On reflection ...
Author: Rodney Wood
Rodney Wood is a retired URC Minister. |
‘On reflection’ is a phrase we use as an introduction to an improvement on an idea or proposal after we have thought about it. During my ministry, I usually began sermons by reflecting on a text, trying to see what it meant in its original historical context and also what it meant for ours today. Now in retirement, I can take the freedom to begin the other way and reflect on today’s reality (now so much more complex than the Biblical world-view) and see if it illumines scripture. Whether these reflective afterthoughts are improvements is perhaps moot, but at least they will be different.
Making sense of life is rather like the puzzle where one joins up the dots to make a picture. I am well aware that better minds may see dots that I have missed or disagree with some of the joins that I am making. Anyway, these are my dots and this is my picture!
Reality is both Being and Movement. Movement gives the three dimensional universe its fourth dimension of Time. Movement also gives it its character of contingency – a dependence which scientists trace back to the Big Bang, which some now call Inflation. The fact that everything is the result of something else has led thinkers to propose that there must be behind it all a necessary hook on which all else hangs, which is not dependent and not changing, This is the immutable God of Greek philosophy and classical theology.
This God does not sit easily with the God of the Old Testament, who can repent of intentions and change course. Carl Jung uses a this idea in his book, “The Answer to Job”, where God realises that Job has right on his side and the only way for God to regain the moral high ground is through being incarnated in Jesus. (Apparently this process of divine reflection took a few hundred years before being acted on.) Process theologians have explored a God who as a ‘living’ God, can react and respond in a dialogue with humanity, a ‘Becoming God'.
I want to suggest that Reflection is like a fifth dimension to reality. Reflection is something we all share in as humans. Our awareness and understanding today reach beyond our immediate surroundings to far out in space and way back in time to furthest galaxies and the background radiation of that big bang. It probes deep into the intricacies of the quantum world. Yet in doing so, we can loose sight of the very fact of being able to do so through our conscious awareness and reflection is itself an important characteristic of the cosmos.
Some would dismiss our conscious Reflection as a unique quirk of human brains, an ‘epiphenomenon’, and assert that only by human brains is the universe becoming aware of itself. But just as electricity was once known only through lodestones and lightning and now is found in everything, so it seems reflection will be. Teilhard de Chardin speculated about a primitive consciousness in atoms; today we hear about quantum entanglement where distantly separated particles make the same changes together, influencing each other. Einstein found this awareness ‘spooky’. There is the discovery of the fungal interconnectedness of trees, ‘the wisdom and intelligence of the forest’. The Gaia hypothesis suggested that earth has self-regulating mechanisms to maintain an equilibrium for life.
Arthur Koestler, long out of favour now, coined the word ‘holon’ to describe a unit that is part of a greater whole, and that is itself made up of parts.
Holons seem to run down in size indefinitely: even the atom, once thought to be the smallest conceivable thing, has been anatomised into ever-smaller particles. And consciousness-bearing earth may be no longer unique but one of a class, as may be confirmed through the search for exoplanets and the search for extra terrestrial life and intelligence. What would that greater Whole be, and what would we call it?
A book that gripped me in my early teens was C S Lewis’s “Voyage to Venus” (Perelandra). It concludes with the hero, Ransom’s vision of Reality, or The Great Dance. When Copernicus made the sun the centre of the solar system, he exploded the idea of the earth being the centre of the universe. If the earth is not at the centre, then, suggests Lewis, the centres can be everywhere. I summarise The Great Dance in quotations:
“. . . That Dust itself which is scattered so rare in Heaven, whereof all worlds, and the bodies that are not worlds, are made is at the centre. . . Each grain, if it spoke , would say, I am at the centre; for me all things were made . . .
Each grain is at the centre. The Dust is at the centre. The worlds are at the centre. The beasts are at the centre. The ancient peoples are there. . . There seems no plan because it is all plan: there seems no centre because it is all centre. . .
“And now . . . what had begun as speech was turned into sight. . . many cords or bands of light leaping over and under one another. . . Each figure as he looked at it became the master-figure or focus of the whole spectacle . . . Some of the thinner and more delicate cords were beings that we call short-lived: flowers and insects, a fruit or a storm of rain . . . Others were such things as we also think lasting: crystals, rivers, mountains, or even stars . . . the whole of these enamoured and inter-animated circlings was suddenly revealed as the mere superficies of a far vaster pattern in four dimensions, and that figure as the boundary of yet others in other worlds . . .”
The whole human religious enterprise is one of reflection leading to action. As we get nearer, as I do, towards the end of life, we have our personal times of reflection over the course of our lives, and wonder about its place in this great onward-moving tapestry of life. For life’s brief span we have been ‘at the centre’.
But reflection is not just personal. It can be communal – as in Holy Communion – and it can be national as on Remembrance Sunday. We live in an age when reflection has also become global, as people worldwide wrestle with the issues relating to our planet’s health and climate. Can we leap to the next holon and posit a cosmic reflection? If we thought of that whole living tapestry of Ransom’s vision having a super-conscious awareness and reflection it would be close to theology’s “immanent God” who “is all and in all” (1 Cor 15.28)
Of course, Ransom is ‘outside’ his vision. He has a Godlike view of the living tapestry of reality. That would give us a transcendent God, outside and not part of the universe. But the very vastness of the universe has made this God redundant to most of us. Whether the divine is transcendent or immanent, or both, the whole tapestry of reality, past, present and future is open to the divine reflection, “And God saw that it was good”. We, who also reflect, share partially in the divine reflecting. It is the image of God in which we are made. (Genesis 1. 26, 31)
Our part in the divine reflection gives us hope beyond death. Miguel de Unamuno, a Spanish philosopher of the last century, said, “To be remembered by God, is that not in a sense, to be?” The penitent thief crucified with Jesus, asked, Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Paul looked forward to a time of completion when “I will know fully even as I have been fully known” (1 Corinthians 13.12).
Jesus’ vision of God’s Kingdom was as a contrast to Rome’s empire. Christian thought developed it into a vision of a consummation of history and time. Teilhard wrote of an Omega Point, where the lines of evolution no longer separated out but converged. The letter to the Ephesians mentions a similar idea, a summing up, “a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (1.10). This “anakephalaiosis”, this ‘heading up’ is inclusive, none are omitted.
When I was a school teacher, it was hard to notice everyone equally. It was the very good and the very naughty who got most notice. There are souls who have striven, not for fame, but to be noticed by God, by exploits of mortification. Others have found union with God through quiet mystical contemplation. Jesus taught that even the sparrow is noticed by God (Matthew 10.29). Everyone in the tapestry of life reflects and is reflected upon in the great Reflection which Paul looks forward to: “ Then I will know fully even as I have been fully known”.
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