The Divine Universe

You may be surprised when I say that my prayer begins at my bottom. At the risk of repeating what I have said elsewhere, I will tell you why.
It begins with St Paul. He referred many times in his letters to the body of Christ, by which he meant the community of faith. He declared that we are members, limbs and organs of the body of Christ. But he doesn’t stop there. He told the Colossians that, “all things in heaven and on earth were created” in Christ, and a few sentences further on, “in him all things hold together.”
St John, in the prologue to the fourth Gospel, says the same thing in a more imaginative way. “In the beginning was the Word (Greek, Logos), and the Word was God. He (the Logos) was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him.” He was referring to Jesus, the mortal human manifestation of an eternal and divine being who is infinitely more than a mortal man.
The word Logos (from which we get our word, logic) suggests the mind, the knowledge, the intention or wisdom of God, uttered not only through Jesus, but also in and through all things, our whole universe, and all universes if there are others. This is the embodiment of God. God is pure spirit, according to the Catholic Catechism, but not a disembodied spirit. The Bible knows nothing of disembodied spirits. Even angels in the Bible have bodies.
In recent times, theologians have taken to referring to the Cosmic Christ to distinguish the man Jesus from the eternal being Paul and John wrote of. The incarnation is manifest in all of physical nature, as well as being focused historically in Jesus. The leaders at the Council of Nicea finally defined the eternal incarnation of God as the Second Person of the Holy Trinity.
Recent discoveries in astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology offer us a far richer understanding of our universe than Paul, John or the Nicene fathers had. It is no longer even seen as a collection of independent material objects waltzing around in space, under the influence of gravity, according to the principles of general relativity. An organic interdependence has been recognised, as intimate as the organic interdependence of the parts of our bodies. The universe is, in fact, a living organism.
Physicist Brian Swimme holds that the universe is not just a material entity; it is a spiritual event. We tend to separate spiritual and material reality. We speak of the “natural” and the “supernatural”. This dichotomy is a peculiarly Western notion. It is tenuously connected with Plato’s idealism, but we really owe it to the 17th century philosopher, René Descartes. ‘Cartesian’ dualism is firmly entrenched in Western philosophy and in Christianity today. Material objects are not permanent realities; they are events in the universal field of energy, the quantum vacuum. Scientists distinguish between energy and matter, but now recognise that they are of the same essential nature: matter is energy. Energy, on the other hand, is not seen as a temporary entity. The quantum vacuum is regarded as being outside time and space. This causes us to review our traditional dualism. Monism is gaining influence.
And it is important for our understanding of prayer. Prayer is an activity of the whole person. It is not my disembodied ‘spirit’ going walkabout on its own. Paul described an experience when he was unsure if he was “in the body or out of it”. But he was still feeling and thinking; he “heard words that cannot be uttered”. So his ‘spiritual’ experience was certainly embodied. The resurrection appearances of Jesus to the disciples suggest some sort of quasi-material body. I am one who believes that the gospel accounts refer to real experiences, even if their nature is uncertain.
And this has a practical application that has been discovered by many people. For me the best way to still my mind is to focus my attention on my body. I feel the pressure of the chair I am sitting on. This is what I mean by beginning with my bottom. It is the start of a process of feeling my relationship to the world around me, and ultimately to God, immanent in the world. I try not to leap too quickly into thinking about distant things and situations. I spend a little time getting ‘in touch’ with my body, literally ‘coming to my senses’, then to the traffic on the road, the birds in the garden and other local sounds. I can ask myself in what way God loves the source of these. Only then do I allow my attention to move outward, to things beyond the range of my senses: the wider community, its wisdom and its foolishness, its happiness and its pain.
This is a danger point. I have to make an effort not to wander off aimlessly in my imagination and thinking. There is a purpose in connecting myself to the outside in this way. It is to feel myself part of it all, and to look for epiphanies and miracles of God in nature and in acts of generosity, kindness, tolerance and forgiveness. So I still need to focus my mind.
I also perceive God in what I know of the continuous creative process going on throughout the universe – new plants, animals and people, new planets, new stars, new galaxies, coming into being from the remnants of those that have previously lived and died. The death and resurrection of the Cosmic Christ is happening all the time throughout the universe.
This reflection on the wider universe also gives me a sense of proportion. I ask myself why I think that our human species is of such tremendous importance in the cosmic scheme of things. Even Jesus said that the very hairs of our heads are numbered, and that that every sparrow is important too. But I don’t think this is a statement about our relative importance or the sparrow’s; I think it is a statement about the intensity of God’s love. When we speak of natural things we are speaking of God’s incarnate self, his only begotten Son, God’s cosmic incarnation, the Second person of the Trinity. God’s love of the world and us is his love of himself too.
Finally I come back to myself. Where am I? What am I doing? What am I going to do today? The answers to those questions are of miniscule cosmic impact, but they are important for me because I have real responsibilities as part of the cosmic organism, however small.

When things go unexpectedly well we say, “Thank God!” And sometimes we really believe that God has intervened on our behalf, has diverted nature from the course it would naturally take. Such a belief is quite harmless and may even give a boost to an individual’s personal religion. On the other hand, when some catastrophe occurs or some unspeakable act of injustice or violence, we say, “Where was God? Why didn’t he prevent this?” Individual religious faith may then be threatened. So sometimes we believe that God has used some kind of magic on our behalf that we call a miracle, and sometimes we doubt if God even knows how to operate properly the nature he himself created.

Both these notions are wrong. There is no such thing as magic, whether we dignify it with the name miracle or not. Miracle means ‘something that causes wonder’; magic means actions or events that subvert or intervene in the workings of nature. No doubt things happen that we cannot explain, but that does not mean that the “laws” of nature have been broken; it means that nature is stranger then we think. If we imagine that science knows everything about nature, then we may think, quite wrongly, that the laws of nature have been broken. Nature, as conceived by God, is completely consistent, coherent and rational, and is more resourceful than we can imagine.

