ok i’m a slacker, i admit it. i haven’t written a post in a month and a half. all of january passed without a single word written. oh i thought about it a a lot, but no dice. on the flip side, i’ve been reading a book - not wired magazine, not the new york times online, not kindle - but an actual bound book. it was a christmas present from my wife’s amazing 102 year old grand aunt.
the sacred universe. the essays of thomas berry
the title is ‘the sacred universe‘ and it’s a book of collected essays by thomas berry, the esteemed scholar of world religions. it is deep and complex with tremendous global historical references. oh, and it has big words. there are some sentences i have to read twice and i still don’t completely get them. tonight i read the essay titled ‘alienation’ written in 1974 - but the message it contained is timeless and timely for the 21st century. this passage literally jumped out at me:
We are at present on one of these convulsive moments in the unfolding of the human developmental process. Like the ‘flower people’ of the 1960’s, we might wish for the quiet of an interior transcendental experience by which we could rid ourselves of the feverish strife of external processes. Yet we must accept the fact that the temporal process has become the dominant human process and must be dealt with. In a world that we experience as both a coming together and moving forward, we need a new planetary symbolism: a time-space, active-contemplative, prophetic-mystical, future-present, human-divine symbolism that will provide a context for discovering the journey toward self-authentication that humans desire.
‘nuf said. so… when will we stop and listen?
