The Mystery of the Universe

Mystery OF THE UNIVERSE THE

. THE CATHEDRAL QUARTERLY , WINTER 2022

A LETTER FROM THE DEAN

. DEAR PEOPLE OF GOD ,

As I write these words, I am standing outside a hospital room. A doctor is telling one of my parishioners about his cancer, which has spread. I am waiting outside the door, waiting to pray in the face of one of life’s greatest mysteries – how and when will we die?

It seems that the older I get, the more questions I have. The kind of simplistic faith that has answers seems long ago lost to me. Instead, I believe that God loves it when we embrace the unknown. I believe questions drive the deepest kinds of devotion.

This quarterly is dedicated to pondering the mystery of the universe. As our days shorten and we wait for the coming of Christ, let us marvel at the mysteries that God has made and the greatest mystery of them all- the incarnation of God in Jesus.

May you be moved by mystery this season.

In Christ’s love,

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The Very Rev. Kate Moorehead Carroll

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.“TO PONDER THESE MYSTERIES OF TIME AND SPACE IS TO PRAY. AWE AND WONDER ARE FORMS OF DEVOTION,...” ,

PONDERING THE MYSTERIES OF TIME AND SPACE

by The Very Rev. Kate Moorehead Carroll

ONE OF THE QUALITIES I LOVE THE MOST ABOUT THE Anglican branch of Christianity is its ability to embrace science. Richard Hooker, a priest from the 16th century, spoke of human reason as a gift from God. He believed that our wonder and study of the scientific world was a form of devotion. We are creatures designed to seek understanding. We should not check our brains at the door of church. Our doubt, our questioning, our searching for answers – God loves these qualities.

Einstein forever changed our perception of reality by linking time and space. For Einstein, time was the fourth dimension. Einstein introduced the concept that time was intertwined with matter. The speed at which light travels impacts the way we perceive our realities and how we view time. The Universe was made up of not just “what” but “when.” What this means to me is that the time that we spend on this earth makes us who we are. We are both time and matter. Our decisions, the events of our lives that unfold, they shape us both physically and spiritually. We are the response to all that we have seen, done and experienced. We are shaped by our past and becoming our future.

One of the greatest mysteries of the Universe is time itself. The Christian tradition has a long-standing practice called Confession. In this practice, we examine the past, and we ask to be released and forgiven for the things that we have done and left undone, things that were not all we hoped for them to be. Confession is a way of reshaping time, learning from our mistakes and allowing ourselves to learn and grow from our mistakes.

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I am struck by how Jesus appeared in the resurrection form. He came to us with his wounds still open. He let Thomas put his hand in the cut that the soldiers made in his side, to put Thomas’ fingers in the holes in his hands. He came to us with his past open and visible for all to see, as one who was impacted by his past. He let us know him based on what he had endured. The resurrection was not a new start, it was a restart. Jesus held onto what happened to him and redeemed it. He took the past and breathed new life into it, showing us how to be redeemed. He was all that had happened to him and more.

The older I get, the more I marvel at how my life has turned on a dime, how my decisions have led me into relationships, to cities, to kinds of life I never would have anticipated. Who knew I would settle in Jacksonville! Who knew that my very first kiss in high school would end up becoming my husband and will be the last kiss of my life. The marvel of this life is how our path twists and turns to bring us exactly where we are and where we need to be.

To ponder these mysteries of time and space is to pray. Awe and wonder are forms of devotion, at least that is what Father Richard Hooker believed so long ago. Science uncovers the miraculous workings of a universe that we will never understand fully but for which we can give thanks every day.

THOUGHT PATTERNS | Dottie Dorion

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ABORIGINAL COSMIC

ART

THE WONDER OF THE UNIVERSE!

by Owene Courtney

HH calls a star a “how I wonder” Yes she does, she really does. So when we gaze into the heavens together, She says “Look, a how I wonder!”

So too we must all wonder what is out there, up there, around there, in there. Some call it the universe, some the heavens, some the galaxy, some the sky.

Descartes’ aha I think, therefore I am began the Enlightenment… eternal truths could only be attained by reason. Everything is rational, explicable, and able to be proven scientifically, he thought, which made him be.