What is perplexing is the unpredictability. When we are dealing with simple mechanical systems, predictions can be made with the help of mathematical equations. But in spite of what many people believe, nature is not a simple mechanical system. At the most basic, atomic level there is inherent uncertainty. This was only discovered last century, giving rise to quantum theory. At the most basic level, scientists can only calculate ratios of probability. No outcome is certain; none is impossible. So, is God in charge or not? Does nature have absolute freedom to do what it likes – what scientists call randomness? That question deserves careful thought.

What is the relationship between physical nature and the Holy Trinity? We are taught that God created everything “ex nihilo” (out of nothing). Physical nature, then, is entirely of God, the source and essence of all being: conceived of God in the womb of God; born of God as dynamic, intensely active yet ordered energy in space and time. God possesses limitless energy, space and time. Within this infinite potential, God is incarnate, embodied. God is pure spirit, but not disembodied spirit. Saint Paul referred to a spiritual body when writing of life beyond death. The idea of a disembodied spirit was meaningless to him. The resurrection stories emphasise the bodily-ness of the risen Christ too. Embodiment is of the essence of God; that is why we have the Second Person of the Trinity.

The Second Person of the Trinity, begotten of God, is not only the man Jesus. St Paul and St John said that everything is in Christ and through Christ. In fact, if Christ is divine, then he is not a finite entity at all. God’s incarnation, his embodiment, is everything that is and can possibly be. As well as being absolutely transcendent to physical nature, God is also totally immanent in it, because God cannot be relatively or partially anything. God does not have degrees of being; he is not fragmented into parts. His incarnate self is everything, everywhere, and of equal status and “coeternal” with his transcendent self. Seen through the eyes of Paul, John and modern cosmology, this is what the Nicene Creed says. Physical nature is God’s embodiment. Physicist Brian Swimme has said that our universe is not a material object; it is a spiritual event. The Cartesian separation of body and spirit is a philosophical aberration peculiar to Western thinking.

So why doesn’t the “Father” discipline the “Son” more effectively? Why is nature, especially humankind, allowed to play up so? God has absolute freedom. If the “Son” is co-equal with the “Father” (Nicene Creed again), then God incarnate has absolute freedom too. Nature, including humankind, has a terrifying degree of freedom. And there, perhaps, we may have a theological explanation of quantum uncertainty!

But that is not much comfort to the survivors of the Holocaust or other victims of disasters. Are we then helpless victims of absolutely random chance? No. Cosmic optimists, Christians for example, believe that there is an underlying motive for existence – love. We believe, in fact, that God is love. Love is what constrains the universe in some kind of order, astronomically through gravity, socially through some sense that prevents us from being quite as dreadful as we could possibly be; call it conscience perhaps.

As an individual I have only a simplistic and hazy notion of what love is. Divine love is much more far-sighted and wise than I can comprehend. Jesus and many other holy people have been able to focus human love in miraculous ways, such as healing the sick. This focussing of love is called faith, and Jesus wished there was much more of it. But even when faith is lacking, love still operates, only in a more obscure and often delayed way. Good eventually comes out of evil, we say. From stars to humans and everything else, the new emerges to replace what dies – resurrection.

I cannot pretend to understand God’s technology of love. As St Paul said, God’s wisdom looks like foolishness to us. But I have seen enough evidence to convince me that there is a purpose, and to permit me to believe that the ultimate outcome is to be good. And my belief in God is not in some disembodied entity outside the universe or permeating the space between things. I believe that God is the source, the essence and the totality of all being, including physical nature.

The problem of evil and suffering remains. But I don’t see this as a technical problem for God to solve. I see it as inherent in the transcendent mystery of existence in the process of becoming what it truly is. Why is God taking this utterly baffling journey? Why did his special human incarnation, Jesus, have to endure the greatest cruelty his contemporaries could inflict? It seems that, in choosing not only to be but also to become, God has chosen to suffer till the end of time. God has no technical fix, only the immanent energy of love, the Holy Spirit.

Even for those who possess that cosmic optimism that emerges as religious belief, it is necessary to recognise that there are hazards in the way. There are con artists and false signposts that will leave you stranded far away from the happiness you believe can be yours. There’s a story in two of the gospels, Matthew and Luke, which offers great insight into the traps that await the unwary.

Things really begin with Jesus’ baptism by John, first described by Mark. On that occasion God spoke to Jesus saying, “You are my Son, my beloved one.” That is a way of saying, “You are the Messiah.” No doubt Jesus was thrilled by this divine confirmation of what John and others had been suggesting for some time, but he wisely took time out to think about this stupendous vocation.

The description of the mental struggle Jesus went through is very like a parable. It looks as though Jesus intended it to be a teaching story and he has carefully crafted it accordingly. There are several lessons to be learned.

One of the first things I notice is Satan quoting from the Bible. I am often struck by how the Bible can be used to promote hatred, intolerance, injustice, war and violence, or to intimidate and manipulate the ignorant, credulous and vulnerable. The Bible was used to promote slavery in the 19th century and is still used as an excuse for anti-Semitism, homophobia, racism, male chauvinism, unjust discrimination and religious intolerance. Jesus quoted Scripture, but most often it was to challenge religious leaders about their misunderstanding and abuse of it. Sometimes he overruled it altogether. I have to say, the Bible is not always the source of all truth; it can be made the source of very serious error.

Jesus’ temptations were related to his realization that he was the Messiah. It was a particular crisis in his own personal life. We are tempted differently, less dramatically, by common life situations. But Jesus’ three temptations are archetypal. That is to say, each stands for a whole range of temptations, and they identify areas in which we are all vulnerable.

I wonder if you noticed that there is one thing in common with all three temptations. They are all about taking short cuts, and we all love a short cut when we spot it.

“Command that these stones be made bread.” Jesus enjoyed a good feed as much as anyone. In fact he was accused of being a glutton and a drunkard. But, even now, when he was really hungry, he knew he was not into magic. In fact, there’s no such thing as magic. Satan is the ultimate liar. Magic, if it existed, would be the ultimate short cut to get what you want. A lot of people in Jesus’ time, and some even today, think there really is such a thing as magic, or even think Jesus could do it. Jesus simply pointed out that Satan had his priorities all wrong. In any case, God doesn’t work that way, and nor would he.

