Friday, November 22, 2024
In her book Race and the Cosmos, Dr. Barbara Holmes expands the quest for justice and liberation to a cosmic level.
The languages of physics and cosmology offer powerful analogies that reveal our cosmic and spiritual identities and empower our collective creativity. One thing is certain: Although we cannot reason our way out of this quandary, we can allow the universe to reveal its secrets through us. We can contemplate and consider together. We can expand our spiritual and cosmic vocabulary and allow the mysteries of life to permeate every cell. We have waited long enough. It’s time to take the transcendent leap forward in hopes of personal and communal healing as well as a shared cosmic future. [1]
Holmes continues:
Any community that we construct on Earth will be only a small model of a universe whose community includes billions of stars and planetary systems. Are we alone? We don’t know, but if we don’t know how to become a community with our own species, how shall we find harmony with other life forms in the cosmos? Our ideas of community begin with fragmentation, difference, and disparity seeking wholeness.
Our beloved community is an attempt to hot-glue disparate cultures, language, and ethnic origins into one mutually committed whole. The universe tells a completely different story—that everything is enfolded into everything….
Even though the languages of the new physics and cosmology discard mechanistic understandings of the universe in favor of potential, we love order. We see it where it doesn’t exist and impose it through our narratives. Everything that we do conceals the unity that seems to be intrinsic to our life space. We take pictures of objects that seem to be outside of self, we demarcate national boundaries, we align with friends and break with enemies, we give and receive in what seem to be neat sequential packets of life and experience….
Perhaps in ways that we don’t yet understand, the struggle for justice on many fronts is an enfolding image of the whole—the embodiment of a holistic and unfragmented community. This community … would not be the logical outcome of progressive movements toward an ascertainable external goal, but would be the sum of past, present, and future expectations and disappointments. Then the community-called-beloved becomes all that we can and cannot conceive, all that lies beyond the horizon of apprehension but is available to us as part of the matrix of wholeness….
We are one, and our wars and racial divisions cannot defeat the wholeness that lies just below the horizon of human awareness…. Diversity may not be a function of human effort or justice. It may just be the sea in which we swim. To enact a just order in human communities is to reclaim a sense of unity with divine and cosmological aspects of the life space. As Hebrew Scripture scholar Terence Fretheim suggests, the “Let us” discourse in Genesis [1:26] is a statement of the community of God. God is creating and ordering the universe, but does not do it alone. [2]
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Sarah Young; Jesus Calling: November 22
A thankful attitude opens the windows of heaven. Spiritual blessings fall freely onto you through those openings into eternity. Moreover, as you look up with a grateful heart, you get glimpses of Glory through those windows. You cannot yet live in heaven, but you can experience foretastes of your ultimate home. Such samples of heavenly fare revive your hope. Thankfulness opens you up to these experiences, which then provide further reasons to be grateful. Thus, your path becomes an upward spiral: ever increasing in gladness.
Thankfulness is not some sort of magic formula; it is the language of Love, which enables you to communicate intimately with Me. A thankful mindset does not entail a denial of reality with its plethora of problems. Instead, it rejoices in Me, your Savior, in the midst of trials and tribulations. I am your refuge and strength, an ever-present and well-proved help in trouble.
RELATED SCRIPTURE:
Habakkuk 3:17-18 (NIV)
17 Though the fig tree does not bud
and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails
and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen
and no cattle in the stalls,
18 yet I will rejoice in the Lord,
I will be joyful in God my Savior.
Additional insight from Habukkuk 3:17-19: Crop failure and the death of animals would devastate Judah. But Habakkuk affirmed that even in times of starvation and loss, he would still rejoice in the Lord. Habakkuk’s feelings were not dominated by the events around him but by faith in God’s ability to give him strength. When nothing makes sense and when your troubles seem to be more than you can bear, remember that God gives you strength. Take your eyes off your difficulties and look to him.
Psalm 46:1 (NIV)
Psalm 46
For the director of music. Of the Sons of Korah. According to alamoth. A song.
1 God is our refuge and strength,
an ever-present help in trouble.
Additional insight from Psalm 46:1-48:14: Psalms 46 through 48 are hymns of praise, celebrating deliverance from some great foe. Psalm 46 may have been written when the Assyrian army invaded the land and surrounded Jerusalem during Hezekiah’s reign (2nd Kings 18:13-19:37).
