The Cosmos and the Highland Thing
by Ted Carr
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 60
Autumn 1998

Part 3

Then I stop kicking leaves. Something important occurs to me.

I live in an interventionist cosmos anyway! I have already come to realise that the universe experiments. The experiment that brought about the right kind of galaxy for second and third generation stars was only one experiment in an ongoing sequence of almost mind-numbing complexity. 'Decisions' were made during the first nanoseconds of the big bang that ensured that all of our names were written there.

With every new doorway of opportunity the universe chooses with us in mind. The wrong choices lead to death while the right ones aspire to life. And in all things the cosmos chooses life. Isn't that continuing 'choice'? Intervention maybe.

What I was not seeing was that God always intervenes, his participation and identification with the universe is total, a part of its very fabric. God's intervention, in fact, is so perfectly seamless that we fail - to see it.

And hasn't God intervened historically at least once? Even if my rejection of the idea of intervention causes me to have trouble with the notion of Christ (it doesn't), his historical reality has excellent credentials.

And what about us? If we ourselves are creations of the Milky Way, through processes that are both staggering and ineffable, then are we not interventionists on its behalf? Do we not continually bend the world to our own will (often absurdly)? Is not the Milky Way itself then, through us, clearly intervening? We are experimenting. We are making choices. We are intervening.

So maybe we do have an interventionist God. And perhaps I am useful here. There are ways here that are the ways of death; like the galaxies of sterile stars they exist, but in the long run the cosmos will have no need of them. So long as we aspire to life the universe will choose us, it lifts us in its arms and runs with us. It intervenes on our behalf and we can have confidence in it.

I have read of this 'choosing' nature of the cosmos before, and some of the writers have identified this bias towards life and growth as being nothing less than the power of the love of God. An ultimate love expressing itself in the flaring forth and the flowering of all creation. Creation loves us.
At a very deep level I sense something else, that perhaps nothing is really lost, even all those sterile stars. For all I know, they may well be part of the plan. After all, they contribute to the total mass of the cosmos, a factor that cosmologists now recognise to be extremely critical in deciding the final fate of all being? Our own Milky Way, our own sun, every atom of our bodies knows about all of those stars and counts their names in¾ways that we are only just beginning¾to understand.
No, they are certainly not lost. I am suddenly glad that they are all there. Their presence may well have bearing on the continued existence of mountain streams and roses and bird-calls. And piccaninnies with snotty noses in Enga . . . and clumsy peace-makers.

To: Perspectives Issue 60

Ted Carr Ted and his wife Dawn have recently returned from two years in the New Guinea highlands where they worked for the Catholic Diocese of Wabag.