Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers:

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1 Living the Questions Science, Religion and an Evolving Faith "When I have a terrible need of dare I say, religion? then I go outside at night and paint the stars. Vincent Van Gogh Overview Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers: Grow, grow The Talmud I believe that what Christianity was to Judaism, science is to Christianity. Science is reformed Christianity; it is a community of members who must tell the truth to one another as they explore their faith in the inherent intelligibility of the universe. William Irwin Thompson These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. Flare up like flame and make big shadows I can move in. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don t let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand. Ranier Maria Rilke, Book of Hours Our ancestors could only intuit what this generation now knows empirically about the nature of reality: we are involved with a universe that is in a continual process of transformation, or what choreographer, Martha Graham, called the blessed unrest, the divine dissatisfaction. As an artist, she felt this condition in her own body, and in her urge to create ever-new forms of dance. The universe preserves its best evolutionary achievements, but like foundational positions in Painting the Stars 2013 livingthequestions.com, LLC Overview - 1

2 ballet, they are ends in themselves, but also means to more elegant, more complex, and more expressive forms of dance. This creative impulse is never satisfied. It might have stopped at galaxies, or bacteria, or a hyena. But it pressed forward, groping its way in the interplay of chance and purpose, suffering and inexplicable beauty, sheer terror and surprising tenderness. This blessed unrest rose up after five great extinctions in the history of our planet and gave birth to new forms, staggering in diversity and complexity. The crisis of the extinctions of dinosaurs made room for the small mammals to flourish. Flowers emerged to perfume and glorify the planet. And with them the pollinators: the bees, the bats, and the birds. Death itself is enfolded in this mysterious unfolding of creativity that is our cosmos. In the pithy adage of Tom Atlee, Death, it brings good things to life. In the course of time, self-conscious awareness emerged in at least one of these species. The relentless and irrepressible creativity that was fashioning a universe awakened to itself in human beings. This evolutionary process is a deep mystery. Spiritually, mystery is not the sum total of all that we don t yet know, but given enough time could figure out and move on to the next problem. Mystery is a condition of awe, of resting precisely in an unknowing, long enough for the silence to have its way with us. The goal of this curriculum is to create some space for us to inhabit this mystery more deeply, and explore the relationship between science, particularly evolution, and religion. Perhaps most importantly, the hope is that each participant will feel from the inside what it is like to be the presence of all this creativity showing up after 13.8 billion years as him or her. Without this felt sense of being one with the creative process that is ceaselessly animating life, the conversation will remain objective and academic. We invite you to engage these next six weeks with an awareness that you are not separate from the creativity that produced you. Our spiritual ancestors assumed that Earth was young, perhaps six to ten thousand years old, that God had created all creatures holus bolus, just as they appeared. A giraffe was surely an awesome creature in their eyes, but they had no way to understand that it actually took 13.8 billion years to produce a giraffe. They had no way of knowing that a giraffe s stunning beauty represented the coalescence of elements forged in an exploding star, the intelligence of the chlorophyll molecule that figured out how to convert the sun s light into useable energy, or that its long neck was shaped, in part, by the random mutation of genetic material that proved to be well adapted to its bioregion. Still, one can track in the sacred scripture of the Jews and early Christians, an intuition of historical momentum, a precursor to an awareness of evolution. In the cyclical worldview of agrarian societies life was imagined to be more of a wheel that circled around and around with the seasons, but wasn t really going anywhere. This was certainly incorporated by the ancient Jews in their annual Painting the Stars 2013 livingthequestions.com, LLC Overview - 2