Then the Church said everything is controlled by God and able to be proven By saying it was “God’s will.”

and then the Romantic poets emerged. No, they said, no, no, no. We must Wonder, they said. We must Imagine. We must see the Creator in the Creation and be awed. Intuitions, instincts, feelings speak Truth and are not always rational or explicable! The everyday and the exotic surround us. Blake and Wordsworth and Keats and Byron… they were seers, precursors to the likes of de Chardin and Delio! They recognized the mysteries of the universe. They embraced the mysteries. They encouraged us to wonder.

With apologies to Descartes, He should have said, “I think therefore I wonder.”

Note: HH is the poet’s 2 ½ year old granddaughter.

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WE SHALL NOT CEASE FROM EXPLORATION AND THE END OF ALL OUR EXPLORING WILL BE TO ARRIVE WHERE WE STARTED AND KNOW THE PLACE FOR THE FIRST TIME. ~ T. S. ELIOT ,

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STAR FACTORY NEBULA

A GENEROUS BECKONING: ACCEPTING GOD’S INVITATION TO A MORE FULFILLING LIFE

by the Rev. Peter M. Wallace

GOD BLESSED THEM, AND SAID TO THEM, “BE FRUITFUL AND MULTIPLY, AND FILL THE EARTH AND SUBDUE IT; AND HAVE DOMINION OVER THE FISH OF THE SEA AND OVER THE BIRDS OF THE AIR AND OVER EVERY LIVING THING THAT MOVES UPON THE EARTH.” —GENESIS 1:28

GOD TRUSTS YOU. Let that powerful notion sink into your heart. The Bible says human beings were created “in the image of God” (Genesis 1:27). And that nature is marked by creativity, productivity, choice, and authority.

Not only did God create us with the divine image, but also God blessed us. God spoke powerful words of invitation and command over the very first humans, our forebears. And God speaks the same words to you. In The Message, verse 28 reads, “Prosper! Reproduce! Fill Earth! Take charge!”

God says, “Go for it!” Make life happen. Reproduce what’s good and holy and true in you, and spread it around to others. Fill the planet with righteousness and justice and holy truth. Exercise fruitful, faithful, servant-like dominion. “Take charge!”

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In creating us as human beings, God has gifted us with all the wisdom and resources and strength we need to fulfill this calling. And we have the Holy Spirit dwelling within us to empower and guide us.

How can we open ourselves up to this truth? How can we accept God’s gracious invitation to “take charge”?

When I became the head of a well-known ecumenical media ministry that’s now more than 75 years old, I must admit the prospects were energizing. The foundation of the organization had been well set and was solid. The sky was the limit.

During the first several months, I was a tornado of energy, making overdue improvements to our weekly radio program, pursuing new broadcast outlets, restoring neglected relationships with other organizations, revamping our website, and cultivating new donors.

It was energizing because I knew I had to trust and depend on God completely. That’s because I didn’t have a clue as to what I was doing. I had a wide range of experience that informed me and plenty of smart people to support me. But I was determined to launch out, go all in, approach problems with fresh creativity, believe in this calling, and let myself be invigorated by the potential of this ministry.

After a few years on the job, I started doing the same right, good things in my own strength. I began to function on autopilot, focusing on what I had accomplished. My dependency on God began to slip ever so slightly. My strength ebbed away into exhaustion; my enthusiasm dwindled into negativity. When harder times came for the organization, I had few resources to draw on.

Feel familiar? Is that where you are too? I have been there many times. And I will no doubt return there again. For me, in the more than twenty years since that early time, I have learned—hopefully more times than not—how to keep trusting God and pushing the limits so that the ministry can continue to thrive despite the complex roller coaster of our times.

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When you find yourself in that place, remember: “God blessed them.” And God blesses you. God blesses you when you lift your eyes to heaven and recognize this invitation to be productive and proactive. When you renew your trust in the God who urges and cheers you on. When you drink deep from the bottomless pool of divine wisdom and strength. When you let go of your own fears and fetters. When you rely on all who have been called along with you.

And when God blesses you, then you are set free to prosper.

It won’t happen if you don’t trust God with everything you are and with everything you have.

And it won’t happen if you don’t trust that you were created to be part of this amazing responsibility to make life happen. GOD TRUSTS YOU.