Next, Satan showed Jesus all the wealth of the world: “I shall give to you all this power and glory; for it has been handed over to me, and I may give it to whomever I wish. 
All this will be yours, if you worship me.” He offered Jesus another short cut, but again it was a thumping lie. The only wealth and power Satan had was what he had accrued by fraud and trickery. If Jesus was Messiah he was destined to rule the world. Even to become the President of the United States requires many millions of dollars and enormous influence in high places. Satan’s misappropriated wealth and power could be a great help. But Jesus believed God had a better way than spending megabucks and patrolling the corridors of power. Today, it still seems that he made a terrible choice from his own point of view. It needs a lot of explaining.

In my eighties, I am a bit past climbing church towers, but Jesus had got himself to the highest point of the Jerusalem temple, so he must have left the desert. Satan saw an opportunity. “If you are the Messiah, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you, to guard you;
and
with their hands they will support you,
lest you dash your foot against a stone.’” (Ps 91) His underlying argument was that, if you’re going to get on, you’ve got to impress people. Here’s a quick way to do this where it counts, here in Jerusalem. Everyone loves a spectacular stunt. You’ll be an instant celebrity.

Of course it’s all lies again. If people take insane risks God may be horrified, but he won’t interfere with our freedom. It’s up to us what we do with our lives. Some people seek thrills. Jumping off tall buildings is a sure way to get that charge of adrenaline they are addicted to. Sometimes stunts have a more practical benefit – if we bring them off, we could get fabulous sponsorship fees from advertisers. You and I will probably have more common temptations – a lie perhaps. If you can get away with it, it will give you an advantage. There is a risk, but it’s worth it. And, if you get found out, you can always say you were misinformed (as our illustrious leaders tend to do).

I’m not saying you shouldn’t take risks. Almost everything worthwhile involves risk and danger; so by all means be courageous. But be critical, be prudent; above all be patient. Ask yourself, is this particular goal worth this particular risk?

Does any of this ring any bells with you? It certainly does with me. I often find myself thinking of a short cut to something I want: probably something quite trivial. The trick may be risky, it may be stupid or it may be downright immoral. These situations happen all the time in ordinary lives like ours.

I don’t know where the suggestions come from: Satan perhaps, or simply our endemic self-centeredness. But we’ve got to be watchful. Like the Psalmist said: “Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary the Devil prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour.” And I like to think of those guardian angels Satan referred to, not to perform magical rescue operations, but warning us of danger. Satan and angels are mythical beings, but they stand for very real experiences in our lives – experiences of being human.

In the gospels there are six accounts of occasions when Jesus fed a huge crowd of people with just a handful of food. I find it difficult to imagine these events happening in real life because crowds of people don’t generally go off with charismatic teachers to lonely spots these days. But apparently in Northern Palestine (Galilee) in Jesus’ time this sort of thing did happen. The region was a hotbed of political unrest. The Jewish people were fiercely nationalistic and greatly resented the Roman occupying forces. There were rebel movements springing up all the time, gathered round charismatic leaders.

New testament scholar, Prof. Allen Calaghan of Harvard Divinity School, describes a typical one of these charismatic characters:

“Some guy wakes up in the morning and he thinks he’s the Messiah or something. Or he’s a prophet, and he gets a group of people to follow him. He says, ‘We’re going to go out in the desert and we’re going to an empty place. We’re going to go out there and we’re going to wait for God to do something for us.’ So a whole bunch of people go with him, maybe thousands, go with him out to this deserted place . . . . “

This basically describes what Jesus did in these gospel stories, but the story writers believed that Jesus was really the true Messiah, as Christians do today, and they describe specifically what God did for the multitude – he provided food. The gospel authors saw this as a real sign from heaven, a breaking in of the kingdom of God.

So let’s look more closely at what happened. Most of the people had travelled a considerable distance from home and the afternoon was wearing on. Generally, if someone was going out to work or travelling for the day, they’d take some food with them in a little wicker basket or woven bag called a ‘scrip’. But many might have joined the crowd on the spur of the moment, so the disciples suggested to Jesus that they wind up proceedings so that people who needed to could get to the nearest village store for food before it closed. Jesus, however, told them to provide what was needed themselves. They were flabbergasted, of course. They had brought a little food, but what use would that be?

My favourite of all these stories is the one by John. In this a small boy, who heard what was being said perhaps, offered his own food to Andrew. Andrew was very touched and told Jesus. Jesus then told the disciples to hand round the boy’s food: two fish and five bread rolls.

A remarkable thing happened. For the small group of disciples to distribute food to thousands of people would have taken hours but, suddenly, food seemed to appear everywhere. Some people believe the food dropped from the sky or just materialised out of thin air or something, but that is just idle speculation. I want to focus on the boy’s inspiring act of generosity. I believe this is the key to understanding what happened. I believe that this was the sign from heaven, the breaking in of God’s kingdom. The boy was an authentic kingdom person. What he did was an example, and acts like that have an effect on people. What happened was a sign of how things are in the kingdom of heaven.

The broad message of Jesus’ two feeding miracles is that God provides plenty for everyone if we follow the ways of his kingdom. But, no matter what we do, whether we are kingdom people or selfish individualists, it is all, ultimately, a gift from God.

But there is another important part of the gospel writers’ agenda – the central act of Christian worship, the Eucharist. At the last meal Jesus had with his disciples, the night before he was killed, he did an odd thing. He passed bread and wine round saying that they were his body and blood. The tellers of that story believed that Jesus was a unique and perfect human manifestation of God’s wisdom, God as a human being. This is a foundational tenet of Christianity still. So what Jesus did was a symbolic way of indicating, not only that God provides all we need in life, but also that he provides it from his own being, his own body.

