Weekly Blog: Contemplating Br. Neil McGurk’s “Faith, Physics and Love”
Sunday 31st January 2021. Scripture for the week: Ephesians 1: 3-14
True conversion doesn’t happen just because we change our minds about something. Our choices won’t change until we truly believe a more compelling story. And as much as we want it to, the world won’t change until we ourselves become active participants in the expansion of consciousness and the restoration and healing of all things. (1)
In the foreword to Br. Neil McGurk’s cosmology “Faith, Physics and Love”, I describe the work as “transformational in its potential”. This is because it examines not only the origin of things, but also our collective understanding that has emerged through centuries of different stories about who we are, where we have come from, and where we are going to. As such, it opens both intellect and spirit to the possibility of deepening, or even changing, the story that frames our own particular belief.
For those of us who profess Christianity as our faith, the compelling story that guides our lives and our thinking is our belief in a Creator God who identifies with us in our flawed humanity, so much so that this Creator God became one of us in Jesus Christ, who died on the cross and rose again so that “in Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that was lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding” (Ephesians 1: 7-8). Yet within the broad sweep of interpretations of the basic narrative of the Christian faith from the fundamentalist to the mystical, the lived picture of who and what constitutes a ‘Christian’ seems to be a long way from the ‘happy ending’ of the Christian narrative, described by St. Paul as the ‘fulfilment of the times’: “ – to bring all things in heaven and earth under one head, even Jesus Christ.”
So how are we to reconcile this reality with the added complexity of considering the needs and aspirations of all those of other faiths, or of no faith at all? Not to mention the needs of the earth and all living things within it – which cannot be separated from the infinitely wider consideration of the universe itself. It is a cosmic question. And it needs a cosmology to fertilise our thinking and deepen our understanding of the nature of things. The remarkable thing about this cosmology is that it fully immerses itself in both the theological and the scientific, without the usual dualism of the ‘theology vs. science, science vs. theology’ contestation.
In the ensuing blogs which I will attempt to produce on a weekly basis, I hope to be able to draw on the wealth of content in “Faith, Physics and Love” to stimulate contemplation and prayer, providing relevant scriptures where appropriate. As quoted above, the world won’t change until we ourselves become active participants in the expansion of consciousness and the restoration and healing of all things.
Rev. Peter Habberton
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1. (from Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation, the Center for Action and Contemplation, Saturday 16th January 2021)
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