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Starting
Point Role of flesh in universe
By MATTHEW FOX
In our times a new creation story
and a new cosmology have vastly expanded the meaning of flesh. No
previous generation has been taught that the universe is hundreds of billions
of galaxies large and still expanding. Ernesto Cardenal, in his poem on the new
cosmology, celebrates the news of the expanding universe as the most
important discovery of the 20th century.
If the universe is expanding, so, too, is flesh, for the universe
is fleshy. Flesh is matter, and matter is flesh. This insight is implicit in
Einsteins establishing the interchangeability of matter and energy
(isnt flesh energetic matter?), just as it is explicit in Thomas
Aquinas definition of spirit as elán or vitality.
The news from todays physics is not just that matter expands
but that matter is intrinsically energetic, vital, organized and organizing,
busy, dancing, vibrating, seeking, moving, and finding order in the midst of
chaos. All things in motion -- isnt this Aristotles definition of
soul as that which produces locomotion from within?
The boundary between animate and inanimate, like so many other
boundaries today, is rapidly fading. Medical doctor and scientist James
Lovelock writes that there is no clear distinction anywhere on the
earths surface between living and nonliving matter. There is merely a
hierarchy of intensity going from the material environment of the
rocks and the atmosphere to the living cells.
Recently a car mechanic told me this story: He was depressed at
work but stuck with his job because of family responsibilities. Then he
encountered a Sufi teacher who said to him, Each time you turn the
ratchet as you repair a vehicle, speak the word Allah. The
mechanic did so, and his whole life changed, the whole relation with his work
changed. Now, he said, I love my work. I love cars. They are
alive. It is a mistake to think of animate versus inanimate. A car will tell
you, if you listen deeply enough, whether it wants to be repaired or whether it
wants simply to be left alone to die.
In the context of evolution, all things have animate-like
qualities. Mountains grow and shrink in the context of eons of time. Soil
breathes and rises and falls, as do entire continents and the sea with its
tides.
Context is so important. Text is not adequate for expressing
wonder and awe. Indeed, a case could be made that the sacred has faded
proportionate to the use of the printing press invented five centuries ago. As
humans withdraw their senses from the larger context around them, the
possibilities for awe diminish -- and for gratitude, and for reverence.
The earth context -- the animals and plants, the flowers and
forests, the fauna and landscapes, the birds and fishes, the creepy-crawly
things that burrow in our gardens and compost piles -- fascinate us and bless
us. They, too, reveal something to us about failures, about our sins and about
our capacity for beauty and blessing.
Our own bodies, with their 15-billion-year histories (they carry
hydrogen atoms that were birthed 14 billion years ago), with their stunning
achievements of eye and ear, of heart and lung, of bladder and liver, of sexual
organs and larynx -- our bodies, too, have something to reveal to us about
beauty and reverence, gratitude and awe, and their opposites.
The proper context for talking about sin is cosmology, the
evolution of our world, indeed the evolution of flesh. For the evolution of the
world is the evolution of flesh. Flesh, we now know, has a history. (Not
long ago we were taught, à la Aristotle, that species were eternal). For
most people, the blessing that flesh is and has been constitutes the ordinary
entry into wisdom and into the temple of the sacred. As Riceour puts it,
humanity first reads the sacred on the world, on some elements or
aspects of the world, on the heavens, on the sun and moon, on the waters and
vegetation. Spoken symbolism thus refers back to manifestations of the sacred,
to hierophanies, where the sacred is shown in a fragment of the cosmos. ...
First of all, then, it is the sun, the moon, the waters -- that is to say,
cosmic realities -- that are symbols.
As our biblical ancestors knew well, the universe is Gods
temple, and the temple is a microcosm of the universe depicted in cosmic terms
that recall the language of creation. He built his sanctuary like the
heavens, like the earth that he established forever (Psalms 78, 69). Our
bodies are also temples, as Paul insists. Through the temple of the body
celebrating in the body of the temple, chaos becomes creation, and evil is
transformed into order.
This universe so deserving of praise comes in at least three
layers: The cosmic flesh, the eco-flesh and the human flesh.
It is striking that Psalm 104, so full of praise of the fleshy
creation of God, in celebrating the same for 34 verses, only at the 35th verse,
and only in the context of praise and joy, raises the question of human
sin:
I will sing to the Lord as long as I live, all my
life I will sing psalms to my God. May my meditation please the Lord, as
I show my joy in him (her)! Away with all sinners from the earth and may
the wicked be no more! Bless the Lord, my soul. O praise the
Lord.
In putting praise before sin and blessing before curse and flesh
before sins of the spirit, we are following in this ancient tradition.
Matthew Fox is a former Dominican priest and founder of the
University of Creation Spritituality in Oakland, Calif. This is an excerpt from
his new book, Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Lessons for
Transforming Evil in Soul and Society (Harmony Books).
National Catholic Reporter, April 23,
1999
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