Tag creation

Let This Voice, Too, Be Heard

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

Part 1:  Gloria In Excelsis

In the beginning was the Word,

And the Word was with the Voice

And the Word was the Voice

Who spoke all things into being.

And the Voice said, “Let there be light!”

And the Word became light,

flooding Nothing with a boundless energy

springing from a love of simply being

at one with the Voice in the speaking of all things.

And the Voice breathed 

a deep Sigh of joy 

filled with wordless Word,

blowing through the light 

which illuminated Nothing 

with a bright, soundless harmony 

of love between the Voice

and the Word and the Sigh.

And the Voice said, “Let there be a place, and places,

swirling in infinities, dancing through spaces,

where We might listen to the echoes of the Word,

where We might hear the singing of the Sigh,

where laughter and joy and love may be heard,

where Our longing and Our loneliness may have a place to cry.”

And the Word became a matter of matter, the stuff of stuff,

filling Nothing with Something,

with many things full of life in ice and light,  

in plasma, gas and rock, in enough things made enough,

balanced in ellipses, blown into lines of time

to resonate and hum with light––

the Word made music in the spheres:

a spatial choir, a universe to sing apart its part,

to choose its universal notes and in its choice

to be another voice.

And the Voice said, “Let this voice, too, be heard.

By the power of the Sigh,

Let this voice, too, proclaim the Word.”

Part 2:  Et In Terra

In the time when time was still new

In a warmer sphere, 

a few degrees askew,

wild with seething seas, yet lifeless and austere––

a still unfinished  place 

which sustained its sweet blue note in the canticle of space––

the Singer and the Lyric and the Music descended

and that place’s lifeless life was ended.

And as the Sighing Spirit hovered just above 

an ocean of potential,

the Voice cried, “Let us have a place to stand!”

And the Word dove down into the depths

of the vast, pervasive waters

and spoke the word of rising to the bottom of the sea.

And with fire and trembling,

by the power of that command,

the Word created land.

Terra firma.  Terra incognita.

Continents and islands. Peninsulas and strands.

Yawning canyons, rolling hills and towering peaks.

Flats, steppes, deltas, frozen wastes,

secluded coves and barking sands.

Clay and rock and grit and minerals and dust.

Glass and jewels and metals.

Chemicals and rust.

And the laughter of the Voice

reverberated in the earth

as the Spirit broke the waters

and the Word gave Terra birth.

And the Spirit hummed a lullaby

above the seething swell

as the shaping Word reshaped each sound

and inlet, molded every fjord and bay

let each volcano have its way

and rang the mountains like a bell.

And the Voice said, “Let this new voice, too, be heard.

By the wind of the Spirit,

Let this voice, too, proclaim the Word.”

Part 3:  Pax

And when the land had risen from the seas,

standing bare and moist and lifeless

in the fecund, warm and fertile breeze, 

the Voice said, “Let there be voices which do not 

merely echo or harmonize with notes already sung.  

“Let there be life which springs from Our Life but sings its own song.

Let there be piping reeds to whistle in my Wind,

Let there be  whispering flora, bushes, shrubs and grasses

with the sibilant sound of masses 

humbly bowing down in praise.

Let there be stout, hearty trees

to stand against the Holy Breeze,

banging limb against percussive limb

so that in their rhythmic beating,

in their rooted yearning, in their upward reaching,

in their gratitude for living,

their aptitude for giving,

they too, their green and vegetative voices raise

in their own unique, prolific hymn.

Let them sing along 

in their own time, in their own song.

“And let there be the sound of small, scuttling things,

and trilling voices lifted high on wings,

and the sounds of a large, stalking, deep, roaring throat,

and lamenting, lupine barks and howls,

the trumpeting of tusk and trunk, the rumble of heavy feet,

burrowing growls, a soft, sustaining bleat,

and the quack and honk of things afloat.

Let there be sweet, aquatic voices singing from the deep,

insectile chirps, amphibious burps,

and gentle things that murmur music in their sleep.”

And the Word sang shapes into the soil and sea

and the Holy Sigh blew Life and song into the shapes, 

so that by the Voice and Word and Breath 

all these voices came to be.

