We are not just participating in an already-created universe; we are also participants in the process of creation. And that knowledge carries tremendous moral weight.
Afterthought: Our every action or non action, our every word, our every thought, is creating. Are we contributing to the world we want, the world that could be, should be, and one day will be*, or are we adding to something that will need to be cleaned up by someone else? Will another soul be required to spend their precious, priceless creative energy just to clean up my mess?
* We could call this the Kingdom, the Reign of God, or simply the future.
Yes! This.
Posted by: Erin Wilson | January 08, 2013 at 09:41 PM
Everything matters, because everyone matters. If only I could live this way.
I get a bit of a handle on everything matters when I think about our embodied nature along with the notion of spacetime. Einstein's term in all it's richness. I don't pretend to get my head around most of it, only what much smarter people than I have adequately explained.
There's something critical about the "me-ness" of my perception of and inhabitation of spacetime and its inexorable connection to the "us-ness" of our inhabitation of spacetime.
We together inhabit a field of infinite possibilities. (infinite can still be a bounded set, so there are limitations on what's possible, but they are still infinte)
The pivot point, it seems to me, is intent. I'm thinking of the Divine intent poetically articulated in the Genesis story, "brooding" over creation. Then words spoken are the primal foundational creative act.
Our intent, in as much as we bear the image of a creative Creator, is the pivot between "the eternal," what ever that is, (the future, as you say) and embodied spacetime. Our intent is the point at which infinite possibilities of the eternal crash into and are made manifest in here and now, hic et nunc. Here and now, at least in the biblical narrative, is always, always, always implicitly relational. Our intent always has relational implications.
That being the case, everything matters, everything we speak or make or shape. Even our silent "being" that is a betweeness with others is a manifestation of intent, whether we intend it or not.
Everything matters because everyone matters. But I rarely live it.
Posted by: Steve Frost | January 09, 2013 at 03:14 AM
Got the book. Looks quite revolutionary and worth getting into.
Posted by: Dave | January 09, 2013 at 05:55 AM
Ah, but Steve, you know it, and that's (more than) half the battle. Thanks for the great comment my friend. (And Dave and Erin too.)
Posted by: Mike | January 09, 2013 at 07:45 AM