Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

From the Center for Action and Contemplation

Week Twenty-five

Cosmology and Nature

A Christian Cosmology
Sunday,  June 21, 2020

The word cosmology has been used more frequently in recent years, even in religious circles. If cosmology is the study of the origin, processes, and shape of the universe, then it also involves the study of God, the universe’s Creator. I find it utterly enticing, but I also know how threatening it has been to Christian thought as a whole.

Up until Copernicus and Galileo, western cosmology was very linear and largely informed by faith, with little attention to science. With a kind of extended egocentricity, Christians thought the earth was the center of the universe. God dwelled on his throne (and God was considered male), Jesus somehow dwelled beneath God, with heaven, the earth, and hell set below in their fixed places. But after the Copernican revolution, scientists have discovered ever more galaxies, and demonstrated that we humans are not the center of anything. We are just a small part of a much bigger ecosystem and universe. It is a very humbling lesson that we are still adjusting to five hundred years later! From that revolutionary moment, religion and science largely stopped talking to one another and started going in two different directions.

At a minimum, we need a God as big as the still-expanding universe. Otherwise, many earnest people will continue to think of God as a mere add-on to a world that is already awesome. However, I believe our traditional faith has a key to open the door to a new cosmology. That key is the proper understanding of the word Christ.

Christ, as I like to say, is more than Jesus’ last name. Christ is God, and Jesus is the Christ’s historical manifestation in time. Jesus is a Third Someone, not just God and not just human, but God and human together.

If we cannot put these two seeming opposites of the divine and human together in Jesus Christ, we usually cannot put these two together in ourselves, or in the rest of the physical universe. A merely personal God becomes clannish and sentimental, and a merely universal God never leaves the realm of abstract theory and philosophical principles. But when we learn to put them together, Jesus and Christ give us a God who is both personal and universal. Jesus is a map for the time-bound and personal level of life, and Christ is the blueprint for all time and space and life itself.

When cosmology became largely a secular science, a large number of Christians felt free to reject evolution and history. Today, however, we are living in a wonderful time of convergence. We have a chance to bring them together again. As author Beatrice Bruteau (1930–2014) wrote: “We need a new theology of the cosmos, one that is grounded in the best science of our day . . . so that all the world turns sacred again . . .” [1]  I hope this week’s meditations offer you a vision of a cosmology that is scientifically accurate and still entirely suffused with the presence of God.

Gateway to Action & Contemplation:
What word or phrase resonates with or challenges me? What sensations do I notice in my body? What is mine to do?

Prayer for Our Community:
O Great Love, thank you for living and loving in us and through us. May all that we do flow from our deep connection with you and all beings. Help us become a community that vulnerably shares each other’s burdens and the weight of glory. Listen to our hearts’ longings for the healing of our world. [Please add your own intentions.] . . . Knowing you are hearing us better than we are speaking, we offer these prayers in all the holy names of God, amen.

Listen to Fr. Richard read the prayer.

Story from Our Community:
I wait for the ruby-throated hummingbirds to arrive. They are amazing birds, so tiny, and highly energetic. They have beautiful iridescent plumage which reflects the sunshine. They drink nectar from flowers and eat bugs caught midair for protein. The Wild Red Columbine blooms in time with the arrival of these hummingbirds. These two species are in a mutually beneficial relationship, tubular columbine flowers are pollinated, hummers are fed. I like to understand how God has encouraged this. God seeks nourishing relationships. –Fawn P.

Share your own story with us.

[1] Beatrice Bruteau, God’s Ecstasy: The Creation of a Self-Creating World (Crossroad Publishing Company: 1997), 13.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Christ Cosmology and Consciousness: A Reframing of How We See, (CAC: 2010), MP3 download; and

The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, And Believe (Convergent: 2019), 6, 17–21.

Image Credit: Una “rete” di rami all’Arte Sella (Wood and Art in the Forest of Italy) (detail), 2008, Arte Sella, Trento, Italy.

News from the CAC

Resources on Race and Social Justice

The topic of race and social justice is very important to the work we do at the CAC. These resources have influenced the thinking of our staff and teachers, and we encourage you to look through them, see what resonates with you, and to incorporate those sources into your understanding of this issue. We've broken them up into categories so that you can choose the medium which is best for you.

Articles

• Worship of a False God - An Interview with Bryan Massingale by Regina Munch (Commonweal Magazine)
• Open Letter to a Friend Waking Up to Racism by Ángel Flores Fontánez, SJ (The Jesuit Post)
• A Letter to my White Male Friend of a Certain Age by Dax Devlon-Ross (Third Settlements)
• Smithsonian's 158 Resources to Understand Racism in America by Meilan Solly (Smithsonian Magazine)

Books

• Race and the Cosmos by Barbara Holmes
• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
• White Fragility: Why It's So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo
• Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paolo Freire
• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

Films

• I Am Not Your Negro
• Just Mercy
• When They See Us
• 13th
• Trouble the Water

Podcasts

• The Mystics and Social Justice
• 1619
• Seeing White 
• Revisionist History 

Action & Contemplation

2020 Daily Meditations Theme

What does God ask of us? To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God. —Micah 6:8

Franciscan Richard Rohr founded the Center for Action and Contemplation in 1987 because he saw a deep need for the integration of both action and contemplation. If we pray but don’t act justly, our faith won’t bear fruit. And without contemplation, activists burn out and even well-intended actions can cause more harm than good. In today’s religious, environmental, and political climate our compassionate engagement is urgent and vital.

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Inspiration for this week's banner image: God is the web, the energy, the light—not captured in them, as if any of those concepts were more real than what unites them—but revealed in that singular, vast net of relationship that animates everything that is. —Barbara Brown Taylor