A prose version of the following poem was published in the December 1994 issue of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science as part of an article: "From the Sense to Sense: The Hermeneutics of Love." Apart from the initial sense of fear/awe and a continuing sense of wonder/amazement at the sheer grandeur and beauty of the vision (despite certain terrifying aspects), there was no emotion in the experience. It was pure learning/knowing, and inexplicably contained vast amounts of information which I simply did not have at the time and in fact could not have had. I am Catholic and had gone to first communion. However, My parents were profoundly anti-clerical and I rarely went to church. My religion at the time was a deep attachment to Advent and Lent (more so than Christmas and Easter), and especially a love of the mysterious nave/cave of the dark Norbertine Abbey church (which I visited on my way home from school, the rare instances when Mama wasn't there to walk me home), the flickering flame by the monstrance, and the haunting chants of the canons if I was lucky enough to catch them at prayer, up by the altar in their carved choir chairs. I loved the Christkind and Saint Francis, and tried to live my life without stepping on ants or allowing wasps to drown. The "vision" had none of these elements, and yet I have known for many years that it was essentially religious (or at that "root" where spirituality inspires religion). It left me with a profound sense of the interconnectedness of everything--the crystalline configurations of the pre-organic dance of atoms and molecules somehow weaving the hierarchical web of life with the necessity of transient organic suffering (from atom to living cell to organism to conscious organism to self-conscious organism to rational self-conscious organism to rational self-consciousness . . .). If left me with joy at the overall beauty of the Whole-In-Process. It left me with the conviction that there is meaning at the heart of things. It left me with the inability to hate anyone and anything. It also profoundly affected my academic "self" and inspired me to write my dissertation on Hegel, Jung, and Hesse in order to pursue the ghost of a purposive power, a dynamic pattern of emergence and unfolding, beyond the spatio-temporal bubble. It filled me with delight when I discovered Pythagoras and Teilhard and fractals and the World Wide Web . .. In 1991 the "vision" also in part inspired a poem I read at at the Templeton Symposium, "Human Viability and a World Theology" (sponsored by Zygon and the Chicago Center of religion and Science, 15-16 November 1991). The poem, "Noogenesis: Weaving Ourselves on Incarnation's Loom." was subsequently published in Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, 27.3 (September 1992): 361-370.
Vision 1949 I hover
Grey up, grey front, grey back, grey left,
grey right, grey down
I
ONE I am a crystal, floating in the void,
a glowing
....
I
I AM
I think World
Zooming in from the billions
I shiver-tremble-quiver-glisten in opalescent
shimmer.
then
I
I hover
Grey up, grey front, grey back, grey left,
grey right, grey down,
Seeing everywhere simultaneously I remember having been here before
I look toward the horizon and discover
the expected other
"Wake
up
or
you
will
be
trapped
23 April 1993
|