That’s a way-out thought, but it makes sense. Christians believe that God created the universe from nothing (ex nihilo). What does that phrase mean? Even in what the book of Genesis calls ‘the deep’, the ‘formless void’, and what modern physicists call the ‘quantum vacuum’, there is God. So the ‘nihilo’ was, in effect, God himself. The raw material of the universe was God. By universe I do not mean an entity of which there may be more than one, but the totality of physical existence; some call it the ‘multiverse’. The universe, then, is God’s body, or his ‘incarnation’ to use the theological term. (This is not to compromise our belief that Jesus was the perfect human manifestation of God’s wisdom – his ‘logos’). So everything we eat and drink, the air we breathe, the sun that provides the energy of life, gravity and the other fields of energy – all this is the body of God. The Eucharist can be seen as an affirmation of the sacredness of physical nature.

We are part of that cosmic Body ourselves; we are specialised little images of God. Read up what scientists have to say on fractal theory or holography. It’s about every tiny part of a larger whole containing all the information of the whole. It’s not easy to follow but it relates closely to the Bible idea of us being “in the image of God”.

This may all sound like obscure theology, but Christians believe that a basic grasp of the message of the Gospels is a key to understanding the meaning of existence. They unlock the deepest wisdom. Religious people call it salvation. They believe too that sharing in the Eucharist with an understanding of its significance will also reveal deep truth and eternal life. This belief goes back to the earliest days of Christianity, before the Gospels were written.

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to grasp these meanings; you don’t need a whole lot of theology. When I said a basic grasp, that’s what I meant. For most people it’s intuitive. You either get it or you don’t.

From the atom to the galaxy, with everything in between, there is evidence of design (scientists call it order). From Newton onwards – the era of modern science – scientists have seen the universe as a complex machine. Since Einstein and Max Planck, however, relativity and quantum theory have led scientists to revise their perception of nature and the universe quite radically. We now have what might be called ‘post-modern’ science. Early last century Julian Huxley said, “Nature is not only weird, it is weirder than we can possibly imagine.”

Newton thought the universe was a static entity with internal movements as regular as clockwork. In 1927, Edwin Hubble observed the universe to be expanding. By reversing the process we have the Big Bang theory: that the universe has evolved from the infinitely small and unordered ‘singularity’ to the incomprehensible complexity of our universe, including humankind.

This process of complexification is a process through random changes and a fundamental uncertainty about outcomes. The probability of the Universe developing as it has is incalculably small. It depends on extremely finely tuned ratios between the strength of energy fields and certain other physical factors. The process also includes the emergence of what seem at first to be fortuitous ‘vortices’ of increased order.

Thermodynamics theory holds that all closed systems decay towards uniform equilibrium – formless chaos. The universe is a closed system, so if this law of thermodynamics alone governed the universe, it would still expand and cool from the Big Bang, but it would be an almost uniform cloud of gas in almost perfect equilibrium. The evolution from chaos to order seems to contradict accepted theory. Scientists working in a new branch of physics, called ‘chaos’ or ‘complexity’ theory, are discovering how this anti-entropy or ‘negentropy’ is happening. Vortices of increased order referred to above have been observed and experimentally reproduced. It is a new field of study, but suffice it to say that no external agency is involved. It is a matter of delicately balanced conditions and tiny, random disturbances.

After fourteen billion years of such phenomena, where order emerges out of chaos, the human brain has evolved. But what is intelligence? It is more than just the brain. Psychologists measure intelligence quantitatively as the ability to make deductions from given data, but it is more complicated than that. It includes memory and intuition that transcends logic .

Most people associate mind and intelligence mainly with humans and only marginally with other highly evolved animals. We tend to regard humankind as separate from the rest of nature, a different order of being. In pre-modern times this was not so. People of the ancient Celtic tradition, medieval mystics like Saint Francis and Saint Ignatius Loyola and others, saw the whole of nature as an interrelated community. We see the same message in the Hebrew psalms. Today most scientists recognise that humankind is an integral, interrelated part of the universe. We are of the earth, a product of cosmic process, not outside observers or alien invaders.

Insofar as scientists recognise the existence of mind today, they do not confine it to humankind. True, it is manifested quite intensely in humans, but it doesn’t stop there. It appears less clearly in the higher animals and insects, and less still in the lower ones. Even plants seem clever. But although there is no detectable trace of intelligence in a rock, there is no definable cut-off point. Earth may be the cosmic centre of gravity for mind, or it may not be. There may be other concentrations in other places in the universe. Even though mind is not a material substance, it is still not unreasonable to suppose it is distributed through the universe, albeit very unequally, like matter. Some scientists have coined the term ‘psi field’, an energy which we have at present no means of measuring quantitatively.

To sum up: mind is a cosmic phenomenon that we cannot locate precisely. It is everywhere. It functions physically in the organs we call brains, but we cannot locate it there. Some have suggested that the cosmic mind directs the process of cosmic evolution, however limited it is by uncertainty and randomness. But that is metaphysics, not science.

Let us now turn to the religious idea of an intelligent universe. The Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity states that, while God is essentially spirit, ‘He’ has begotten, as the Nicene Creed says, a Son, a material ‘incarnation’ (embodiment) who shares fully the divine nature. The perfect human manifestation of this was Jesus, but Paul and others quickly realised that the incarnation was not merely a brief human event; it is a continuing cosmic event, spanning the whole of time. (Col. 1:15 – 17; John 1:1-3). Physicist Brian Swimme says that the universe is not a material object but a spiritual event. The whole universe, the “Cosmic Christ”, is God’s progressive physical self-manifestation in energy, matter, space and time.

When we speak of intelligence, it is only as we recognise it in ourselves, but in fact we refer to a transcendent quality of the whole universe. Ours is an intelligent universe. There are other abstract qualities we see in ourselves; ones we value and others we would rather not have. We need not baulk at seeing imperfection, unfinishedness, in God’s cosmic incarnation.

