Illuminated by Starlight

The theologian Karl Rahner wrote:

 ‘Today the Christian is aware of living on a tiny planet that is part of a system of a particular sun, which itself belonged to a Galaxy with 300 million stars and is many thousands of light years broad. In this cosmos of unimaginable size . . . ( we believe that)  the eternals Logos of God, who drives forward these billions of galaxies became a human being on this small planet which is a speck of dust in the universe.’

 We wonder what creation stories those other inhabited specks of dust might have. Would they include a Fall? And if not would an incarnation still be central to their stories? God, of course can be present on other planets in a million ways. Incarnation and redemption are not unique to earth. Nor does the possibility of a different kind of incarnation to ours diminish the unique importance of our Christian story. We believe that the reason Christ, the cosmic Christ, has the supreme role of saving and completing the entire material universe. And we continue to wonder.

Palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ also wrote,

‘All that I can entertain is the possibility of a multi aspect incarnation which would be realised on all the stars . . .

Alice Meynell imagines this ‘multi-aspect incarnation’. She pictures an extra-terrestrial gathering of the civilisations of countless constellations, telling stories about their incarnations and eternities, listening to  ‘ a million alien Gospels, in what guise He trod the Pleides, the Lyre, the Bear’.

Oh, be prepared my soul!

To read the inconceivable, to scan

The myriad forms of God

those stars unroll

When, in our turn,

We show them to a Man’

These reflections draw us into a deeper exploration of our own faith story, and especially the meaning of an Original Sin. Might we be the only inhabited star to have disappointed our creator? From the beginning there have been theologians who come up careful not to confuse myth with history, find no place since the first flowering forth, for an actual historical fall, a geographical Eden. Humanity they say is not defined by an original act of disobedience, condemned from the very start to a punitive exile.

Paradise was never lost, they hold. Incarnation is not about restoring it. Planned from the very beginning, it is about the healing, flourishing and perfecting of our human nature as it evolves, despite its ignorance, darkness, alienation and destructiveness, into its final destiny in the heart of God. The Fall account is a story about our daily disruption of the harmony between the creator, humanity and creation due to what Pope Francis calls, in his encyclical Laudato Si, ‘our presuming to take the place of God and our refusal to acknowledge our creaturely limitations.’

Original Sin is not the name of a primordial catastrophe. It expresses, as Fr Kevin Kelly puts it, ‘the dark underside of our greatest humanity and our graced world’. In ‘Christianity and Evolution’, Jack Mahoney SJ critiques the theology of atonement that links the Fall with Incarnation. He believes that ‘it would be more theologically appropriate now to drop (the doctrine of Original Sin) as unnecessary and cumbersome baggage.’ Why? Because God’s first intention was never thrown off course.

Some leading theologians call for a radical revision of this flawed teaching, this blight on the blossoming of Catholicism. Apart from its implicit denial of the evolutionary process, the doctrine is generally understood to define our disobedient disposition, the flawed nature and origin of our human condition, the guilty way we stand before our creator.

But we are born in God’s image, not definitively shaped by SIM from the beginning. Perhaps baptism is not so much about eggs or sizing a past original sin from the baby soul as about preparing her innocent heart for encountering the waiting thin of the world (Saint Paul).

We are not a fallen race. We never were. And this, of course, is a lost traditional insight. St Augustine of Hippo wrote of the first creation as a  ‘carmen Dei’, a divinely inspired Symphony of Incarnate beauty. St Bonaventure saw our planet and its people distilling light ‘as a stained-glass window in the morning sun’. More recently Thomas Merton reminded us that we were created to be ‘manifestations of divine beauty in a world that is absolutely transparent, and the divine light is shining through it all the time.’

Teilhard de Chardin was aware that the world stands at the threshold of a swiftly developing theology of creation, together with a new cosmology. He believed that ‘our former planetary and anthropocentric focus must give way to a fuller consciousness of cosmic community.’

And now, as astonishing discoveries and theories about our origin, evolution and destiny fill the media, a significant renewal in Catholic theology, spirituality and pastoral ministry must surely follow. Writing about ‘the fecundity and creative artistry of the Creator’, Zachary Hayes OFM, at the end of his, A Window to the Divine, asks a fundamental question –

‘How big a God do you believe in?’

 

(Extracts from a Tablet article 2015)