3 festivals, but their religious sensibility told them that the wheel had gained some traction. Perhaps this intuition was grounded in their experience of historical oppression. When the boot of history is firmly pressing down on one s neck, you are less interested in yet another rotation of that particular wheel. Furthermore, unlike Eastern religions of the day, in which the goal of life was to escape the wheel of history and suffering, the intuition of the ancient Jews was that they were being called to inhabit it more deeply. That life was difficult was undeniable, but the Jews were carried by a promise of a better future, and this they staked their life on. In their bolder moments, they claimed that they were called to be the presence of that better future, in how they lived with each other and for the world. They were to be a light unto the nations. Furthermore, their God was accompanying them through the historical process, going before them and behind them (in a cloud and a pillar of fire), calling them to realize a future that their hearts knew was possible. History was on the move. As a Jew, Jesus also lived by the promise of a better future. Whereas the metaphor of his ancestral lineage was the Promised Land, Jesus chose a subversive one the Kingdom of God, for his day and age. The better future lay not with the Kingdom of Caesar and the imperial strategy of peace through violence. Jesus staked his life on that better future arising through justice, loving kindness, and an egalitarian mode of life in community. And like his own ancestors, Jesus ministry displayed an undeniable future orientation. A Great and Intimate Power that he called Abba, or Father, was moving through him to proclaim and enact that future as already having arrived in him, and yet awaiting fulfillment. His challenge to his core disciples to follow him implies a momentum that he is already embodying. He didn t say, Come, sit and meditate with me and be liberated from suffering. (This is not to deny the empirical benefits of meditation or the way in which meditation does liberate us from identification with ego). But his standards for discipleship were rigorous. Following him was no escape from suffering, but rather involved a radical willingness to embrace it: Take up your cross and follow me. Follow me into the future that was promised to your ancestors and needs you in order to be realized. Let nothing get in the way of the urgency to realize the Kin(g)dom of God. No social conventions: Let the dead bury the dead. No creature comforts: The foxes have dens, the birds have nests, but the son of man has nowhere to rest his head. And once you ve stepped into the ecstatic urgency of this mission, there is no looking back: Anybody who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is not fit for the Kin(g)dom. Paul experienced the presence of the resurrected Christ and caught this sense of urgency. Whatever happened in Jesus, in his life, death, and mysterious resurrection, represented, for Paul, what today we might call the evolution of a new human. Using the language of his faith, Paul called this new human, a second Adam. A new age had begun in Christ. When we read Paul s authentic Painting the Stars 2013 livingthequestions.com, LLC Overview - 3

4 letters (as well as those which used his name), through the lens of an evolutionary worldview, metaphors of momentum and development jump off the page. There is no sense in which Jesus did all the heavy lifting for the church, and therefore all we had to do was believe. Animated by the Spirit of Christ, Paul presses on toward the goal ; he runs the race ; he doesn t claim to have arrived, but rather prays that he might one day attain the resurrection that is, realize the mind and the heart that animated the Christ, here and now. Remarkably, he understands that creation has been involved in giving birth to his new human. Creation is groaning in labor pains, waiting for the children of God to show up in their new and improved version, anticipated and made possible by Jesus, who laid down the evolutionary template for the emergence of a new iteration of what it meant to be human. Neither Paul or Jesus had any understanding of evolution, but as spiritually evolved souls, they would have been tapped into the essential nature of reality. Without the words or the scientific knowledge to express it, nevertheless they would have intuited that a Power was living through them and doing so with purpose and intention. It is no longer me, says Paul, but Christ in me. As we move into the second decade of the twenty-first century there is arising in the consciousness and in the culture a group of spiritual seekers who are themselves intuiting that whatever is pointed to by the metaphor of God must be intimately involved in the evolutionary processes of nature, consciousness, culture, and social systems. While there is no consensus about how this is so, undoubtedly this will be the century in which philosophers, theologians, and spiritual seekers address this question robustly. They call themselves evolutionaries. Regardless of their spiritual lineage, or the absence of an explicit lineage, they share three core qualities, according to Carter Phipps (Evolutionaries). First, they are cross-disciplinary generalists. Because this evolutionary dynamic encompasses all domains of reality, it covers every discipline imaginable, including science, culture, systems theory, religion, and the study of consciousness itself. Most evolutionaries are synthetic thinkers, bringing to bear upon the considerable problems we face, the wisdom of the Whole. While not denying the need for in depth specialization, what matters in the 21 st century is being able to make connections. They are holistically inclined patternrecognizers. The emergence of this quality seems to be a fruit of the evolutionary process itself, liberating our species from the fragmented and fragmenting silos that academia has become. Ken Wilber calls this vision-logic, to see through the eyes of the whole. Second, evolutionaries enjoy a deep-time perspective, the vision of a universe that has been in development for almost fourteen billion years. This perspective breaks the spell of local time. Catholic priest and paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin compared this capacity to the development of depth Painting the Stars 2013 livingthequestions.com, LLC Overview - 4

