raised just a few months earlier and under which they soon would gather for worship, they thought they lived in a very, very different sort of universe from the one we think we’re living in.
For them, time was a matter of about 5,000 years and space a matter I suppose of only thousands of miles; and though they had by then learned that the earth was not at the center of the solar system, they probably still felt as though it was. And, paradoxically, though they saw with the naked eye many more stars in the night sky than most of us routinely do, including, on any clear night, the magnificent spray of the Milky Way, they had no idea just how immense it all is – or how fast it’s all moving! After all, though we may know with our brains about this immensity and speeds, we still hardly find it easy to wrap our minds or imaginations around the distances of time and space in which we live and move and have our being.
All this said, however incomplete and inaccurate from our perspective their understanding of the physical universe, they did have a pretty darn clear idea of their place in the scheme of things – as they understood it.
The world they lived in was, to begin with, God’s world; God, who created the world just a few thousand years ago, and filled it with all the creatures, last and best of all… us. It was at first a world of perfection (you know the story), then spoiled by our first ancestors who, as we might put it these days, made some bad choices, so that now we had to work with the sweat of our brow, now we died, now we needed salvation from our sin, salvation generously provided (at least for some of us) through the sacrifice of Jesus and the grace of God.
Oh, our Puritan forebears differed with one another and from other Christians on some of the specifics, but on the broad outlines they agreed – and I expect gave little if any thought about other peoples who had other myths and other quite different ideas about the cosmos.
And now? Are we any smarter about any of this, about the physical universe to begin with?
Well, sadly, a surprising number of people – actually about half of all Americans – still think we live in a world of a few thousand years of time and only thousands or maybe millions of miles of space.
Yet plenty of us do realize that we were not just somehow placed on this ready made earth, but that, as Joni Mitchell put it, perhaps more truly than she realized forty years ago, “we are stardust” – at least descendants of stardust.
I expect you know much of the story as astronomers and cosmologists have been piecing it together – a story many are coming to name “The Great Story.” But even if you know it, I invite you to bring the story to mind once again.
Thirteen or fourteen billion years ago this universe in which we live began with the “big bang” or what some have started to call “the great radiance” (don’t you like that?). We are told that everything emerged from one point, out of mystery really, in any case began and expanded explosively, protons and electrons and neutrons forming almost right away, along with huge amounts of still mysterious “dark matter” and “dark energy.”
Then before long the first atoms and the first three elements: hydrogen, helium, a little lithium.
Then clumps (big clumps) of matter and energy began to coalesce, forming the beginnings of galaxies, with their billions of stars and nebulae.
Stars forming, as they continue to form.
Stars. Some stars, as you may know, yellow stars like ours, just make helium; other stars, much, much larger and heavier are able to generate enough pressure to make carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen and other elements. Some stars are even heavy enough that they explode as supernovas after only millions of years of star life (young for a star), flinging the stardust of these elements into the reaches of space.
So, about five billion years ago, as our yellow star was forming out of nothing but hydrogen and helium, some of that stardust from an exploding supernovae or two or three was held in our sun’s gravitational field, and over time condensed into clumps which became the planets and asteroids and comets of what we now call the solar system.
More billions of years and the right conditions led to the beginnings of life on the third planet, just far enough away from the sun, but not too far away.
More billions of years led to the evolution of life in myriad directions, eventually including our own.
And so… everything we know and love here on our earth is… stardust, still evolving in the ever-creative universe, yet still stardust.
One of the readings in our hymnbook speaks of this poetically: (No. 530) “Out of the stars in their flight, out of the dust of eternity, here have we come…”
And almost as amazing as this Great Story itself is the fact that we have come to know all of this in a remarkably short time. As recently as the 1920s we thought that the Milky Way was the entire universe! And now, the Hubble Telescope and other deep space telescopes have taught us that our Milky Way is one of not thousands, not millions, but several billion galaxies, each galaxy millions of light years across, each galaxy millions of light years distant from the next.
It is truly amazing and mind-bending.
But… why am I talking about all this in our place of worship. What does it have to do with us in any meaningful, day-to-day, and sometimes crisis-to-crisis, way?
Well, some people affirm that the Great Story has a lot to do with the meaning of our lives… maybe everything to do with the meaning of our lives. It is, after all, our story, life’s story, humanity’s story.
Earlier this week I was on retreat with my local colleagues in the Unitarian Universalist ministry, and our program, presented by Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow, two self-avowed UU evangelists (bet you didn’t know there was such a thing), concerned “The Great Story” I’ve been describing: The Great Story of our cosmic evolution from the Great Radiance almost fourteen billion years ago until now, including the several billion year story of the evolution of life on our home planet from stardust. They not only reminded us of the Great Story, but spoke of why it matters that we learn it.
For yes, it surely may be that most of us think we know this – if not in the way an astrophysicist or cosmologist knows it, equations and all, even so we know it in the sort of general terms I’ve just outlined.