And the Voice said, “Let these, too, be heard.

By the Spirit and the force of Life,

Let all these singers, too, proclaim the Word.”

Part 4:  Ecce Homo 

When the earth was filled with nearly every kind

of Life in nearly every state of animation

and nearly ever sound that animal or plant could make

had been added to the score,

The Voice, the Word, the Song

did something that would change the heavens and the earth forevermore.

Inherent in this new creation was a calculated chance

that this newest voice might be so absorbed 

in the singing of itself that it could, it might

create a dissonant disharmony,

an awkward, arrhythmic antiphony

in the very heart of the dance.

But also, there was hope, a more than even possibility,

that of all the creatures swimming in the sea

or gliding through the skies or burrowing or slithering

or in one way or another moving on the land,

there was hope that this one might not merely hear each harmonizing note

and repeat it all by rote—

there was, there is, a hope that this unlikely creature just might

understand

the reason why the song began.

So, with every hope but also every apprehension

the Voice said, “Let us make a man

and woman, in our own image–– Voice and Word and Breath.

And let us hope they learn to sing

the song of Life and not the song of death.”

And that, of course, is the source of all the tension––

that the all-creative Voice 

gave us such a powerful choice.

So the Word assembled dust and clay

and the Breath of creation had its way

and we became 5 billion voices

with God only knows how many choices.

Still, when we are our better selves,

when we are not lost in pursuing our own aims, no matter how absurd,

we still can hear the Song sung over our making––

We hear the Voice that sings, “Let this voice, too be heard.

By the Will that gave this creature will,

Let this voice, too, proclaim the Word.”

Part 5:  Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus ad erit

We were made to appreciate

sounds deeper than the ear can perceive,

music only the heart and soul can hear,

melodies only the discerning mind can believe.

We were made to contemplate 

sounds tuned only to the spirit’s ear.

And you, beloved friend and sibling in the Sight,

when you finally escape from all the sound which is merely noise,

when you find that quiet place where you see the Song and hear the Light,

when you follow the winding way of the Word, blown by the Breath of Making

and you stand on the precipice, poised

to fall out of death and into love…

listen closely,  and somewhere beneath

the chattering of your teeth,

behind your trembling and shaking, 

you will hear the meaning of your life.

We make music to draw us into creation’s deeper symphony.

We sing because it is our pathway to the all-sustaining Song.

We love because it is our only way to embrace the original Lover

whose Voice and Word and Breath created us to be the beloved other.

And, though so often we get it wrong,

we are still invited, always summoned, forever encouraged–– made–– to sing along,

to tune our voices to the Holy resonance,

to learn the way out of our mangled dissonance 

and into that divine harmony 

that is patient and kind,

that bears all things, believes all things and hopes all things,

that seeks to sing you into your right and healthy mind,

and make you, too, a voice that out of joy and love forever sings.

In the rest between the notes, 

in the break before each glorious chord,

in the space between the stops,

be still and know

the Touch of the Breath

which lifts you as the Voice sings  to you,     

over you,       

about you:

“Let this beloved child be heard. 

By my Love which loved you into life,

Let your voice, too, proclaim the Word.”

The Days of Our Lives

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

I was reading through the Book of Genesis, as one does, when a repeated phrase in chapter 5 made me pause. The phrase was “all the days of” as in “Thus all the days of Seth were nine hundred twelve years.”  As I noted, the phrase gets repeated: “all the days of Enosh;”  “all the days of Kenan,”  and so on.  Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech—each of them was given lots and lots of days, according to Genesis 5,  but after telling us how many years of days they lived, each account ends with a stark “and he died.”  Well, except for Enoch, but he was a special case.  

Apparently God thought this kind of longevity was excessive.  Right out of the chute in chapter 6 we read, “Then the Lord said, “My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.”  It looks like that was meant to be an upper limit and not a prescription for everybody because almost nobody actually gets that old.  The longest verified human lifespan in recent times is that of Jeanne Louise Calment of France (1875–1997).  Genesis would say the days of Jeanne Louise were one hundred twenty-two years and 164 days; and she died.  So she got a couple of bonus years on top of the 120.  Good for her. 

