Spirituality: Time

If the entire history of the universe was compressed into one year…

The Big Bang happens on January 1.
The Milky Way forms in May.
Earth appears in September.
Dinosaurs arrive on December 25.
And humans?
We show up in the final seconds of December 31.

All of human history… fits in the blink of cosmic time.

Photo: Stitched in History

 

Spirituality: from Teilhard de Chardin on the Eucharist

As our consciousness expands, it grows into the loving, all embracing consciousness of God. It requires a metanoia to put on a new way of thinking and seeing. It happens over time. Sadly, some people stay locked up in their own personal lives and interests. Others continue to develop wider interests. Humanity will reach a tipping point when there are more people with expanding consciousness than those who are locked up.

Photo: Pope Leo XIV

 

Poem: “Lead,” by Mary Oliver

 Here is a story 

to break your heart. 

Are you willing? 

This winter 

the loons came to our harbor 

and died, one by one, 

of nothing we could see. 

A friend told me 

of one on the shore 

that lifted its head and opened 

the elegant beak and cried out 

in the long, sweet savoring of its life 

which, if you have heard it, 

you know is a sacred thing, 

and for which, if you have not heard it, 

you had better hurry to where 

they still sing. 

And, believe me, tell no one 

just where that is. 

The next morning, 

this loon, speckled 

and iridescent and with a plan 

to fly home 

to some hidden lake, 

was dead on the shore. 

I tell you this 

to break your heart, 

by which I mean only 

that it break open and never close again 

to the rest of the world.

Poem: “An April Rain Song” by Langston Hughes

 Let the rain kiss you.

Let the rain beat upon your head

With silver liquid drops.

Let the rain sing you a lullaby

With its pitty-pat.

The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk.

The rain makes running pools in the gutter.

The rain plays a little sleep tune

On our roof at night.

And I love the rain.

Photo: Keep Running

 

Spirituality: from Teilhard de Chardin on the Eucharist

Today's theology needs to undergo a kind of Copernican revolution to deal with the fact that God did not create a fixed and unchanging universe. The universe, Planet Earth, is in process of becoming what it was meant to be.

Photo: the Boston Marathon

 

Spirituality: Bill Plotkin, from the Soulcraft Musings newsletter, December 27, 2024

Humanity—in fact, the entire Earth community—currently exists in such dire circumstances that the most significant, viable, and potent solutions will seem like impossible dreams to most everyone (at first). But this is apparently the way it has always been in our universe. At the greatest moments of transformations—what Thomas Berry calls "moments of grace"—the "impossible" happens....

If you consider the data on such things as current wars, environmental destruction, political-economic corruption, social/racial divisions, and widespread psychological breakdowns, there seems to be little hope for humanity and, by extension, most other members of the biosphere. But if, alternatively, you look at the fact of miracles—moments of grace—throughout the known history of the universe, it will dawn on you that there is and always has been an intelligence or imagination at work much greater than our conscious minds. Given that we cannot rule out moments of grace acting through us in this century and the next, we have no alternative but to proceed as if we ourselves, collectively, can in fact make the difference...