The Divine Universe

You may be surprised when I say that my prayer begins at my bottom. At the risk of repeating what I have said elsewhere, I will tell you why.
It begins with St Paul. He referred many times in his letters to the body of Christ, by which he meant the community of faith. He declared that we are members, limbs and organs of the body of Christ. But he doesn’t stop there. He told the Colossians that, “all things in heaven and on earth were created” in Christ, and a few sentences further on, “in him all things hold together.”
St John, in the prologue to the fourth Gospel, says the same thing in a more imaginative way. “In the beginning was the Word (Greek, Logos), and the Word was God. He (the Logos) was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him.” He was referring to Jesus, the mortal human manifestation of an eternal and divine being who is infinitely more than a mortal man.
The word Logos (from which we get our word, logic) suggests the mind, the knowledge, the intention or wisdom of God, uttered not only through Jesus, but also in and through all things, our whole universe, and all universes if there are others. This is the embodiment of God. God is pure spirit, according to the Catholic Catechism, but not a disembodied spirit. The Bible knows nothing of disembodied spirits. Even angels in the Bible have bodies.
In recent times, theologians have taken to referring to the Cosmic Christ to distinguish the man Jesus from the eternal being Paul and John wrote of. The incarnation is manifest in all of physical nature, as well as being focused historically in Jesus. The leaders at the Council of Nicea finally defined the eternal incarnation of God as the Second Person of the Holy Trinity.
Recent discoveries in astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology offer us a far richer understanding of our universe than Paul, John or the Nicene fathers had. It is no longer even seen as a collection of independent material objects waltzing around in space, under the influence of gravity, according to the principles of general relativity. An organic interdependence has been recognised, as intimate as the organic interdependence of the parts of our bodies. The universe is, in fact, a living organism.
Physicist Brian Swimme holds that the universe is not just a material entity; it is a spiritual event. We tend to separate spiritual and material reality. We speak of the “natural” and the “supernatural”. This dichotomy is a peculiarly Western notion. It is tenuously connected with Plato’s idealism, but we really owe it to the 17th century philosopher, René Descartes. ‘Cartesian’ dualism is firmly entrenched in Western philosophy and in Christianity today. Material objects are not permanent realities; they are events in the universal field of energy, the quantum vacuum. Scientists distinguish between energy and matter, but now recognise that they are of the same essential nature: matter is energy. Energy, on the other hand, is not seen as a temporary entity. The quantum vacuum is regarded as being outside time and space. This causes us to review our traditional dualism. Monism is gaining influence.
And it is important for our understanding of prayer. Prayer is an activity of the whole person. It is not my disembodied ‘spirit’ going walkabout on its own. Paul described an experience when he was unsure if he was “in the body or out of it”. But he was still feeling and thinking; he “heard words that cannot be uttered”. So his ‘spiritual’ experience was certainly embodied. The resurrection appearances of Jesus to the disciples suggest some sort of quasi-material body. I am one who believes that the gospel accounts refer to real experiences, even if their nature is uncertain.
And this has a practical application that has been discovered by many people. For me the best way to still my mind is to focus my attention on my body. I feel the pressure of the chair I am sitting on. This is what I mean by beginning with my bottom. It is the start of a process of feeling my relationship to the world around me, and ultimately to God, immanent in the world. I try not to leap too quickly into thinking about distant things and situations. I spend a little time getting ‘in touch’ with my body, literally ‘coming to my senses’, then to the traffic on the road, the birds in the garden and other local sounds. I can ask myself in what way God loves the source of these. Only then do I allow my attention to move outward, to things beyond the range of my senses: the wider community, its wisdom and its foolishness, its happiness and its pain.
This is a danger point. I have to make an effort not to wander off aimlessly in my imagination and thinking. There is a purpose in connecting myself to the outside in this way. It is to feel myself part of it all, and to look for epiphanies and miracles of God in nature and in acts of generosity, kindness, tolerance and forgiveness. So I still need to focus my mind.
I also perceive God in what I know of the continuous creative process going on throughout the universe – new plants, animals and people, new planets, new stars, new galaxies, coming into being from the remnants of those that have previously lived and died. The death and resurrection of the Cosmic Christ is happening all the time throughout the universe.
This reflection on the wider universe also gives me a sense of proportion. I ask myself why I think that our human species is of such tremendous importance in the cosmic scheme of things. Even Jesus said that the very hairs of our heads are numbered, and that that every sparrow is important too. But I don’t think this is a statement about our relative importance or the sparrow’s; I think it is a statement about the intensity of God’s love. When we speak of natural things we are speaking of God’s incarnate self, his only begotten Son, God’s cosmic incarnation, the Second person of the Trinity. God’s love of the world and us is his love of himself too.
Finally I come back to myself. Where am I? What am I doing? What am I going to do today? The answers to those questions are of miniscule cosmic impact, but they are important for me because I have real responsibilities as part of the cosmic organism, however small.