But have we truly integrated the Great Story (our Great Story) into our minds, hearts, and bones? Even we who may not subscribe any longer to any of the old myths and stories, who value the excitement of the scientific quest… have we integrated the Great Story into our bones?
And is it important that we do?
Let me suggest three reasons why the Great Story matters, and why it might matter a great deal (much of this gleaned from Michael Dowd and Connie Barolow’s work, yet drawing from other directions as well):
The first reason that learning and communicating the Great Story matters: Because the Great Story is a story that we human beings all share, it just might help us to bridge the often violent divisions that plague us. It’s not that the Great Story should or could take the place of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and so on, each tradition an important and unique expression of important truths, often in forms which speak to the heart in ways not possible – not yet anyway – through the only recently learned Great Story. But taken too literally, the ancient traditions can divide, too often violently as we well know.
So, what if more and more adherents of each tradition, more and more people from varied and sometimes conflicting cultures, came to realize that whatever may seem to divide us, whatever the differences among our traditions, we share the same Great Story of life.
Such a transformation of faiths and perspectives cannot happen overnight. But what could be more important than discovering that whatever we don’t share, we do all share one story, the largest story of all.
A second reason for the importance of learning and communicating and experiencing the Great Story. As we bring the Great Story into our minds and hearts, into our bones, we may come to feel more deeply our genuine kinship not only with one another, but with all creatures, with the earth, with all that is. For we all – human, non-human, earth, all of it – are stardust, all descendants of the Great Radiance. Think of it. Feel it. It is not an abstraction. It is who we are.
Of course in one way of looking at it, this is not a new insight; the idea of universal kinship is expressed in many of the world’s religious traditions and by poets of the ages: We are all children of God, a Christian would say; everything is Brahman, a Hindu would say. Yet the learning and integrating into our lives the Great Story can be a way of experiencing our kinship with the whole of the Creation which transcends the varied religious languages. And as we come really to feel this universal kinship – whatever words we use to express it – we may more naturally act to live more gently on the earth, to curb pollution, to deal with climate change, not out of a sense of duty and sacrifice, not as a big “should” (we all know how long commitments based on “shoulds” last) but in the most natural of ways, growing to feel that we would no more want to harm another person, another creature, or the earth herself than we would want to harm our own child or our own self.
And a third reason suggesting the importance of the Great Story here and now, in our time, in many ways the most personal reason.
Scientific discoveries over the past several hundred years have led many to experience the world as bereft of meaning and purpose, and therefore our own lives as bereft of meaning and purpose. The philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal, writing in the 17th century, just as our human sense of the size of the cosmos was beginning to expand, wrote that “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” And so long now, the discoveries of science have seemed to many to take away the consolations of religion and myth, to place us instead in a vast, meaningless infinity, as if we had just been randomly plopped down in an unimaginably huge universe with no vibrant or organic connection to most of it. Yet now the Great Story, understood not only with our minds but with our hearts and imaginations, may be able to return us to a world, indeed a universe, of meaning.
Does the Great Story solve all questions? Take away all mystery?
Hardly.
But it may return us to a world in which we are not placed randomly with no part to play, may return us to a world in which instead we can once again see the creative role we do have to play. A world, a universe in which we belong, “star stuff pondering the stars” as Carl Sagan put it. A universe in which we belong, in which we do have a place in the scheme of things, part of the continuing creative process of the universe. A place in the midst not only of the beauty and the creativity, but in the midst of the pain and suffering and violence of life, in any case not separate from, but part of the Great Story – call it God’s story if you will, call the story and all the forces which generate and create the story God if you will. Or not. But we do belong.
And surprisingly in a central place. Did you know that the largest structures in the universe are as much bigger by orders of magnitude than us as we are bigger by orders of magnitude than the smallest sub-atomic particles? We are in the center.
And if it all still seems overwhelming to mind and spirit (billions of this, billions of that!), we can remember this: Though the distances are huge and the ideas can be dizzying, it is our human intelligence which can at least begin to conceive of it all. In a real sense, we contain the universe as much as the other way around.
Let me end today (more next week) with additional words from Brian Swimme, from a book review he wrote. As we learn the Great Story, he says, we just might come to experience that however vast the distances, however unimaginably numerous the galaxies, that even so…
… we live in a personal Universe, a Universe that cares. A Universe that is filled with passion. A Universe that delights in its work, even the work of giving birth to us. Suddenly, even if only for the briefest instant, we have the feeling that we BELONG. And that one flash of an insight can provide a person with an entirely different orientation in the Universe.
Inside this story, we dare to imagine. What if we are not here just to get a good job? What if our existence is more significant than the things we buy? What if we truly belong here because the Universe has labored for 13 billion years to bring us into being? What if the ultimate meaning of our brief lives is the way in which we enable the care that gave birth to us to extend out through human hands in the great work of building a vibrant, compassionate Earth community?
What if, indeed.
So may it be.
Benediction
Creative sparks of the stars,
May we go forth with the fire of compassion in our hearts,
Knowing that we are embraced by the universe of which we are a part.
So may it be.