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Sermon
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PROGRAMMED FOR KNOWING GOD Babies in utero are not as a rule that perceptive, and I’m not asking you to take the story literally. But at the same time, it raises for us one huge question. Is a capacity to respond to what we call ‘the transcendent’, ‘G-O-D’ or whatever, built into us from conception. Is it natural to be ‘religious’? Is there a spirituality gene in us – already present in utero? If the answer to that were ‘yes’, we would have to say there’s nothing freaky or odd about being a religious person or a spiritual person; even a ‘mystical’ person. On the contrary, the person who is not that way, or who doesn’t want to be thought that way, may be the freaky one! He’s lost something that was part of his original being. There is another fascinating incident I want to lay alongside this. Jesus has become an adult and is about his mission of preaching and teaching and healing. We’re told people are bringing little children to him for a blessing; maybe some of them are sick. The disciples shoo them away. Jesus says, “Let the little children come to me. Unless you become like a child, you’re not going to be suited for the kingdom.” That was the new order he was working for. So, what in the world is he saying here? Obviously not that we should all be ‘childish’ – spreading our food everywhere, bawling when we bark our shins, throwing tantrums when denied candies. So, what is he talking about? Some say he’s advocating blind trust and obedience, thought to be marks of a child. Given that you don’t get that from your dog, let alone your children, what then is he getting at? He is saying that there is something in us as children that we must never lose. He is saying, “Get in touch with that child part within you. Let that part of you flower and flourish again if it has been suppressed.” So, what ever is it, that mark of ‘child-ness’ that we need to guard and retain? Indeed, allow to ‘flower and flourish’? Over recent weeks, I have put this to a number of you. I can tell you the most oft-recurring response. “Oh, the sense of wonder!” That, in fact, is the title of a book by Rachel Carson published after her death: The Sense of Wonder. Carson was a biologist. She wrote Silent Spring, making her the pioneer of the environmental movement. Sadly, she developed terminal cancer in her early 50s. Rachel Carson wasn’t convention-ally religious, but she was deeply mystical in the way she thought about the natural order. It filled her with this sense of wonder and of responsibility for its care. She wrote that she wished every child at baptism could be invested with a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last through life. Consider what happens when the sense of wonder is suppressed or lost. I think of the woman who pulls the blind on her aircraft to watch the in flight movie while they fly over New Zealand’s southern alps. “Nothing to see down there, honey.” I think of the man who leaves the delivery suite as his wife groans their baby into the world; he sees no miracle, only mess. “Couldn’t get out fast enough!” he says. I think of the lass bored to sobs at the Melbourne planetarium, who has a telescope the grandparents gave her for a sixteenth birthday, still in its unopened box. I think of the chap in the Canadian high country, looking at a giant sequoia, the largest living thing on earth, its diameter nearly the width of this building and up to 3,000 years old. “Get a load of the woodchips in that, eh, Norm!” What happened to the sense of wonder? One of the great corrosives of wonder has been a misunderstood science: the falsity that science answers everything or, in due time, certainly will. I have for twenty-five years been engaged by the ‘dialogue’ (as it is called) between godtalk and cosmology; that is the science of how the universe works. I have met and talked with some of the major players in this dialogue, and find them over and over refuting that idea. Contrary to a popular notion, many scientists are profoundly humble men and women. Like Sir Isaac Newton, a deeply religious man, they say, “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”One of those to whom I owe much is Chet Raymo, forty years a professor of astrophysics at Stonehill College, Boston, and twenty years science writer with the Boston Globe. In 1991 had the pleasure of meeting him at a symposium on science and godtalk in Boston, and hearing his own story; since then I have kept up with his writings. Let me tell you his story. Chet Raymo was brought up very traditional Catholic; he described his faith as “French piety, pebble in the shoe stuff.” In other words, no comfort; only unrelieved squirming with guilt. God kept a ledger of good and bad deeds, figured out whether we had a credit balance or a debit balance, punished the wicked and rewarded the virtuous; intervened in human life and the doings of the universe sometimes whimsically and sometimes in response to the prayers of the pious; a miracle worker when it suited him to be so. A supernatural god who worked outside the realities and laws of the universe. That was the faith Chet Raymo grew up with. From undergrad’ work at Notre Dame, he went to the University of California in Los Angeles, and shed the lot. He says that he was delivered by a Panamanian atheist Jew! Then he pursued a distinguished career as astrophysicist and author. He spoke to the symposium of the awe and wonder and reverence before the mystery of the universe constantly evoked by his study of astrophysics. Chet Raymo spends much of the year at Mount Brandon, one of the holiest places in Ireland, and is a kind of modern-day Celtic mystic. He speaks of a path to God that has nothing to fear from science. He says, “With the discovery of the universe of the galaxies, the geologic aeons, the wonders of evolution, and the dance of the DNA, our eyes are opened to a majesty and a mystery of far greater dimension than the Olympian deities of our ancestors – and of most believers today.”Four years ago I wrote a piece called “Dancing Leaf”. Until now I have not aired it publicly. I wrote at the time, “I often find the proprietary lines of packaged piety, as marketed by churches, unappealing. More often than not they obscure, rather than reveal, the holy . . . the sacred . . . the ineffable mystery all around us and within. My ‘epiphanies’ or revelations often come outside churches, not inside them. Let me tell you of my dancing leaf. “Early one morning I stopped transfixed at the foot of my back steps. To the right of me, and about one metre above the ground, was a gum leaf. It was about 10cm long and little more than 1cm across at its widest part. It was in mid air, apparently weightless, with no means of support. But it was not still. It was describing in mid-air all the most stunning of ballet movements. For just a second or two poised on the point of the toe. Then pivoting faster and faster – until it stopped as quickly as it began. Taking giant leaps this way and that, and then pausing as if to think “What shall I do next?” Of course, it wasn’t without means of support. It was suspended on the finest gossamer spun during the night by a spider now gone. The thread was invisible, but I knew it had to be there. No scientific instruments could have predicted the sequence of movements described in the air by my dancing leaf. Catching the softest breeze, it lifted and spun and leapt and flew with a freedom not even God could have known in advance. For, as with everything else in this universe, its future was ‘open’. It had the freedom to be itself. That was my dancing leaf epiphany. This to close. Last Wednesday night I was in St Patrick’s Cathedral, courtesy some of my Catholic family: two grand-daughters at Sacré Coeur. It was the school’s annual ‘carols in the cathedral’. The place was packed. The sound in that vast and cavernous holy place was at times truly celestial. For me the high point was the junior school’s ‘pageant’. For years now this has been a feature in what is otherwise a big girls’ night. I was by the central aisle, and watched as the costumed holy family, angels, shepherds and wise men inaudibly took this long walk up to the altar. Little girls, six and seven years old. The expressions, and the dignified movement with hands folded before them, suggested to me that some of these little girls were totally entranced by the moment. It was for them a special time in the presence of they knew not what – but which evoked in them awe, wonder and reverence. I went back to Luke’s fanciful narrative of the baby in Elizabeth’s womb leaping (the Greek word can also mean ‘dance’) at the recognition that he was in the presence of the holy. And I thought again of Jesus saying, “Hold to the child-ness in you – for that is your ‘visa’ for the new world.” That, dear brothers and sisters, is where real religion begins: knowing that around us and within us is the Sacred Presence, penetrating and enveloping everything that is. ___________________________________________________
An
address presented by the Rev Dr John Bodycomb at St Aidan's
Uniting Church North Balwyn, on 9th December, 2007 IT MAY BE
REPRODUCED WITH ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF AUTHORSHIP. |
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Page updated 12/12/07