knew a world of nonlinear space.
Theologians, back in the sixties, tried to grapple with this by saying that God is not “up there,” that heaven is not “up,” and they listened in awe as Yuri Gagarin, the first Russian cosmonaut to go into space, said that of course there is no God; he was out in space looking for God, and he didn’t see him. (As I try to visualize the “God” Gagarin was looking for, all I can do is smile.)
We look into outer space, and because we cannot “see” a God we can touch, a God we can comprehend with our rational intellects, we invent new gods to take his place, all the little gods of technocracy, little gods who have eyes and see not, ears and hear not, hands and touch not, and who have nothing to say to us in the times of our deepest need.
Montaigne saw this and wrote, “O senseless man who cannot make a worm, and yet makes gods by dozens.” We have been doing this for centuries, and perhaps only the coming of the kingdom will stop this futile activity.
Nonlinear space/time is more easily understood by poets and saints than by reasonable folk. Back somewhere around the end of the eleventh century, Hildevert of Lavardin wrote:
God is over all things
under all things,
outside all,
within, but not enclosed,
without, but not excluded,
above, but not raised up,
below, but not depressed,
wholly above, presiding,
wholly without, embracing,
wholly within, filling.
And that says all that needs saying.
—
When I am looking for theologians to stimulate my creativity, theologians who are contemporary enough to speak to these last years of our troubled century, I turn to the Byzantine and Cappadocian fathers of the early years of the Christian era, because their world was more like ours than the world of such great theologians as Niebuhr and Tillich and Bultmann, who were writing in the framework of a world which was basically pre–World War II, and definitely pre-the-splitting-of-the-atom. In the first few centuries A.D. , Rome was breaking up; civilization was changing as radically as is our own; people were no longer able to live in the luxury they had become accustomed to, as the great aqueducts and water-heating systems broke down and the roads were no longer kept up. Such people as St. Chrysostom, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and his brilliant sister, Macrina, were facing the same kind of change and challenge that we are, and from them I get great courage.
And when I try to find contemporary, twentieth-century mystics to help me in my own search for meditation and contemplation, I turn to the cellular biologists and astrophysicists, for they are dealing with the nature of being itself, and their questions are theological ones: What is the nature of time? of creation? of life? What is human creativity? What is our share in God’s work?
In his letter to the people of Ephesus, Paul wrote, “Each of us has been given his gift, his due portion of Christ’s bounty.” To accept our gift means accepting our freedom. This involves a new understanding of time and space, the same understanding towards which the astrophysicists are struggling, that same understanding which Jesus was offering John and James and Peter on the mountain, despite their obtuseness. They didn’t begin to understand this kind of freedom until after the mighty acts of the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and Pentecost, the coming of the Spirit.
And the men and women to whom Jesus offered this gift were ordinary human beings, faulted and flawed, just like the rest of us. He gave his disciples no job descriptions; he did not disqualify Mary Magdalene because she had been afflicted with seven demons; he did not spend a lot of time looking for the most qualified people, the most adult. Instead, he chose people who were still childlike enough to leave the known comforts of the daily world, the security of their jobs, their reasonable way of life, to follow him.
For the past several
Theologians, back in the sixties, tried to grapple with this by saying that God is not “up there,” that heaven is not “up,” and they listened in awe as Yuri Gagarin, the first Russian cosmonaut to go into space, said that of course there is no God; he was out in space looking for God, and he didn’t see him. (As I try to visualize the “God” Gagarin was looking for, all I can do is smile.)
We look into outer space, and because we cannot “see” a God we can touch, a God we can comprehend with our rational intellects, we invent new gods to take his place, all the little gods of technocracy, little gods who have eyes and see not, ears and hear not, hands and touch not, and who have nothing to say to us in the times of our deepest need.
Montaigne saw this and wrote, “O senseless man who cannot make a worm, and yet makes gods by dozens.” We have been doing this for centuries, and perhaps only the coming of the kingdom will stop this futile activity.
Nonlinear space/time is more easily understood by poets and saints than by reasonable folk. Back somewhere around the end of the eleventh century, Hildevert of Lavardin wrote:
God is over all things
under all things,
outside all,
within, but not enclosed,
without, but not excluded,
above, but not raised up,
below, but not depressed,
wholly above, presiding,
wholly without, embracing,
wholly within, filling.
And that says all that needs saying.
—
When I am looking for theologians to stimulate my creativity, theologians who are contemporary enough to speak to these last years of our troubled century, I turn to the Byzantine and Cappadocian fathers of the early years of the Christian era, because their world was more like ours than the world of such great theologians as Niebuhr and Tillich and Bultmann, who were writing in the framework of a world which was basically pre–World War II, and definitely pre-the-splitting-of-the-atom. In the first few centuries A.D. , Rome was breaking up; civilization was changing as radically as is our own; people were no longer able to live in the luxury they had become accustomed to, as the great aqueducts and water-heating systems broke down and the roads were no longer kept up. Such people as St. Chrysostom, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and his brilliant sister, Macrina, were facing the same kind of change and challenge that we are, and from them I get great courage.
And when I try to find contemporary, twentieth-century mystics to help me in my own search for meditation and contemplation, I turn to the cellular biologists and astrophysicists, for they are dealing with the nature of being itself, and their questions are theological ones: What is the nature of time? of creation? of life? What is human creativity? What is our share in God’s work?
In his letter to the people of Ephesus, Paul wrote, “Each of us has been given his gift, his due portion of Christ’s bounty.” To accept our gift means accepting our freedom. This involves a new understanding of time and space, the same understanding towards which the astrophysicists are struggling, that same understanding which Jesus was offering John and James and Peter on the mountain, despite their obtuseness. They didn’t begin to understand this kind of freedom until after the mighty acts of the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and Pentecost, the coming of the Spirit.
And the men and women to whom Jesus offered this gift were ordinary human beings, faulted and flawed, just like the rest of us. He gave his disciples no job descriptions; he did not disqualify Mary Magdalene because she had been afflicted with seven demons; he did not spend a lot of time looking for the most qualified people, the most adult. Instead, he chose people who were still childlike enough to leave the known comforts of the daily world, the security of their jobs, their reasonable way of life, to follow him.
For the past several
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