Religion In An Expanding Universe

The Andromeda Galaxy

Or, what I mean by Religion. I have never written such a "new age" type title. What a thrill. And I did not have to sell my soul to do so, contrary to what some evangelicals believe. I know evangelicals who are positively on the cutting edge of boogie-men and shibboleths and generally scarey stuff. They go around howling "New Age, New Age!!" and "Rock and Roll is Evil !" and "Obama!". At each and every incantation, they expect Old Nick to doff his mask and smile a leer or two to the crowd, but it never happens: only in the minds of the fevered gospel babes does the devil jump up...which reminds us all of "Jumpin' Jack Flash", and we wonder whether rock'n'roll ( or rock and roll ) is actually the SST ride to perdition.

After the First World War, Edwin Hubble researched and made observations which established the fact that the astronomical phenomena called nebulae were in actuality too far away to be considered any longer as part of our Milky Way galaxy...and thus were independent galaxies. The Great Andromeda galaxy was established as being a galaxy in its own right less than a century ago. And all the others. Then followed the expanding universe, application of Einstein's insights, as well as those of Quantum Mechanics, and you have the almost limitless horizon we have come to be used to. But it is all very recent.

There are people living today at whose birth the Universe was a small, sub-compact, and not the super-stretch Hummer it is today. In my childhood, my exposure to Religion was from my parents and teachers. From them I drew the lessons of religion, and from them I drew the correct emotional grammar of religion: when and how to feel guilty, when and how to feel to feel justified, when and how to feel awestruck. When filled with awe by the power of God, we bowed our heads before it. That is how we were taught. If I had been born a Holy Roller, I may have done something else.

Entering more fully into symbolic life - the life of using language: reading, writing, speaking, and thinking in language - I set my own researches into God on the same roads I had been taught to follow. Here we realize firstly that conscious beings each individually establish a history of their existence by employing that very consciousness they have. It is almost a logical contradiction to say that conscious beings follow what went before. Conscious beings almost by definition make their own way, thereby developing that consciousness, which in turn develops their view of the world. Each individual's story is different. It may differ from their predecessors by a small or large degree, but it is different. If the story was not different, then there would not be consciousness; there would be physics and chemistry, but no life.

Now when I had reached 8th grade, I stumbled on Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, a novel in which the history of man is followed millions and millions of years into the future, to the point where the Sun itself is about to end its existence. On this journey of millions of years, mankind never loses its sense of divine-in-creation: that which is (what we call) divine in that situation wherein we live - the universe. There was a Zen type feeling in the book. What I mean by Zen is this: there is a being-inside and a being-outside. We are in history. We are not condemned to be in history forever. We are in the world. We are not condemned to the world as a prison. Thus, as a mirror reflection, we see now by the end of this little paragraph that there was a St. Paul-type consciousness also. (When I say Zen, I do not exclude St. Paul...nor Rabbi Akiva...nor the Prophet of Allah. I am not "for" nor "against". We cannot choose up sides. We use adjectives like "zen" as watercolours, not as permanent ink.)

My childhood narrative of the divine was what I fancy the Middle Ages' narrative to have been: a bearded and irrascible God in heaven, angelic choirs, ceaseless hosannas, and saints milling around looking for the right place in the hymnal. The universe was small, small enough to fit within the miniscule ambit of the Church of Rome. If I could but strain sufficiently, I could see heaven far off in the stars. All evil was punished. Hitler was in Hell. Tojo was, too. Society was correctly stratified into the correct "apart-ness" of the races and nationalities. I wasn't aware of Hubble, so what was bound on little old Earth was bound in Heaven, and - by implication - the entire universe...because it wasn't all that big, and what went in Heaven must go for the whole universe! Stapledon shattered that. I actually felt as if my lungs expanded, and by some magic process I could breathe more. Of course, I also felt more exposed, more liable to new winds blowing; winds which may be gentle or stormy. The old world view was not a prison. I might say that it was metaphorically, but that would be misleading. It was a cocoon, protective and confining, until the time is reached that one leaves it.

Our lives show a series of cocoon-like structures, starting at the womb and extending to our final rest here. (The dynamic of the cocoon continues until the Resurrection, when religion says we are all in heaven and the process ends. Faith, all faith. Maybe the process will never end. This leads us to re-birth and another line of religiosity.) Finally, what is appropriate to our time is the expansion of religion, not its diminshment into obscure violence and superstition. We expand by opening one door and closing the other, emerging from the protective cocoon. We open and feel the air of the suddenly immense universe and the divine-in-creation, but we must be ready. For at this time, the STORY is going to change. And I have told you, when the story changes, it is absolutely necessary that the new story be a good story - not a horror story. For the new story to be good, we must be good. Time's a-wastin'! Get crackin'!