GOD, I AM OVERWHELMED BY THE RESPONSIBILITY YOU PLACE ON ME, THE TRUST YOU HAVE IN ME TO SERVE YOU IN CREATIVE AND MEANINGFUL WAYS. I ACCEPT YOUR CHALLENGE.

GIVE ME THE TRUST, WISDOM, AND VISION I NEED TO MAKE IT HAPPEN. FOR YOUR GLORY. AMEN.

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TURNED TOWARDS THE COSMOS | by Jean Paul Lemieux

LOVE...

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

All God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand of it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you Love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all - embracing love.

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MYSTIC

COSMOS

INTRODUCTION TO THE HOURS OF THE UNIVERSE: REFLECTIONS OF GOD, SCIENCE, AND THE HUMAN JOURNEY

by Ilia Delio

IN THE BRIEF SPAN OF THE LAST TWO DECADES, we have experienced a number of major crises, including the terrorist attacks of 911, protracted wars in the Middle East, the recession that followed the mortgage crisis of 2008, persistent racism, and more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic. Each crisis has brought about profound loss, and yet we managed to pick up the pieces and move on, as if these crises were merely interruptions in our otherwise normal lives. In a fragile world of finite limits, the breakdown of systems is not unusual. What is startling, however, is that within 20 short years, the number of human casualties due to catastrophic events has risen exponentially.

Profound suffering can evoke different responses. We may mourn our losses, especially the loss of loved ones to tragedy. But we may also recognize in these disruptions a call to awaken from our cultural stupor to the signs of a new reality breaking forth in our midst. We may long for what we have lost, but are we also able to read the signs of the times? Can we discern a new reality on the horizon?

The New Testament calls our attention to the in-breaking reign of God. The message of Jesus was one of seeing, believing, and trusting in the empowering presence of God. God is doing new things, Jesus proclaimed, but only those with new minds and new hearts can see a new world breaking through the cracks of the old. Jesus offered a new set of values, teaching us how to live on the edge of a new tomorrow.

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We must make a choice, however, to embrace these new values and to live in a new way. The spiritual masters called this process of change “conversion”: an unlearning of old habits that block the light of the new reality, and a turning of the mind and heart in grace in order to entrust our lives to the living presence of God. Only if we believe in a new power in our midst can we let go of the old reigns of control and allow the spirit to draw us toward a new future.

We know the Christian message as a set of instructions, but do we know it as a new way of life? Its basic message is simple: God is doing new things through us; we are the new creation in process. Hence, the most unchristian position we can assume is to block the new creation from taking place. And that is exactly where the institutional church finds itself today, internally divided and defending itself against the cultural winds of change. The marginalization of religion from culture, the opposition of religion to evolution, and the reduction of religion to privatized forms of spirituality have left the world stripped of God, bereft of meaning and purpose. It is a world gone blind, turned inward, satiated with things, and unconscious of its fundamental interdependency. Nothing really binds us together, and we find ourselves in a world of fear and resistance. We are skeptical of any new reality because we fear that rearranging our lives will disrupt the comfortable niches we have come to inhabit. We have a condition of chronic low-level depression driven by fear and distrust. And yet there is also a deep dimension of our lives that wants to transcend this trap of isolation and fear.

What we know today from the modern sciences is that evolution is our fundamental reality. All of nature, in a sense, is summed up in the human person; the principles of nature are the fundamental practices of human personhood. Systems of nature work in tandem with the environment, so that when environmental conditions thwart the optimization of life, the system finds the necessary tools to adapt, change, or rearrange its organization. The maxim of nature is life seeks more life. This maxim holds true on the human level as well as throughout all of nature, except we do not follow the principles of nature. Instead, we seek to control nature and direct its course of action. According to Genesis 1:26-28, we were given dominion over nature, giving rise to the idea that the human person is special and distinct from nature. But the fact is, earth is the primary reality and we are derivative of earthly life. God was creating

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long before we arrived on the scene. We are not meant to control nature, but instead to be its mind and heart as it seeks its ultimate fulfillment. If we seek to manipulate nature, it will rise up against us.

