We Are Creatures of the Cosmos

Diarmuid O'Murchu

We are creatures of the cosmos, sustained and nurtured within the living organism of planet Earth. We are creatures who belong, and from the web of our belonging we take our identity and our meaning. We belong to the whole of creation, carrying within our being the hydrogen and helium of the early universe, the carbon from exploded stars and, perhaps more than anything else, sunlight which is the critical ingredient of the food we eat everyday.

We are co-creative beings whose destiny is to work collaboratively with nature and with life. For most of our time on earth we have been faithful to that task; hence, the naming of homo ergaster (the human person, the worker) which the anthropologist Leakeys adopted in the 1970s to describe that stage of our evolution that dates back at least two million years.

I am not intimating that we are, or were, perfect, nor do I wish to glamorize the past. By nature, we are "raw in tooth and claw" (Tennyson). Often we don't get it right, but for most of our human story (possibly 6.5 million years according to the discoveries made in Chad in July 2002), we have related lovingly, meaningfully and collaboratively in terms of our planetary and cosmic mission.

At our best, we are good at making the right connections. At heart we are a creative species, the progeny of a cocreative God. Deep in our hearts we know who we are and we know where we have come from. Almost in spite of ourselves, we reflect the grandeur and creativity of our divine origination. And we have not done too badly in our co-creative responsibilities. We have messed things up at times, and we ourselves turn that into a massive problem, whereas for our divine source, I suspect it is nothing much to worry about. After all, a God of unconditional love can tolerate more than a little foolishness from homo sapiens.

In a word, there is no major problem about the long-term past, either for us or for the divine source of our being. It has never been perfect, but it radiates evolutionary meaning, and I am in little doubt that the evolutionary process is fueled by a powerful divine energy. Our problem today, as a human species, is our recent past, not our distant past. What we have been up to for the past ten thousand years (a mere second in evolutionary terms) is the source of our deep alienation, pain, and suffering, forcing us once more to ask fundamental questions about the meaning of our existence.

We are living at the end of a patriarchal era in which things have gone badly wrong for homo sapiens. We became over-attached to power games, trying to play God and in the process alienated ourselves to levels we have never known before. We have alienated ourselves from each other, from the earth, from creation and even from God. But there are indications that this crazy ten thousand year wave is beginning to ebb and with that flows the prospect of a better future.

Whether homo sapiens, as presently constituted, will see that future, is becoming doubtful by the day. But from our mass extinction, the co-creative life-force will beget a more developed (and hopefully, more benign) species, and the universe will continue to flower and flourish as God designed it to do.