The Council of Chalcedon (415) declared that Jesus had two natures, human and divine, in what they called the ‘hypostatic union’. This somewhat technical abstraction has its roots in human experience. According to Paul, “Christ learned obedience through the things he suffered.” Perfection, even in Christ, is a process as well as an eternal state. Jesus is both perfect man and becoming-perfect man. This dual nature can also be attributed to the cosmic Christ, the universe. We can see the universe as both divine and physical. In it’s physical nature it is still in a process of becoming what it truly is.

So, to return to our riginal theme, I think we can see an intelligent universe, though not yet a perfectly wise one. Nevertheless it is still, to those who can see, full of miracles (signs) of the Father’s wisdom and the Spirit’s energy.

These are religious statements, yet they are not inconsistent with the new science of an organic, interrelated, evolving universe of fundamental simplicity and yet unimaginable and increasing complexity. For science, the universe is the ultimate mystery; it invites communication and intimacy but denies final comprehension. For believers, that is true of God too, transcendently so.

Almost the earliest indicators of the presence of Homo sapiens are religious artefacts; cave paintings, clay or stone images, standing stones or burial sites. What makes us human, even more certainly than toolmaking, is a sense of the numinous, a sense that has impelled us to objectify and represent the invisible entities or energies that evoke it. We speak of supernatural powers, but I am suspicious of the word ‘supernatural’. I believe that all things, including the numinous, the invisible and objects of our imagination, are part of nature; but not all are accessible to the technologies of science.

Sources of numinous experience have been objectified down the ages through material objects, a tree, an animal, a mountain, a particular location, or a work of art. Heaven exists only in our imaginations but, though it is not materially realised here and now, we instinctively dream of a perfect state of being, and there are material signs that indicate its nature and its approach.

In both ancient and contemporary religion there are objects and rites that we believe invoke the power of God. Christians call them sacraments, and we call the power of God ‘grace’. Sacraments have a long history and admittedly include, especially in earlier times, a certain amount of superstition. We believe our modern world is free of superstition, and theologians have refined our ideas about the sacraments accordingly.

There are those who believe that the sacraments still pose a risk of superstition and idolatry. In the Protestant wing of Christendom the idea of any non-material or spiritual content in the sacraments is discounted. They are simply formalities by which we affirm our religious identity and commitment. This also suggests that heaven has to be conceived of as a material entity in outer space. Not everyone can appreciate the carefully refined definitions and subtle abstractions and debates of Catholic theology. The high status of the exact sciences in our culture has also brought a new scepticism. I do not think, however, that there is a conflict between science and religion in the matter of sacraments. In fact I believe contemporary science opens the door to an enhanced understanding of them.

First, we must understand that the Christian sacraments are events, not material objects. There are material objects involved in sacramental rites: water, bread, wine, oil, for example. There are also special buildings, furniture, vessels and garments. But the Eucharist is not material objects, bread and wine; it is a social event and, for many, an affirmation of the sacredness of all matter. Baptism is not about water; it is about focussing faith and sharing our optimistic belief in divine benevolence. We believe that grace, the power of God, is invoked, but the effect is too subtle and uncertain to detect in any outward way. We can only define it in metaphorical or abstract language – member of Christ’s body, child of God and heir of the kingdom of heaven.

The seven official sacraments are not the sum of what we mean by sacrament. We are taught that a sacrament is “an outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual grace”. There are many signs of grace in the world around us that are not religious rites – Medicine, Sans Frontier, the wisdom and courage of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, the compassion and diligence of dedicated welfare workers, the fortitude and cheerfulness of those who suffer great pain or hardship, the laughter of children who are in daily danger of death. In the Scriptures we read of the supreme sacramental event of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. In all this we can see the wisdom and love, the generosity, the steadfastness and the limitless patience of God.

But are we only to recognise the admirable and attractive things? There is conflict and violence at every level of nature, from galaxies colliding and stars exploding, to predatory violence between animals, including humans, and viruses struggling to prosper, causing disease and death. Are these signs of heaven or a benign God?

In the perfect or idealised sense of heaven and God, they are not direct signs. But how perfect is our understanding of perfection? Everywhere are signs of a process, a process from chaos to order in which death and rebirth are essential elements. They indicate change, evolution that points in the direction of perfect order and harmony, that we cannot even imagine. The ultimate sacrament is the universe. The universe is a miracle, a sign. The universe is not just a finite material object; it is an outward and visible sign of divine creativity, but also of a divine discontent, the divine will that nature should perfectly express God’s perfect being. It is an event, a process, a work in progress, like a growing child in tutelage.

More than any human parent, God lets the child learn by experience. At every stage the universe gains information and order from its past and becomes more mature and aware of itself. As Teilhard de Chardin put it, “God makes things make themselves”. Such wisdom, such generosity, such patience is greater than that of any human parents. Stress and anxiety compel us at times to intervene by force majeure.

Many people think that God does that, especially when something extraordinary happens. Although it is on the fringe of Christian orthodoxy, I personally think that is an illusion. It is quite reasonable to thank God when something good happens, and prayer certainly works, but it doesn’t work in a magical way. Jesus emphasised this many times: “Your faith has made you whole.” It is a case of things making themselves. Prayer is a focus of the will, a focus of desire and intention that is particularly powerful when it is shared by a group of people. It invokes an energy that has only recently been a subject of scientific inquiry. The data so far is interesting but inconclusive. But science is a work in progress and, anyway, we don’t need scientific approval for everything we believe!

Seen as a sacrament, the universe is rich in wisdom and beauty. If we are willing to see, it offers an amazingly deep and intimate glimpse of what God is and does. It evokes a sense of the numinous. It inspires worship. In toto it is the realm of heaven.

I am not suggesting that we abandon our homely sacraments. Each expresses and nurtures something precious in our lives and in our relationship with God. But I do suggest that we widen our notion of what we mean by sacrament.

You may not believe in fairies, but you may be interested to know that angels are an important element in Christian tradition. They are also part of our day-to-day speech. The most famous of all the angels is probably Gabriel, the angel of the Christmas story, or rather the prologue to it. Set in the context of serious historical research, Luke’s Gabriel marks a watershed point in our understanding of angels. And Luke makes it clear in his introduction to Theophilus that he is writing about real events. Jesus was a real person, not a hero from Greek mythology. But what was Gabriel?

