The cosmic God is a surety

“I have no doubt now that God is with us all and comes often to many in a burst of awareness. The difference is that the Presence becomes a guide, a warmth, not a vengeful human being writ large. Instead the cosmic God is a surety, a promise of support, a reminder of what the Jewish community has always called "The Covenant" and the Quakers call "The Inner Light'. God is the internal voice calling me to give myself to the fullness of life. It is the trek of the soul to wholeness and understanding. It is an awareness within me of my identity with all creation and the strength I need to wrestle my own uncertainty, indifference, spiritual deafness to the ground.

 

Let me explain: Science has become my spiritual director.

 

It is science that brought me face-to-face with the awareness of the overwhelming, immeasurable presence that is God. It took me to the edge of life, beyond the fairytale God. It helped me to understand that the Light was the energy from which all things come. It brought me to realise that the Cosmic Presence, the beginning and end of everything, has been consumed, dwarfed, shrunk, and reduced to magic, warring, vending, judging, and manipulating the laws of life. God, to be God, is the substance, the embrace, the whole of life. It's out of five basic elements - oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon - that all the elements of life come. These five elements are at the base of all life processes, in all of us, in all living things everywhere. "We are made of the same makings as the stars," Dr Ashley King, a planetary scientist and stardust expert teaches. "Nearly all the elements in the human body were made in a star...", and so, I believe, will return to stardust at the end.

The poets tell us that we are nothing but stardust. But stardust is the same stuff of a Cosmic God as we are its cosmic dust. Think of it: God is within us and we are within God, the Light - God, the energy of all life, God the Creator of the universe.

 

God within us is Light, the essence of revelation and insight. God within us is energy, the pointer toward the tomorrow that comes out of today. God within us pours out on us the reckless generation of the gifts of life.”

            —from An Evolving God, An Evolving Purpose, An Evolving World by Joan Chittister (Fortress Press)