This was our First Reading at this year’s Easter Vigil Service – another take on creation!
A New Origin Story by Jean Houston
From what Cosmic garden of Eden did you emerge? And toward what destiny are you pointed? Perhaps now, as the ground of the known shifts beneath our feet, what we need in order to steady ourselves is nothing short of a new origin story.
In the beginning there were and continue to be the Great Gardeners who live in the Metaverse, a vast farm fertile with energy, creativity, intelligence, and love. The Gardeners decide to plant a new garden in a field of limitless, nested universes. So potent is the ground, so ready the seed, that once planted, it bursts its pod with an explosion of light and energy.
The seed sprouts into a great tree that holds in its branches a trillion galaxies, each blossoming with a hundred billion or more stars. Whirlwinds of energy swirling through the branches coalesce into bio-systems of planetary scale, each home to billions of organisms – self-sustaining ecological webs. The great tree links every expression of the garden’s unfolding such that anything that happens in any part is known instantaneously to the whole.
Budding life complexifies, jumping first into self-awareness and then into awareness of the Great Gardeners who planted them. Growth problems create learning opportunities. New expressions lead to profound understandings. Physical needs require less energy and resources so that the garden of consciousness and culture may be tended.
Venturing out in exploration by imagination and technology these lives discover the wonders of the cosmic tree. All life is a continuous creation of birth, growth, death, and new birth – all expressions of energy in motion. The cosmos, both within and without, is a living organism, recreated moment by moment by the love and the intelligence of the Gardeners.
With the knowledge of the Great Tree comes a radical freedom. We are free to face evil, to experience suffering. As we transcend these limits we come to a more expansive understanding of who we are and what we may yet be and do. Dear friends, this brings the Origin Story up to who and what we are in this moment of cosmic-earth history!
Knowing that all is within all and each part is connected to the whole, we gain access to the very patterns of creation. With this knowledge, dear friends, we join the Gardeners in planning and planting, nourishing the cosmic garden as it blooms.
We Gardeners create fields and landscapes whose blossoms are our minds and spirits. We are made of the same stuff of the Metaverse, manifestations of the Divine Spirit in the world. We are woven into the fabric of infinite ecology. We contain the design of creation itself.
We – you and I – know this to be so. We are reality surfers, delightedly riding the waves of creation, minds opened, hearts expanded. Joy and a willingness to say “yes” to the new dawn is the sign of our creative partnership with the Metaverse.