Let me remind you of the situation in which Gabriel’s role was so central. It was a bit involved. It seems that it was generally known that Jesus was conceived out of wedlock. Joseph was not his real father. This presented a serious problem for those trying to convince people that he was the Messiah or Christ, God’s anointed representative and vicegerent.

The only person to provide a complete answer to this difficulty was the Macedonian gentile Luke; one of Paul’s early converts. The angel Gabriel is a central figure in his explanation. To a modern reader this may suggest that this episode is intended as an allegory, such as might be written by C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien – edifying fiction. It is not that, But for us modern Europeans to understand Gabriel and angels in general, we need to understand Luke.

Luke and Paul were kindred souls, intelligent and cultivated. They were interested in each other’s cultural backgrounds, especially since they now had a deep common bond in Christ. Luke, hardly less than Paul, wanted to share his newly discovered faith. His natural inclination was to reach out to people like himself, classically educated, critical thinking seekers after truth. Theophilus, god-lover, may have been an individual but, more likely, Luke used the name to attract any literate gentile, interested in religion and spirituality but sceptical about the popular Hellenistic gods.

So Luke gathered all the information he could about Jesus and wrote an account of his life, death and resurrection that is unique because it is the only account written by a gentile. The accounts Luke discovered were all by Jewish writers or oral traditions of Jewish origin. Christianity was a Jewish religion. To an educated gentile it might be interesting but it was essentially foreign.

Luke aimed to bridge that gap, and that is important for us because our modern European culture owes more to Classical than to Jewish ways of thinking. Luke’s treatise draws on both Jewish and Greco-Roman tradition, seamlessly combining both. It presents a heroic characterisation of Jesus after the Classical pattern, but the content is as Jewish as it is historical.

Miraculous births and angelic visitors are part of Jewish tradition. Samson’s birth to Manoah’s barren wife, Sarai’s conception of Isaac at the age of ninety-nine, Hagar’s angelic visitor to tell her the name of her firstborn, Ishmael, and promising her abundant fertility, Samuel’s birth to barren Hannah as the result of prayer; these were part of Jewish Scripture. Conception through a conjugal relationship between a god and a human is a common feature of Greek myth, but alien to Jewish thinking, as is the notion of a god-man, yet Luke’s account of Jesus’ conception implies just that.

In so analysing Luke’s story, I am not saying that it is purely fictitious. As he tells Theophilus at the beginning of his treatise, Luke intended to write an exact account of events, albeit relying entirely on the witness of others. It is possible that Mary herself confided this story to Luke; it cannot have come from anyone else. Perhaps Mary told Luke of a tremendous mystical experience that she could not precisely describe, and Luke, a skilled writer, translated it into language that combined elements from both Jewish and Greek religious tradition, and that his intended readers would understand. The God who is Mary’s partner in this unique conjugal union is not one of the gods of Olympus; he is the one true and living God, the source of all things. God did not only sire a baby boy; according to Genesis he sired the whole universe.

For an educated person all this is implicit in Luke’s account. However mythical its style, Theophilus would be challenged. Myth, even for Theophilus, was not for entertainment; it was a vehicle of profound and sublime truths. In this case it was the truth of Mary’s essential innocence and purity, regardless of anything that may have befallen her. Of this Luke was undoubtedly fully convinced, as are all Christians.

Do angels, then, have a real place in our understanding of human affairs and history? Luke, like most Christians, was quite at home with them. Tradition holds that he was a physician, but that does not mean that he was a narrow-minded scientist, admitting the reality only of matter. He was deeply aware of the spiritual dimension of reality, including the idea of spiritual messengers. Spiritual truths are not simply products of our own creative imagination; they are mediated to us by some ‘other’. The Greeks spoke of the muses; Jewish legend spoke of angels. Luke did not see myths as we see Superman or Luke Skywalker, for entertainment only. He knew nothing of anything called a fairy story. Angels represented an element of non-material reality for which we use abstract, psychological terms. Christian theology is not all abstractions; it contains a rich mythology too.

In common discourse we also find angels useful symbols. Guardian angels reflect our capacity for self-preservation, both instinctive and learned, and most often unconscious. Reference to “angelic choirs” reflects our belief that music possesses a non-material power, beyond and quite different from its physical impact as sound. “You are an angel” means that someone has brought you a drink when you were exhausted after your work – a messenger of divine compassion! “Entertaining angels unawares” refers to some morally challenging encounter. In these examples, the context is ordinary daily life, not fairy stories. What they refer to is real, though not tangible. None of these examples are used with religious solemnity, but they are not less meaningful for that.

It is time to explain the title of this collection of articles. Why do I, a Christian, think of the universe as divine? Isn’t that pantheism? Christianity is not alone in believing that matter has a spiritual origin. The Jews believe it has its origin in God (Eloim). Many ancient traditions of indigenous peoples have a spiritual relationship with their land. But it is probably Christianity which affirms the most intimate relationship between matter and God. Archbishop Michael Ramsey described Christianity as the most materialistic of all religions.

To explain this we will have to take a quick jog round the Christian theological estate, noting briefly its beautifully designed and tended gardens, it’s weird fauna (we call them theologians), and areas were new work is in progress. Theology as a systematic academic discipline is a Christian invention, originating at the very beginning of the Christian era, and establishing its basic framework at an historical meeting of the leading Christian thinkers of the time in Nicea in the year 325 CE.

Sponsored by the newly converted Roman Emperor, Constantine, the focus of this conference was the hotly debated issue of the relationship between Jesus and God. The outcome was radical and uncompromising. It was declared that Jesus was “God of God, true God of true God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father”.

At the Council of Chalcedon in 451 it was also established that Jesus had two natures, human and divine. This was not an entirely new concept. Though the idea of a God-man is foreign to Jewish thinking, it was familiar to gentiles of the Greco-Roman tradition. Roman emperors were treated as divine, and most of the Olympian gods had some earthly or human connection. Zeus, for example, was said to have been hidden by his mother, Rhea, in a cave in Crete when he was an infant.