The narrative of nature can be summed up in one word: evolution. We are evolutionary nature on the level of self-consciousness. Evolution works according to many factors, far beyond the simple rules of Charles Darwin, and one of the most significant factors is information. Evolution is a function of information and complexity; an increase in complexity corresponds to a rise in consciousness. It is no surprise that we find ourselves today in a massive shift of consciousness. The development of computer technology has drastically increased the amount of information in the human sphere. As a result, consciousness has rapidly complexified, giving rise to a new integrated levels that can now be identified as global consciousness and planetary consciousness. While computer technology has enhanced the rate of evolution, most human support systems, including religious, educational, and political systems, are still structured according to a static, fixed model of closed systems, the Newtonian paradigm of the autonomous individual. Hence the information driven person who is electronically connected is living from an evolutionary open-system consciousness, while the support systems are individuated closed systems. To continue this trajectory is to anticipate global breakdown. Newtonian systems can no longer sustain human life. Without rewiring support systems along the lines of complex systems, we are headed for global systems failure.

… We have an urgent need to construct a new religious story today; theology can no longer be content to roam around the Patristic and Middle Ages while importing ancient ideas into the 21st century. We have confused history with a living God. A theology that does not begin with evolution and the story of the universe is a useless fabrication. Teilhard de Chardin felt the urgency to articulate his challenging ideas. His cry, “unify or annihilate,” builds on a search for cosmotheandric wholeness in our dynamic world of evolution. His profound insights help us realize that a new story of the cosmos demands a new understanding of God and a new understanding of ourselves in relation to God. Simply put, we cannot speak of God apart from human evolution, an idea that led Teilhard to state that God and world form a complementary pair. God and world are entangled with one another to the extent that talk of God

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is impossible apart from talk about nature and creative change, and talk of nature makes no sense apart from God. If a unified God-world relationship is the heart of theology, then theology cannot be done apart from modern science. Without science, theology can easily become idolatry.

This book is a collection of essays written over the last few years to help form a new theological vision for a world in evolution. They were written for a broad, general audience, especially those seeking new meaning and purpose in today’s world. The title of the book, The Hours of the Universe, is meant to convey the idea that the universe is the new monastery, the place to find God. Just as in a monastery, the recitation of the Liturgy of the Hours calls to mind the work of God in our lives, from the gift of creation to the sufferings we bear, so too the new monastery is the cathedral of the universe.

Each chapter begins with a poetic introduction that expands the Trinity into the arc of the universe. The name God points to the mystery of an unspeakable source of eternal love that flows endlessly from the divine creative heart into the mouth of creation, an eternal divine kiss that is, at once, a deep, intimate presence (Word incarnate) and an erotic attraction (Spirit) toward ultimate transcendence and fulfillment.

My hope is that each essay can be a source of prayerful reading, a searching for the depths of God’s intimate presence in a world of chaos and change, for we are not alone and have no reason to fear. God is doing new things, and our response in fidelity and love can bring forth a new communion of planetary life.

Orbis Books, Box 302, Maryknoll, NY 10545-0302

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COSMIC FINGERS

SOUTHERN RING NEBULA

MY UNIVERSE HAS NO BLACK HOLES

by the Rev. Dr. Linda Privitera

My universe has no black holes, although I acknowledge my mortality. This universe has edges that extend far from its centerand yet it holds itself, full of stars, full of neighbours, friends, teachers, all my relations. Made up of the particulate lights that make me grow, those whose clusterings afford connections of a different kind, not one color, not one shape, not static but moving, swirling, pulsing, dancing to music i cannot hear but see It is not mine at all, but ours and we are held and keep unfolding.

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CATHEDRAL QUARTERLY EDITORIAL BOARD

Owene Courtney Nancy Purcell, Managing Editor

The Rev. Dr. Linda Privitera

ADVISOR

The Very Rev. Kate Moorehead Carroll jaxcathedral.org

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“WORTHY ARE YOU, OUR LORD AND GOD, TO RECEIVE GLORY AND HONOR AND POWER, FOR YOU CREATED ALL THINGS, AND BY YOUR WILL THEY EXISTED AND WERE CREATED.” ~ REVELATION 4:11 ,

256 East Church Street Jacksonville, FL 32202

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