WESTMINSTER — Thomas Berry, cultural historian and Earth “geologian,” wrote: “In the known universe, Earth is more alive, more intelligent, more beautiful, more sensitive, and more complex than any other galaxy or star or planet we have examined. Earth then can be considered the primary revelation of what the universe is aiming to accomplish.”
We belong to a miraculous planet. That we as humans can realize this, and in our daily lives respond to Earth's qualities with feelings of awe, wonder, empathy, love, and gratitude - as well as experience dimensions of mystery and sacredness - reveals that Earth is fundamentally a biospiritual planet.
Through our scientific investigations, we know this flowering of Earth's evolutionary journey has come about through a sequence of major transformations.
Each period of transformation was marked by the emergence of what is traditionally called a “primary element”: earth, water, life, air, fire, and others. As Earth unfolds, each primary element arises from a preceding one, much as a maturing organism passes through life stages. Earth's elemental stages constitute worlds that have shaped its physical and psychic dynamism.
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Years ago - 4.6 billion years - a supernova gifted a wafting cloud of dust and gases with the materials that will shape our solar system. Then, 4.5 billion years ago, Earth formed as part of a necklace of planets around the Sun.
In its infancy, Earth is a mass of molten rock, as are Mercury, Venus, and Mars, the other inner planets of the solar system. Unlike those planets, Earth is of a proper size and at a favorable distance from the Sun to permit the continuous churning of its magma, star-matter restless with unformed dreams and hidden potential.
Earth is a planetary stem cell, brimming with creative possibility, poised to become a jewel of the cosmos.
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When the heavenly body that will become our Moon impacted Earth 4.4 billion years ago, precious water held within our planets's rocks is suddenly released. The moon performs a service of midwifery, and indigenous water transforms Earth into a blue ocean planet.
The seas become a global circulatory system, wearing away volcanic outcroppings and coastal shelves, while dissolving and transporting vital minerals throughout the planet.
Like a self-nourishing seed, Earth prepares for a fruitful blossoming.
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Our planet's oceans become a womb for the emergence of life when, 4 billion years ago, Earth began to know and feel itself through single-celled organisms capable of sensing and responding to their environment. In the cell, nascent choice arises: What is food? Where is safety? These are the initial stirrings of intention and purpose.
The microscopic entities are Earth's most complex creations, distinctive expressions of a groping intelligence. In the sense with which we are most familiar, Earth has come alive, and each subsequent primary innovation will derive from this momentous unveiling.
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Amidst flourishing life in the oceans, a particular group of microorganisms called cyanobacteria fashion a unique way to obtain food. Cyanobacteria birth the remarkable process of photosynthesis: capturing energy from the sun to create sugar from carbon dioxide and water. The potent byproduct of photosynthesis is a gas never before present on Earth's surface: oxygen.
Oxygen permeated Earth's seas and atmosphere 2.4 billion years ago. In the ocean, abundant energy from the metabolism of oxygen spurs the assembly of a novel kind of lifeform: multi-cellular organisms. These organisms are precursors of the domains of fungi, plants, and animals that would grace our planet, making Earth a zoological marvel and a lush garden of beauty and diversity.
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Starting 420 million years ago, Earth conjured out of thin air a mysterious element: fire. Requiring an oxygen atmosphere and something to ignite, fire cannot exist on the Sun or any other planet in our solar system. Fire is an evolved power of Earth.
Fire's volatile intensity carved out landscapes and remade ecosystems. In the path of this energy, plant life succumbed and animals fled. Earth sculpted a planet that can burn, and into a fiery world introduced a single species able to manipulate and encourage this elemental power.
Every human culture that has ever existed has used fire. We are fire creatures born to a fire planet. Humans assimilate fire into their biological heritage, coevolving like the bonded strands of DNA. Together, fire and humanity have transformed the planet.
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Fire is a fascination, and for early humans the most basic social unit consisted of a group who shared a fireside. Storytelling - the nourishment of imagination - originated around an open fire, one million years ago.
A new world of inner visioning formed and matured, and was brilliantly rendered in the cave paintings of paleolithic cultures. Imbued with qualities of curiosity, connection, conflict and creativity, imagination became the primary shaper of human communities.
Modern society has embraced an imaginative mythology of separation from nature. This psychic outlook, powerful and narrow, enabled the harnessing of nature's forces for human purposes, to an extent that humans became a geological force. The result of our probing, exploitative orientation toward the world has been a diminishment of Earth's vitality.
In contrast to an untenable stance of independence from nature is the growing realization that humanity is inextricably woven into the tapestry of Earth's transformations and growth. We are an integral and significant part of an ongoing revelation.
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The notion that matter is inert, or “lifeless,” is a view derived from 19th-century science. The only matter we actually know of, composing the universe and Earth, creates, sustains, and enhances life. The dynamism of matter, especially as we witness it through the wondrous stages of Earth's unfolding, is a cosmic form of intention.
Our imagination allows us to see the whole of Earth's stepwise development. In our essence, we are the expression of Earth's magnificent process in the form of human beings.
To know ourselves as embodiments of an encompassing wholeness is the perspective of the sacred. “Spirituality is one of the potencies of the universe,” as cosmologist Brian Swimme states.
An event that can be considered of primary spiritual significance is the originating supernova, from which our solar system, Earth, and humans were formed.
All the elements required for the creation of Earth and life were produced in the magical alchemical cauldron of that star. The elements were then broadcast into the cosmos in an act of gift-giving. A blessing of plenitude. Stars are vehicles of grace in a universe valuing generosity.
Opening to the domain of wholeness - that is, learning to see the whole first - reveals the beauty, complexity, and intelligence of a benevolent and nurturing mystery. Earth embodies the holy, and in choosing to become co-creators and co-nurturers with the living Earth, we become agents of a divine world.