Our Story
Billions of years ago an invisible dot of nothingness exploded into everything that is – the infinite cosmos of each tiny heart, the eternal heart of each expanding cosmos. And we somehow knew it was the unfolding of a love-story. We sensed that the Big Bang was the sound of love, and that creation, once molten rock, would one day sing operas.
On planet earth, almost 14 billion years later, another invisible dot of love exploded in a human womb to create and develop a new order of that one being, of that one living love-story.
It was the same dot – the first the kiss of God to impregnate nothingness with divine creation; then much later this love-story evolved in the kiss of two human beings to create a unique divine-human creature. And in the sheer beauty, love and meaning of that astonishing revelation we no longer doubted. Now we knew for sure that our first hunch was right. Creation was the first Incarnation, the first Bible, as St Thomas Aquinas put it. We also began to understand that we ourselves, now, actually are the evolving, incarnate, invincible, visceral embodiment of the love-energy of God, a love-energy that is dedicated, from the very beginning, to grow this earth into heaven! And this sublime, distorted, twisted, ineffable, terrible love-story is only beginning. And we are that love-story.
From its very beginning nearly 14 billion years ago, the world was already permeated and filled with God’s creative and compassionate presence. There never was a time or place in the history of evolution when God was absent from the world. God was always the beating heart of the universe. In the person of Christ the fullness of the tremendous love-story was finally revealed. The human is now the home of the divine. Salvation and healing have taken place. What was begun in Creation is completed in the Incarnation. This long-awaited revelation of a fleshed God has brought a stunning vision to human awareness. The search for God is no longer a dualistic, divisive journey outwards, away from the material, the ‘ordinary’; it is the recognition of what is already throbbing within us. That is what we celebrate in the sacraments – because the immediacy of the incarnate Mother-Creator keeps slipping our doubting minds. We forget. Grace reminds and re-creates us. It is the divine power that energises our daily lives. Grace is life fully lived. God’s basic gift to us is the life we live and the good earth from which we make our living.
As Christians this insight is offered to all of us. And to the rest of the world too, of course. The smallest particle of Creation is a theophany, a revelation of God – the acorn, the shrill siren of a passing train, the falling star, the shining eyes. All too often our seeing stops at appearances, failing to explore and recognise the love and meaning at the core – the very heart of the Christian revelation. We need eyes to read the wind, people’s faces as they pass, the new runway, the old war-memorial in such a way as to go below the surface. But there are moments that stand out from all the others, moments which come like a gift, moments when, as theologian Sean Fagan puts it, ‘the focus shifts and a single leaf becomes a universe, a rock speaks prophecies and a smile transforms a relationship’.
In his Dominum et Vivificantem Pope St John Paul II wrote, ‘The Incarnation signifies the taking up into unity with God not only human nature, but in the human nature, in a sense, everything that is flesh. . . the Incarnation then also has a cosmic significance: the first-born of Creation unites himself in some way with the entire reality of humanity, within the whole of Creation’. It’s over 30 years since that document was written. The ‘cosmic significance’ has now exploded beyond all imagination. In his encyclical Laudato Si’ Pope Francis calls for an ecological conversion, a paradigm shift in our understanding and compassion for all of Creation in the light of Incarnation.
Scientific revelations are radically changing the way we understand and live out our faith. Creation and its evolution are all part of Incarnation. We are called to become familiar with the term ‘the Cosmic Christ’ and to see all evolution and cosmic energy from the first star to the final ending as the work of the Holy Spirit. Evolution, you could say, is intrinsic to Incarnation. It is how Creation, already containing the divine seed, has prepared the necessary ground for the human birthing of God.
The Pope hopes that a ‘new conversation in a new language’ will surely change our wanton neglect of Mother Earth who is God’s incarnate body and our nurturing home. This radical theological shift in our recognition of the divinity of Creation will profoundly transform the whole heart of our faith, our preaching and teaching, our pastoral practices and ministries. It will renew our understanding of church, the sacraments and especially of the Eucharist. It will revolutionise the meaning of grace, of sin, of salvation and contemplation, of how we see the world and its evolution, of how we perceive, adore and deepen our intimacy with God.
( From the preface to Horizons of Hope)