Universe Lessons: Extravagance, Generosity & Expansion

In yesterday’s DM, I called for taking lessons from the universe itself to strengthen our souls for the challenges we face as citizens and as guests on this special but endangered planet. 

Let us consider some of these lessons which in my book, Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth, I call “Gifts of Wisdom: Rules for Living in the Universe.” 

The first among them is what Annie Dillard calls “extravagance” or we might call “generosity.”  Says she, “If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.”

She argues her case that “nature is, above all, profligate.”  That leaves return to the soil alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital.  Extravagance!  Nature will try anything once…..This is a spendthrift economy: though nothing is lost, all is spent.

We recently celebrated a Christian feast day that declares the Great Mystery that guides this vast universe of two trillion galaxies “leapt” to earth two thousand years ago to join a troubled species—our own—not as a worldly potentate but as one of us.  And suffered the consequences of our disturbed human history.  This too is extravagant.

So too is what the sun delivers every day to our planet which receives .00000005% of the sun’s energy that powers “every single thing on this planet.”*  

Sufi mystic Hafiz, meditating on that reality, names the extravagance and generosity of the sun this way:

Even after all this time
the sun never says to the earth,
‘You owe me.’
Look what happens
with a love like that.
It lights up the whole sky.

Hafiz also teaches that warriors need to sit in a circle with others and “gather the strength to unmask oneself” and “then sits, giving like a great illumed planet on the Earth.”  Our job is to be as generous and extravagant as the sun.  To mirror the universe.  Did Jesus do that and teach it also?

Are we living in a time when humans are called to be openhanded, bighearted, and large souled?  A time calling us to magnanimity?

Poet Ernesto Cardenal believes that “the greatest discovery of the twentieth century is the expanding universe.”  Are we expanding too?  If not, we are contracting and shrinking into fear.  But love expands and fear contracts and “denotes avoidance in general” as Thomas Aquinas puts it.

Fundamentalism and all expressions of racism, sexism, classism, adultism, homophobia or fear of the other, are evidence of contracting.  The general message of the universe is: “When in doubt, expand.” 

Love has no limits.  Love expands to the breaking point and beyond—to crucifixion and then on to resurrection.  We live in a world of divine surprises that, like the universe itself, are beyond our wildest imaginations.  

To be continued

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* Mark D. Bullard. “How much of the Sun’s Energy Reaches Earth?” Linked In. January 29, 2021

Adapted from Matthew Fox, Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth, pp. 43-46.

And Fox, One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from Global Faiths, p. 417.

And Fox, Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality, pp. 66-80.

Banner image: The Universe. Photo by NASA on Unsplash

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Queries for Contemplation

Do you see the possibilities for generosity and expansion on the rise?  How best to sow these seeds and nurture them?

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Recommended Reading

Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth

Fox’s spirituality weds the healing and liberation found in North American Creation Spirituality and in South American Liberation Theology. Creation Spirituality challenges readers of every religious and political persuasion to unite in a new vision through which we learn to honor the earth and the people who inhabit it as the gift of a good and just Creator.
“A watershed theological work that offers a common ground for religious seekers and activists of all stripes.” — Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality and Practice.
“I am reading Liberating Gifts for the People of the Earth by Matt Fox.  He is one that fills my heart and mind for new life in spite of so much that is violent in our world.” ~ Sister Dorothy Stang.

One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from Global Faiths

Matthew Fox calls on all the world traditions for their wisdom and their inspiration in a work that is far more than a list of theological position papers but a new way to pray—to meditate in a global spiritual context on the wisdom all our traditions share. Fox chooses 18 themes that are foundational to any spirituality and demonstrates how all the world spiritual traditions offer wisdom about each.“Reading One River, Many Wells is like entering the rich silence of a masterfully directed retreat. As you read this text, you reflect, you pray, you embrace Divinity. Truly no words can fully express my respect and awe for this magnificent contribution to contemporary spirituality.” –Caroline Myss, author of Anatomy of the Spirit

Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality

Matthew Fox lays out a whole new direction for Christianity—a direction that is in fact very ancient and very grounded in Jewish thinking (the fact that Jesus was a Jew is often neglected by Christian theology): the Four Paths of Creation Spirituality, the Vias Positiva, Negativa, Creativa and Transformativa in an extended and deeply developed way.
“Original Blessing makes available to the Christian world and to the human community a radical cure for all dark and derogatory views of the natural world wherever these may have originated.” –Thomas Berry, author, The Dream of the Earth; The Great Work; co-author, The Universe Story