5 perspective in a child. Until depth perception kicks in, the child lives in a twodimensional flatland. Just like the child, deep-time perspective enables us to live in a four dimensional universe. This itself represents an emergence of a new kind of consciousness. It means, among other things, that we can set our local selves within the context of a much larger process and realize that this process is, in a very real sense, living through us. As we identify with this unimaginably old (and yet ever-arising) process, we are liberated from the tyranny of our early biological self s motivational impulses as survival, sex, status, and security. We understand that these instincts, too, are evolutionary gifts, but that the Process itself is alluring us to higher and deeper expressions of life, grounded in biology and yet more aligned with our deeper potentials. We can choose to realize the higher, spiritual motivations of this impulse to evolve. Third, evolutionaries tend to be optimistic about the future. This organic hopefulness is grounded in the second characteristic just discussed. Contemplating deep time, a clear pattern emerges, whereby cosmological cataclysms, extinctions on Earth, and unconscionable violence and injustice, while undeniable, are contextualized by a cosmic capacity for resilience and creativity. In fact, in every instance, these problems become the evolutionary catalysts for the emergence of new intelligences that are provoked by the crisis. Bacteria take millions and millions of years to solve the problem of the oxygen crisis in Earth s early atmosphere, but human beings, (as the interior dimension of the evolutionary process itself), are able to be bring the catalyst of conscious awareness and agency to bear on our problems much more quickly. What s more, there is an undeniable trajectory to the evolutionary process towards increased complexity and consciousness. To use philosophical categories there is an increase in the capacities for beauty, truth, and goodness. This hopeful orientation toward the future, grounded in empirical observation, is perhaps the most controversial claim of the three because it suggests progress. Many scientists deny that evolution suggests progress, and in fact, may be vehemently opposed to it. Historian, Massimo Salvadori, reminds us that the 20 th century was a great burial ground for ideas and bodies In this vast cemetery, the idea of Progress was laid to rest both by those who had consciously rejected it and by those who had first undergone its molding and then gravely deformed it. (Progress: Can We Do Without It?) Progress reminds us of mistaken and often grotesque interpretations of evolution such as social Darwinism, elitism, Hitler s Germany, and anthropocentrism. Even to raise the possibility that evolution is progressive raises old anxieties. Liberal churches picked up this modernist rejection of the myth of progress. Yet a quick glance over the past sixty years in Western, developed nations, should at least give us warrant to open up the conversation again. The human rights revolution liberated women, blacks, gays and lesbian, differently challenged, and even ecosystems, through legislation, with the right to full inclusion. Jeremy Rifkin, has documented exhaustively the evolution of Painting the Stars 2013 livingthequestions.com, LLC Overview - 5

6 the empathic impulse in the human being since the dawn of civilization, in his book The Empathic Civilization. Cognitive scientist and atheist, Steven Pinker, has done the same kind of painstaking research in relation to violence in his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, concluding that (contrary to popular assumptions) violence has decreased dramatically over the course of history. This is no way implies a smooth, upward trajectory to the evolutionary process. Mass shootings and epic failures of empathy easily come to mind. Still, as Pinker illustrates with careful research, these stand out precisely because they are sensational and newsworthy, exceptions to the rule. The power of an evolutionary hope is that it is grounded in empirical evidence of a deep-time universe that is in always in the process of learning from the various crises of life. This mysterious creativity is the ultimate context for suffering, violence, and death. When this creativity becomes conscious in humans, the potential for the harnessing of its power for virtuous ends is exponential. Another reason for suspicion about progress is that according to the metaphysical assumption of some popular, atheistic scientists evolution is purposeless. It is so, in their opinion, for a single reason, and it is not empirical evidence. The risk of allowing mythic superstition and a designer God back in the game one who engineers and controls every aspect of the universe is not one they want to take. No serious theologian would disagree with this concern. However, there are more nuanced expressions of theology that have gone beyond arguments from intelligent design, and that honor contingency, chance, and chaos. In a universe that is truly free, there is no pre-existing divine plan for creation. There is however a divine yearning, felt in us as a tremendous movement of the world which bears us along, but beyond, to embrace that movement in love. (Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, p. 298) All creation carries within it a memory of the divine heart out of which it emerged. Our tradition has called this the image of God. But in an evolutionary model, this image is not static. It is more like a felt impulse a dynamic yearning fired with a holy urgency to go to the limits of our longing, inhabit life more deeply, to protect what matters more fiercely, to transcend limiting forms and modes of consciousness, to realize our unity in the midst of diversity, and to co-create the future which Jesus called the Kin(g)dom of God. We hear a mysterious voice in the depths of our longing: Flare up like flame and make big shadows I can move in. -- Bruce Sanguin Painting the Stars 2013 livingthequestions.com, LLC Overview - 6