But the Nicene fathers of Christian theology not only defined Jesus’ status, they presented a complete theoretical analysis of God. God was declared to be not just personal, but tri-personal, a Trinity of Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. While the format of this analysis was arrived at through classical philosophical debate, its roots are in Jewish tradition as well. Although the God of Israel, YHWH, was active and powerful in human affairs, and often spoken of in anthropomorphic terms, he was worshipped as spirit, not as a physical being. Although most of the Trinity is defined in anthropomorphic terms, Father and Son, these are understood to be metaphorical. God is declared in the Catholic catechism to be “pure spirit, without parts or passions”. Christians do not really believe the Father is literally an old man somewhere in outer space, nor, as I shall now explain, do they regard the Son simply as a young man.

God incarnate, humanly manifest in Jesus of Nazareth, is the focus of Christian faith and the ideal of the faithful. But God is not fully incarnate simply in one human individual. The earliest of all Christian writings, the letters of Paul, provide a startling but fundamental basis for what is to be meant by the word Christ. Paul saw Christ, not just as an individual man, but also as the embodiment and medium of all physical existence. In a letter to the Colossians he wrote, “In him all things in heaven and on earth were created. . . He himself is before all things and in him all things hold together.” Later, in the prologue to his gospel, John called Christ the “logos” (translated “Word”) of God – God’s utterance. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him and without him not one thing came into being.”

Modern theologians now speak of the Cosmic Christ, God incarnate, embodied in the whole universe. Where John and Paul speak of “all things”, we would say the universe, or universes if there are many. By universe I mean the totality of physical existence – the cosmic Christ – “God of God”, conceived in the womb of God before time began and born as pure light (John, Genesis and Big Bang theory). In other words, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. But this in no way compromises the good news of God’s human self-manifestation in Jesus.

The Second Person of the Holy Trinity includes every thing, every energy field, every wave-particle, every molecule, every living creature, every star, every galaxy. But Christians affirm that God is not only that. There are three Persons. We can say, with Meister Eckhart, that “God is everything, but everything is not God.” – a clear rejection of pantheism.

Jesus said that no one has seen the Father at any time. All we can see is God the Son, yet we perceive, somehow, that there is a more ultimate Source and a deeper wisdom than the intelligence of design evident in nature as revealed by science. And there is a guiding and creative energy that is not directly detectable by scientific means. You can’t see it; you can’t measure it; you just feel it’s there. Somehow you know that what you can see or even know about is not all there is.

If you are not too mentally out of breath after all this, possibly unaccustomed, exercise, it may be clear to you why I believe I can, as a Christian, speak of the divine universe (or multiverse). In saying that, I am not saying that the universe is all I mean by the word God. And I’m not saying that the universe is an object inside God, as though God were a bigger space. It’s a moot point with scientists, but I don’t think the universe is finite anyway, though our knowledge of it will always be. The word God has to mean infinitely more than I can possibly know; and, in fact, so does the word universe.

To sum up, I see the universe as what Christians call a sacrament – the ultimate sacrament. It is an outward and visible sign of the divine reality. It also embodies that reality – as did Jesus, as do lesser sacramental objects such as the bread and wine of the Eucharist. I believe in the real presence of God in the universe, a presence more totally manifest than in any finite part of it. The universe revealed by science evokes more than curiosity and wonder; it evokes worship.

The Jewish patriarch, Jacob, had a dream in which he saw a ladder from earth to heaven. Jesus enigmatically identified the ladder as “the son of man”. Those are strange stories, but they seem to be related to what follows.

I don’t think of heaven as up there, nor do I see it as a destination only for those who have died. I see it as a state of existence in the cosmic environment that is harmonious, serene, beautiful and joyful. But it seems that reaching this state entails a slow and arduous upward climb.

I do not think humankind has the wisdom or the will to reach heaven in a hurry, but I think much of the wisdom is deposited with us in the example of holy and heroic men and women and the teachings of the sages.

I say they were heroic because, almost without exception, the prophets and saints have shown great fortitude in the face of hostility and persecution. Most of them lived in danger and many of them died for their convictions.

Their enemies were often not consciously wicked people. Some were people in power who were exercising a prudent concern to maintain the stability and the accepted values of their society. Sometimes they were protecting a religious tradition against a prophetic demand for reform that seemed to them like heresy. They feared change.

The saints and sages are people ahead of their time, living in a world that is, to quote an Anglican theologian, “even now, but not yet”. Jesus of Nazareth is a prime example. He was executed for subversion on the orders of the Roman consul, and he was also convicted of blasphemy by the Jewish religious authorities. The world was not ready for him. It still isn’t.

Jesus referred often to the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God, and in his parables heaven is here, not up there. He focuses on familiar happenings and people, but they are idealised or given a twist that offers a glimpse of the kingdom. The parables do not point away from this world; they point to our world transformed. Relationships are harmonious, just, kind, generous, forgiving and open. There is no violence, no deceit, no exploitation or domination of one by another. It is not the world we know, but it is not anywhere else either. It is this world as most of us wish it was.

Many people hope that they will enter such a world after they die. We have stories told by people who believe they have glimpsed such a perfect world in a mystical revelation or a near-death experience. Saint Paul is the best-known example. I don’t wish to discount such experiences, but I am not sure that most of us would settle in easily to such a perfect environment. We are habituated to our perverted and dysfunctional way of relating and doing things. We might feel painfully out of place and embarrassed. I think we need training to appreciate heaven and fit in.

Ours is an individualistic, competitive, cynical and often cruel world. The formal education of our children consists largely of equipping them to compete successfully so they will win and others lose. Educationists also claim to “build character”, especially through sport. This often means making our children insensitive enough and smart enough to handle the stresses and hurts of life as we live it.

