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Paws With A Cause

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Join date: Nov 15, 2022

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A love story beautifully told about the storyteller and his vocation,his wife,his mentor Thomas Berry,the universe,and us.Wonderful snapshot moments enliven the soul and imagination and tell the valuable and vulnerable story of the price paid for coming to one’s vocation.The weave here of poetics,spirituality,and science is exquisite.As our protagonist reaches ever deeper for the genesis of the universe,as revealed in the mathematics of his native tongue,he uncovers a subtle,stunning truth.Cosmogenesis is a monument to mystic chords of nature’s memory whose notes join both consciousness and cosmos in the story of creation.But that’s not all that makes this an essential read.We follow Swimme’s journey of studying science as an academic field to embracing cosmology as a lived experience.In only a few centuries,this worldview has completely transformed the world,empowering our species to become a geological force on par with asteroids and ice ages.If Brian Thomas Swimme and Thomas Berry are right,science,through the insights derived from its own methods,has now entirely outgrown the mechanistic image of the cosmos.Swimme’s autobiocosmological narrative is,in one sense,the exemplar of an ancient genre counting Augustine’s Confessions and Dante’s Divine Comedy among its antecedents.The human is not the end of this stupendous process but a crucial turning point.The grandeur of that calling would seem ludicrously beyond our capacity were it not for the trust our guide elicits.That sentence required four and a half centuries of scientific investigation of matter.Cosmogenesis is certainly among the ten most significant ideas in human history.It dwarfs Copernicus’s discovery that the Sun is the center of the solar system.After decades of teaching this evolutionary cosmology,I suddenly realized something.I had left myself out.The demands for getting the necessary knowledge to tell the stories of Earth and universe filled me so completely I forgot to include the story of the storyteller.To be honest,it was not just that I had forgotten,I had tricked myself into thinking cosmology was the story of how things out there evolved through time.But then I realized I was one of those things,that I was evolving,that I was as much a development of the universe as were stars and galaxies.If I wanted to tell the story of the expanding universe and how it developed through time,I needed to include the story of my long struggle out of the structures of existence I had been born into.It is in the tradition of autobiography in that it is a search for meaning that began explicitly in 1968 with Denise Santi and Bruce Bochte at Santa Clara University,that deepened with Dolores Maro at the University of Puget Sound and with Matthew Fox in Chicago,and that culminated in 1983 in New York City in a yearlong conversation with Thomas Berry.But in addition to being autobiographical,it is also in the tradition of cosmology in that these conversations were woven around the major features of the expanding universe.Combining autobiography and cosmology has become a necessity.During the years before the discovery of cosmogenesis,we scientists could live in the fantasy of thinking we could step out of the universe in order to understand it.But there is no outside place where cosmologists can stand and see the nature of things.Every adequate cosmology must include the story of the narrator.Her term captures the new opportunity for those writers,artists,scientists,and musicians who have a cosmic sense,who see their work as involving the universe as a whole.Before we begin,one last point needs to be made.Not one of the ten thousand previous generations of humans knew the cosmic sequence of transformations that brought us forth.Those of us exploring the meaning of this discovery are venturing onto untrodden land.It might take centuries for us to articulate an adequate orientation within the cosmic river in which we find ourselves.Which means that in addition to the thrill of voyaging into unmapped territory,we need to remember that any suggestion of having arrived at a final understanding is the presence of folly.Too excited for sleep,I lay in bed next to my wife,Denise,waiting out the hours,but then gave up and crept into the hallway.Due to the gravity of that moment,every tiny detail still lives in my memory.I can feel the glass knob of our bedroom door as I gently released the catch so it would not snap and disturb Denise’s sleep.In the hallway I pushed the white lever of the thermostat to the right until I heard that whomp sound of our furnace kicking to life,then nudged it a bit farther to make sure the house would be plenty warm.While the water heated on the stove,I stepped onto the front porch and looked for the stars and Moon,but they were obscured by the cloud cover blown in from the Pacific.The cedars,maples,chestnuts,sycamores,and elms that lined the streets had convinced us to buy.Tacoma had planted them in the 1800s with the arrival of Western civilization,and they had since grown into a crowning canopy.We were lucky to find a house two blocks east of the university.The former owner had also been a professor,in the Physics Department.At the signing he pointed to several nearby houses that had passed from professor to professor since their construction ninety years earlier.Across from us was Theodore Taranovski,from the Department of History,whom we would see late at night in his upstairs office,and farther north Dolores Maro,from the Classics Department.My whole body vibrated with excitement.The miracle of this moment hovered in the room.

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