In Psalm 90 that upper limit gets a few more years lopped off.  “The days of our life are seventy years, perhaps 80 if we are strong,” we read in verse 10.   Tradition says that Psalm 90 was written by Moses.  If so, then Moses was in a pretty dark mood that day. It’s not a happy Psalm, Psalm 90, and the curtailed life span is the least of its gloominess.  Oy.

The point of all this is that our days on this earth are numbered.  Frankly, I’m okay with that, even though I’m indisputably closer to the end than to the beginning.  C’est la vie, as Jeanne Louise would say if she were still here.  I’m okay with going on to what comes next, especially since I’m pretty sure that time will be experienced in a very different way—if we experience it at all. It’s all in God’s hands, so it’s all good.

Here’s what’s not good and what I’m not okay with: if we don’t clean up our act, then life on earth, at least life as we know it, is in real trouble.  If we don’t make some major changes starting yesterday, then our days as a species are numbered…and we’ll take a lot of other species with us.  Scientists are already calling our age the Anthropocene. They give names like that to bygone eras of mass extinction.  Anthropocene.  From anthropos, the Greek word for human.  When they call this current era the Anthropocene, they are saying that this is the era in which humanity has caused the extinction of massive numbers of other species.  Not our proudest moment.

I don’t care so much about my own personal extinction.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not in any hurry to shuffle off this mortal coil, but I’m also not worried about it.  It will come when it comes.  On the other hand, I care quite a lot about the threat of extinction to the various biomes of this beautiful planet, and all the other creatures that share the earth with us.  I quite like dogs,  for instance.  And cats and horses and frogs and dolphins and owls and even crows.  And octopuses, who, it turns out, are quite smart!  They didn’t have a say in the damage we’ve created with our massive carbon footprints.  They weren’t given a vote when our plastics were swept into the waters of the world.  I rather suspect they would have objected.  Strenuously.  I also care quite a lot about my children and grandsons and their potential progeny.  I would like for them to live in a world at least as nice as the one I’ve lived in.

Helen Caldicott once wrote, “We didn’t inherit the earth from our parents, we have borrowed it from our children.”   She has a really good point.  We did inherit some things from our parents, especially attitudes and habits that can have a profound effect on what the world will be like when we hand it over to those who come after us.  It would do us all a world of good if we treated the world as if we were renting it from the future and wanted to return it in better shape than when we entered it so we can get our security deposit back.

We are Easter people.  We believe that God can and will give all of creation a new birth, a resurrection life.  But let’s leave the timing of that up to God, shall we?  Killing the planet simply because we believe that God can un-kill it would not reflect well on us.  It’s not a good look and it will upset our grandkids.

There is a lot of amazing work being done to develop new energy and transportation sources as quickly as possible (see https://www.sciencedaily.com/news/matter_energy/batteries/.)  The world of science and technology has finally realized that we’re on a pretty serious deadline here and that there’s more at stake than impressing their colleagues.  There is really is hope for the future.  It’s slim, but it’s there.  We can help is if we all figure out how we can conserve and contribute less to the problem.  You’re all using LED lightbulbs, right?  

Your days and my days are numbered, but let’s do what we can to make sure that the world God loves (John 3:16) has a much longer and healthier run.

God Gets Physical

Steve Beckham 1 Comment

John 1:1-14

This past week, NASA launched the James Webb Space Telescope, a remarkable remote observatory that will travel 1.5 million kilometers, about 3.9 times the distance to the moon, before it parks itself in a Lagrange point—a kind of neutral zone in the tug-of-war between the sun’s gravitational pull and Earth’s gravitational pull.  There it will unfurl its highly polished mirrors made of gold-plated beryllium, and begin to stare deep into space—deeper than we have ever seen before with any other instrument.  As it peers into the depths of space it will also be looking back in time because the light it sees was generated billions of years ago.  It will be able to see celestial events that happened before the earth was formed.