The sages do not require that we be winners; they do not suggest that happiness lies along that path. All our lives are marked by tragedies and failures, but sages see these as steps upward rather than downward on the stairway to heaven. The saints’ resilience and fortitude does not come from cultivated insensitivity, but from a very profound optimism about the meaning and purpose of life. They climb the stairway, not as a means to some kind of superiority, but because they see a radiant light and hear beautiful music from there. They see the personal traumas, tragedies and failures they endure as steps in a struggle towards that ‘strange attractor’, to borrow a mathematical term.

Everyone, I think, has experience of love in some way; everyone feels affection and is kind from time to time. But when the individual is the first priority – my self-realization, my enjoyment, my comfort and security, my pleasure – kindness becomes a rare commodity. Changing that is a daunting task.

No one, as far as I know, has detected any natural physical feature of our bodies and brains that might drive such an endeavour. Yet there is, deep within, a longing to be a nobler, happier and more serene person. There is also a fundamental love instinct that is more than just a biological mechanism to promote genetic proliferation.

Richard Dawkins wrote famously about “The Selfish Gene”. Successful evolution requires random mutations of our genetic code. But adaptation, which is the key to successful evolution, depends to a great extent on relational harmony and co-operation. If genetics really is the key, I suggest that we must also have an “unselfish gene”, or at least a “wisdom gene” that enables us to see the positive value of kindness and co-operation, otherwise there wouldn’t be anything that could be called a society of any kind.

Evolution involves physiological changes, but behavioural change is also significant. Human evolution at least involves the deliberate, conscious cultivation of behaviour that enhances social adaptation. But, like all evolutionary phenomena, it is not a purely individual thing; it is part of the total environment. It is not just something that heroic and holy human individuals do; it is something the universe is doing; it is a cosmic phenomenon. It is something to do with the divine nature of the universe that we are part of. It is as though there were a kind of ‘divine discontent’ that urges the cosmos, including all of us, toward ultimate perfection.

The stairway to heaven is a metaphor, but it represents a reality that exists in dimensions we have not yet found measurements for, so it is outside the realm of science. But some who have not been concerned to put numbers to its height and breadth have discovered and climbed it.

People have been making images of God ever since mystics in prehistoric times took clay or rocks in their hands or used sticks and their fingers to paint on the walls of caves. Gods are associated with power and control so, a few thousand years ago, when people had formed communities and nations with kings to rule them, it was natural that they should imagine their gods as super-kings.

Some three thousand years ago, a group of Semitic tribes recognised a God whose name was never to be spoken and was of obscure meaning anyway. They represented the name by four consonants, YHWH, that together are not pronounceable. In speech they simply called their God Adoni (Lord) and he was seen as the ultimate ruler of the tribes of Israel even after they had secular kings. Adoni had a dwelling place beyond the sight of humankind, yet he was actively involved in human affairs.

After many generations of secular kings, most of whom were very unsatisfactory, Isaiah and other prophets began to imagine a perfect ruler, a man of supreme wisdom and power, anointed by the Lord himself. He would be born of the royal line of David, the Lord’s favourite king. He was referred to as Messiah or, in Greek, Christ – the Anointed One.

A little over two thousand years ago, groaning under the oppressive yoke of Imperial Rome, this vision stirred the hearts of the Jewish people into flame. They eagerly expected the Messiah to arrive at any moment. A number of men emerged who believed they were indeed he, and they gathered enthusiastic disciples around them, sometimes thousands strong. One of these charismatic leaders was Jesus of Nazareth. He didn’t gather a huge following in his lifetime but, of all the contemporary Messiah candidates, he is the only one, two thousand years later, who still has a following and a cult, a religion associated with his name. And it is not just a handful of Jews but many millions, even billions of people in every part of the world. Called “Christians”, they believe still that Jesus was the true “Son of God”, as the Messiah or Christ was sometimes called. During the centuries since, Christians have created a complex and sophisticated theology of YHWH and Jesus.

Jesus is referred in Christian liturgy and hymnary as “King of Kings and Lord of Lords” but, reading the narrative portraits of Jesus that were written during the seven or eight decades after his death, we find someone quite unlike any kind of king or ruler ever known or even imagined in historical tradition.

He was conceived out of wedlock for a start, and his enemies taunted him with this to the end of his life. He was often diffident in his relationship with other people, as though seeking their leadership and guidance, needing their help. He demonstrated impressive power as a healer and exorcist, but claimed it was the faith of others that accomplished these messianic signs. He was a brilliant and forceful prophetic teacher, but this made him dangerous enemies in the corridors of power. He never took aggressive action against his persecutors however, ending his life as the victim of a scandalously unjust and illegal trial and horrifically cruel execution at the hands of the Roman military.

After such an inauspicious beginning and tragic end, it is remarkable that Jesus had any followers left at all. In fact, at his execution, only his mother and three disciples remained faithful. But, a few days after his death, one of those disciples, Mary Magdalene, saw Jesus alive again in a tangible body. But not quite a normal human one: he ate and drank with his disciples, but he appeared and disappeared mysteriously, entering through locked doors. Other disciples began to have similar experiences. Such strange occurrences continued for about six weeks, until a substantial number of people became quite convinced that Jesus was still alive in a weird but very real way.

That number is now billions worldwide. They do not see Jesus simply as a heroic martyr for a noble cause; and it is impossible to regard him as a conquering and dominating king in the normal sense, but Christians see him as embodying what true sovereignty, true leadership, informed by the wisdom of God, really means. They see him as the king in God’s realm, the King of Heaven, then in Judea, now in our own time and everywhere forever.

One has to admit, however, if one is honest, that Jesus is not the kind of ruler most of us would really want. Such unconditional love, such limitless forgiveness, tolerance, generosity, absolute non-violence! Common sense suggests that his kingdom could be chaotic, exposed to wanton exploitation and terrifying lawlessness, not to mention invasion from foreign military powers and unwanted refugees. It is surprising, perhaps, that so many people claim that the rule of Jesus Christ is what they really want. But no democratically elected government, nominally Christian or whatever, shows much political will to realise it. They wouldn’t see a year out if they did. So are Christians mad or merely deluded, subversive or merely eccentric, hypocritical or merely confused? Or is this something sensible people can take seriously?