Consider, one more time, these quotes I’ve recently
posted:
In cities that
have outgrown their promise people
are becoming pilgrims
again, if not to this place,
then to the recreation of it
in their own spirits.
-R. S. Thomas
"Without a mythological context,
sacred text, or some symbolic universe
to reveal the greater meaning
and significance of our life,
we can become trapped
in our own
very small story.”
- Richard Rohr
To look at the Bible
as some kind of fixed and final
Word of God is
a canon firing
in the wrong direction.
The Bible
is part of the movement
of God’s revelation,
which is continuous.”
- Curtis Almquist
Each of these quotes--in one way and another--is about
moving on, staying open, getting the gist of allowing what ‘WE KNOW NOW’ to be
fertilized by what WE MIGHT LEARN every day. To continue to be spiritually
vital means we’re always on pilgrimage.
What joy there is in arriving on purpose at the sacred place we’ve set as our goal. And what deadness
there is in mistaking that place for our final destination.
Our best stories—as well as our best science—are the
ones that ring truest. But when we try to keep them only as big as we can
fathom, wrap our arms around those stories, mistake yesterday’s truths as final
and unalterable, they always become small, confining, and eventually
suffocating.
This lovely musical mash-up of passionate astrophysics
is a powerful example of pilgrimage. On
pilgrimage we carry in our heads and hearts all that has ever rung truest—even as
we keep purposefully moving along paths that will take us to places of fresh revelation.
As a Christian I’ll never ever plumb the depths of
our Bible, our Word of God. There’s never been a week in my adult life that I’m not fed,
challenged, inspired and/or humbled through reading, studying, contemplating,
and trying to embody its wisdom. In every reading I try to listen to what the Spirit is saying to God's people.
And here Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse
Tyson, and Bill Nye (God bless them!) are reading from what Thomas Aquinas calls God's other Bible--Creation. And they have given us another page of the sacred story, a humbling
and exhilarating way to savor the great mystery of Being:
The cosmos
is also within us…
We’re made of star-stuff.
We are a way for the Cosmos
to know Itself.
Across the sea of space
the stars are other suns-
we have traveled this way before,
and there is much to be learned.
Across the sea of space
the stars are other suns-
we have traveled this way before,
and there is much to be learned.
What a journey! May we each continue to find our way.