The astrophysicists, astronomers, and engineers who designed and programmed the Webb Space Telescope have given it four primary missions:

  • to search for light from the first stars and galaxies that were formed in the universe after the Big Bang;
  • to study the formation and evolution of galaxies;
  • to study the formation of stars and planetary systems;
  • to study other planetary systems to see if they can tell us anything about the origins of life.

The writer of the Gospel of John didn’t have a telescope, but in a poetic way John did have a clear view of the beginning of all things.  In the beginning was the logos he said.  The Word.  The Blueprint.  The Narrative.  The Story.  The Content.  The logos was with God.  The logos was God.  All things came into being through the logos, and not one thing that came into existence came into existence except through the logos.  

Here in the prologue of John’s gospel, the logos is another term for Christ.  John is telling us about the Cosmic Christ who existed before all things, who is present in, with and under all things because all things came into being through the Christ.  Christ, the logos, is that aspect of the Divine Presence where Spirit intersects with matter.  Christ is in those distant stars and galaxies that the Webb telescope will show us.  Christ is in the giant nebulae and dust pillars that Hubble has shown us, those columns of interstellar dust and gas where stars are born.  Christ is in the quasars and pulsars, the black holes and gravitational waves and dark matter.

But Christ, the logos, is not just in the macrocosm. Christ is also in the microcosm.  Christ is in the strings of string theory.  Christ is in the strange interactions of quantum mechanics where quite literally anything and everything is a possibility.  Christ is in the anomalies of quantum flux. 

The writer of John goes on to tell us that Christ was not only in the inorganic dance of chemistry and physics, but that through the logos, through Christ, life came into being. Through Christ nitrogen and hydrogen and carbon and oxygen came together to form amino acids.  Through Christ amino acids formed long chain proteins which then formed protein blocks which then evolved into single-celled organisms.  Through Christ single-celled organisms bonded to form symbiotic colonies which then evolved to become multi-celled organisms.  Through Christ life began to take on more and more diverse forms.  Plants, ants, beetles, fish, mice, dinosaurs, cats and dogs, monkeys, apes, humans.  

John tells us that Christ was the origin of life.  In the logos was life, and that life is the light of all humanity.  I suspect that’s because humanity not only lives life, but we also seek to understand it.  

In an age when we have figured out so much about the essential structure of things in physics and the intricate functions of things in biology, an age when we have delved deep into the geology of our own world and have begun to poke into crust of other planets, it’s tempting to think we can explain esoteric things like existence without God in the equation.  But one of the beauties of real science is that the more we learn, the more we realize there is so much more that we don’t know.  Those who dive deepest soon realize there is no bottom, no stopping point, because they have thrown themselves into the mystery of existence.  As Werner Heisenberg said, “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.” 

The word Christ, Christos, means anointed.  John is telling us that through the logos,through Christ, all of creation is anointed with, infused with the presence of God.  As Saint Paul said, God is never far from us because “in him we live and move and have our being.”[1]  Saint Patrick understood this intimate and inescapable presence of Christ when he prayed: 

“Christ with me, Christ before me, 

Christ behind me, Christ in me, 

Christ beneath me, Christ above me, 
Christ on my right, Christ on my left, 
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, 
Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me, 
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me, 
Christ in the eye that sees me, 
Christ in the ear that hears me.”[2] 

Then entire physical universe is where God hides…but it’s also where God is revealed.  God is not “up there” somewhere—well, not only “up there”—God is right here.  Christ is in you.  Christ is in me.  That is what Jesus, the Christ is all about.  Jesus came to show us that God is with us.  In us. Working through us.  “We spend so much time trying to get “up there,” says Richard Rohr, “we miss that God’s big leap in Jesus was to come “down here.” So much of our worship and religious effort is the spiritual equivalent of trying to go up what has become the down escalator.”[3]

Once we really accept the idea that through Christ God is present in all of creation, the world becomes “home, safe, enchanted, offering grace to any who look deeply.”[4]  The Webb Space Telescope will be looking deeply. It may even be able to see as far as the dawn of creation. There’s no telling what we will learn.  But whatever it shows us, it will simply be telling us more about Christ, in whom we live and move and have our being.

[1] Acts 17:28

[2] Prayer of St. Patrick, 5th century

[3] Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For and Believe

[4] Ibid.