Oct 29, 2017

Why Pain (4)

How do we respond to seemingly

Random acts of terror:

Makes us wonder:

If this pain is present,

Is there a loving God?

Who is the Christ? Note: ‘Christ’ was NOT the last name of Jesus; the truth is expressed when we follow St. Paul, who referred to Jesus as “Jesus the Christ”. The Christ was something that included Jesus, but not only Jesus. The prologue of the Gospel of John tells us who the Christ truly is:

“In the beginning the Word already existed.

            The Word was with God,

            And the Word was God.

The Word existed in the beginning with God.

God created everything through the Word,

            And nothing was created except through the Word.

The Word gave life to everything that was created,

            And the Word of life brought light to everyone.

The light shines in the darkness,

            And the darkness can never extinguish it.” (John 1, 1-5)

It has long been a teaching of Christianity that the creation of the universe is an ongoing event, that is, if God should ‘forget’ us at any nanosecond, we would cease to exist. Therefore God, in this case the Word, constantly continues to enliven us with life, and life everlasting.

The more active term used in the gospels for the ‘Word’ is the ‘Christ’. It is the Christ who feeds our universe and has a full level of constant creation. This ‘Cosmic Christ’ that Fr. Richard Rohr talks about is the universal force of life that keeps all life everywhere, whether in our universe or elsewhere, that is, all created things, alive and well. That is, our created universe is part of that what we call the Christ, since it is the breath of God that keeps it here and present. We need to understand in our very depths of spirit that all exists in the dynamic energy of life that is the core of the universe. Or to put it more bluntly, we contain the essence of God in our being, or as Jesus put it: “The kingdom of God dwells within (and without) you.” (Various translations put it either way, either “within you” or “in your midst.)

I would like to look at the physical universe and discuss on a very brief basis what the universe (part of the Christ) represents and how it operates.

The Pain of Evolution

The Prologue of John’s Gospel, and the story of creation in Genesis are beautiful poetry that lift the heart in song. However, the story of the evolving universe and the story of our own evolution as revealed by nature and the heavens are not the smooth flow that seem to be expressed by this poetry from ages past, when none of the power and destruction that is the very source of our being was known. The truth of creation and the evolving of our universe to this point in universal history has only been revealed to us over the recent past; starting in the 15^th century, but mostly over the past 150 years.

13.8 billion years ago, give or take a 100 million years, our universe erupted as a seething mass of energy from an incredibly small point to start the bubble of that is our universe. We know nothing of the actual start, but we can derive what happened to 10(-43) second (a ‘I’ preceded by 42 zeros) after the very beginning. This also means we have no concept of what lies outside our universe in the infinity of something – not space, as ‘space’ is something only known inside our universe, not empty, as there is no such thing as ‘empty space’.

For the first approximately 379,000 years, the universe consisted of electrons, photons, and baryons that was an opaque mass that broke up anything, light included, due to intense temperatures. At the point where the expanding universe reached a ‘cool’ temperature of 3000 K or so, the cooling universe recombined, allowing electrons to combine with protons creating hydrogen atoms, but only hydrogen atoms. As photons could not interact with the neutral hydrogen atoms, suddenly it is as if the universe heard God say “let there be light”, and the universe became transparent and there was light, called the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB. This radiation can be measured today, and was found almost by accident by two American radio astronomers in 1964, even though it had been predicted in the 1950s when the proposition of the ‘big bang’ was first proposed.

At this point, what we had was a fairly smooth mass of hydrogen atoms floating in an almost uniform scattering across the universe. But notice I said “almost uniform” – that was the key. Because each hydrogen atom has a mass, and the action of gravity exerted a force from each atom on every other atom, the atoms of hydrogen began to drift together attracted to one another by gravity and form clumps, and when enough atoms gathered, the intense pressure caused massive increases in temperature and the clumps began to burn, and the first generation of stars began.

Notice the violence of the events, with massive releases of energy at every key point, culminating in the first generation of stars – a seething caldron of fire, that is now repeated trillions of times in our universe.

It is critical to understand where we, you and I, came to be at this time – over 13 billion years of violence and beauty. We will come to see that life is full of natural violence including pain, disease, and death, all part of the world of creation expressed in John’s gospel and the book of Genesis. More to come.

Meditation

Creator of the Universe, You have brought me out of the original seething energy at this breathtaking moment. I am here, one of the many facets of Your making that You have created, to become conscious of who I am and thereby understanding Your presence here and throughout the universe and beyond. I am grateful that I am in this Now, and feel Your Love in all that is and has become. It is amazing to look at the state of the universe, and to understand that it took 13.8 billion years for consciousness to rise and allow my small consciousness to be present. I am filled with wonder at the history of the universe that has been uncovered, and am in awe at all that exists. I bow before you, and am dazzled by the beauty of all Your Creation.