Contemplative theologian Beatrice Bruteau (1930–2014) considers engaging with science as a way of honoring God’s presence in the cosmos:
There are two motivations for including some knowledge of science in our contemplative lives: one, we need to understand God’s artistic work in order to appreciate it properly and relate lovingly to the Creator; two, we need to know something of the work in order to join it, to participate in creating the world from here on. This last is the real way of loving, that is, by joining in the life of the beloved.…
Somewhere deep down, we are all filled with mystical longing, longing for meaningful belonging, for profound union, longing to be securely embedded in the ultimate meaningfulness, and therefore we need to see all our world in that context. We long to feel the ultimate meaningfulness as real, all around us, concrete, real, intimate, tangible, communicating with us. To attain this in today’s climate, we need a new theology of the cosmos, one that is grounded in the best science of our day. It will be a theology in which God is very present, precisely in all the dynamisms and patterns of the created order, in which God is not rendered absent by the self-organizing activities of the natural world, but in which God is actual as the one who makes and the one who is incarnate in what is made by these very self-making activities.
Can our science be seen that way? Yes, I think so, and I would like to show it to you in those terms, so that all the world turns sacred again and we truly feel our unity and our wholeness and our belonging to the all. [1]
Contemplative and physicist Joy Andrews Hayter affirms a mystical oneness at the heart of the cosmos.
Whether you call it Sacred Unity, God, Universe, Ground of Being, the Source, or One, it is not out there somewhere, but is written into what we are and where we are…. Where could the Source of this loving, relational reality, the luminous web connecting all things, ever not be?
When we discover and live from the coherence in our being, we discover that we are in a relational field with all beings, with a mystical spark at the center that connects us all. Merton saw this clearly at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, [when he realized “the gate of heaven is everywhere”] [2] and Teilhard de Chardin saw this and his writings are permeated with it. In Cosmic Life, he said, “To live the cosmic life is to live dominated by the consciousness that one is an atom in the body of the mystical and cosmic Christ.” [3]…
Just as all began (from the Big Bang, or the Word, depending on whether you are talking about physics or the New Testament) and expanded into the myriad forms that are permeated with the One, all returns to Oneness, which could be described as the cosmic Body of Christ. [4]
References:
[1] Beatrice Bruteau, God’s Ecstasy: The Creation of a Self-Creating World (New York: Crossroad, 1997, 2016), 12, 13.
[2] Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 142.
[3] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “Cosmic Life,” in Writings in Time of War, trans. René Hague (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 70.
[4] Joy Andrews Hayter, The Cosmic Web: Hope for Our World through Spirituality and Science (Rhinebeck, NY: Red Elixir, 2023), 142–143, 144.
Image credit and inspiration: Greg Rakozy, Untitled (detail), 2015, photo, United States, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. We stand awed by our contemplation of the cosmos and the science within it.
Story from Our Community:
I was a PhD candidate in Plasma Physics. Most of my research career was in biophysics working in the laboratory. I’m speaking here as a scientist when I say very simply that matter does not live by itself. In laboratories, we have tried to bring matter to life, and we have consistently failed. The ancient way of understanding this is that the Spirit provides life to earthly matter. We can also understand it by saying that life is not something we possess as earthly individuals, but the presence of God that we share with one another.
—Carl H.
