Good Friday, Easter, and transcendent unity

Hello friends. I’ve often noted that the arc of my life follows a path from sky to earth religion. The natural world has often been a portal to edges of the transcendent. In this, I feel kinship with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the paleontologist visionary and with more recent thinkers on evolutionary spirituality. In 1933 Teihard wrote that “The Cross is not a shadow of death, but a sign of progress.” This is a way of looking at the events of Good Friday and Easter as a movement toward completion of man’s transcendent unity, an idea he expressed as the Omega Point.

Writing and reading poems is a way of being together and alone. This interchange summons, in a philosopher’s words, an “attentiveness (that is) the natural prayer of the soul.” In the stillness of writing or in reading aloud, we are in lively contact with nature and other people through the surprises going on in our own imaginations.

As a professor of religious studies and a student/practitioner of Eastern and Western contemplative ways, I’ve come to embrace the world as sacred. Poetry is one hopeful way of sensing and grieving and enjoying that world as sacramental in its ephemeral beauty and pain. Best, Gene