O All-Nourishing Holy Abyss

I hope to see more cosmic contributions from Ed. So beautiful and essential to knowing who we are, why we are and where we are in the "big story."

Thank you,

Judith

Thomas Berry -- geologian, cultural historian, priest, author, teacher -- transitioned into the Mystery on June 1 of this year. Some of his unpublished writings just arrived by mail -- The Christian Future and the Fate of Earth (edited by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, Orbis). After a brief perusal of the chapters, it looks "evocative" to borrow a favorite Berry word.

Berry along with Hays is always searching for words that awake one's imagination, e.g., "numinous," or creates new ones, e.g., "ecozoic" to help penetrate the Mystery for the reader. A "non-religous" author who also does this for me is Eckhart Tolle -- The Power of Now, etc...

I always enjoyed listening to Berry because when he would hesitate to search for the correct word, I never guessed correctly what he would use.

Yes, we definitely need spiritual teachers like Berry, Hays, Tolle to give us the (new) words that will help to understand the Mystery. An oxymoronic task for sure but one that's worth the effort.

...or re-live a memory. I am an Assisi Italy pilgrim returned home. All the writings are true; Assisi's richness in mysticism, spirituality, antiquity and passion imprint ones essence. Relections of Assisi are for those who walked and saw, but feeling Assisi weeks afer ones return home, is for those whose many facets included a pregnant abyss now animated with the holiness of Assisi. There is a kinetic element to the kindling by the Grace of God; when grace blows on our embers it is sacred poetry, no words or chants are needed to motion with transcendance...

Sincerest gratitude Fr Hayes for your bountiful blessings and gifts,
Liz Juarez
9/5/09
8:29 a.m.
Orange, California

In fact, last week I walked through a basilica, the Saint Sophia in Istanbul. I did it with my daughter and son-in-law and 3 children, 5, 4, and 2, and several hundred other tourists. The place was a mob, with guards at the gate and an entrance fee for older children and adults younger than 65. Walkways have been set up to keep the flow of tourists moving. A huge scaffolding was set up in the middle to clean up some of the artwork in the central dome. The tourists were speaking several different languages, but most of them were Turks. It was hard to concentrate on the fact that this was once a church, with services of worship to the living God.

The first time I walked through Aya Sofya, though, I was the only visitor. It was in 1963 and I was just 24 yrs old, with only three months of Turkish study behind me. I came upon several old Moslem scholars laboring over a number of huge tomes piled on a table in a very small room. They did their best to welcome me and asked who I was and how I came there. The whole visit was a wonder of international, intergenerational, interfaith attempts at communication, but we both felt quite warmed by the encounter, I think. I used to feel astonishment at having the luck to spend time in Washington, DC, center of the early history of the United States. Wow! Think what it felt like to be walking in a church with 1500 years of history, in the steps of Constantine and Justinian and generations of Christians and Moslems and now centuries of tourists. Think what it took to build a church of that size in those days. And the silent building game me the peace to imagine times back over the centuries.

A little later that year I visited an archeological digs at Alacahöyük, a little east of Ankara. It was the outline of what researchers said was the library of the palace of the Hittite kingdom that built it. It was barely the foundations visible, but there were clay tablets with business records piled around. I walked through a small tunnel which was apparently meant to be a way of escape to the outside of the town in case of attack. I could just stand up straight without my head hitting the top. The tunnel was found in its original state, not reconstructed. It was made of stones in the keystone design, no cement or anything holding it together, and it had stayed that way for something like 5000 years. I was walking through a tunnel 5000 years old....

It was a great experience living in Turkey. I left in 1979 after 9 years working there.I visited several times on my way home from other jobs. Last week was the first time I had visited in 11 years. The differences we found in Turkey were incredible. I hardly knew where I was in Ankara, it has expanded so much. It's convenient to have the beautiful highways, and the numerous gas stations open late into the night, and the clean bathrooms with western toilets and toilet paper in the holders. When I was first there, there was no toilet paper, just a faucet with water running beside the hole in the floor with places for your feet to stand. But it was very sweet living there. It seemed very true and innocent somehow, and close to life and death. I loved it there. Today my friends and their children are not so different from how they were. Turkish hospitality is still a reality. But the children, now grown up, observed that although people there have all the modern technology we do--almost everyone has a cell phone and a TV and computers and can do email--somehow they haven't achieved the mentality that goes with those things in other countries. Myself, I can't think that's all bad. The poetry isn't quite gone yet.

Thank you.

"Has Brian Swimme’s “all-nourishing abyss” given to us a new wonder-soaked name for the Divine Mystery we so casually call God?"

I believe it has, Fr. Hays. The very concept of the empty space in atoms is discussed in a favorite 1990 film, MINDWALK. It stars Liv Ullman, physicist, Sam Waterston, politician, and John Heard, poet, as they walk on Mont-St-Michel in Normandy, France. The photography is lovely.

How can one not be very receptive to that new name? Astonishing. Thank you, indeed.