Edward Hays ~ Author, Artist & Storyteller
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A Religious Experience at Your Fingertips

6/3/2015

 

A Religious Experience at Your Fingertips


Dear old and new friends,

     Instead of thinking like a seventeenth century woman or man, think, live and pray like someone of the twenty-first century, and you will have an unbelievable experience! Four hundred years ago at sunrise as the sun rose over the eastern horizon people prayed, ate their breakfast and began their day. At sunset as the sun sunk below the western horizon church bells rang calling farm laborers from the fields back inside the city walls for supper and rest. Both sunrise and sunset were then and remain today pillars of stability and of our vocabulary, even if they don’t exist in reality!


                 (Stop reading this Haystack reflection…your doorbell just rang!)

     “Yes, Officer, how can I help you?” you say, opening your front door to a policeman       standing there.          

     “Excuse me, but do you know how fast you were going?”

     “What are you mean, sir? I wasn’t even in my car; I was sitting at my computer right here in my home. I wasn’t going anywhere!”

      “I clocked you going 67,000 miles an hour! Where were you going in such a great hurry?”


     Like the person in that mini-parable, at this moment you and all of us are traveling 67,000 miles an hour as Earth orbits the sun; that is unless you are an old fashioned flat world believer. And as a speed demon you also are spinning around as an inhabitant on Earth as it rotates on its axis at 915 miles an hour (speed measured at The Kennedy Space Center; your rotation speed will vary depending on the latitude of where you live). Fasten your safety belt; as an earthling belonging to our sun’s family of planets inside the spiral Milky Way Galaxy we are hurling outward into space at 1.4 million miles an hour being pulled towards an unknown destination in the direction of (and perhaps beyond) the star constellation Hydra.

     As you attempt to grapple with these incomprehensive speeds without the fake effects of Hollywood’s glowing heavenly mystical clouds, you are having a religious experience! Be forewarned: accepting these estimated speeds, or even that the earth moves, could make you a heretic! That is it you were alive in 1600.

     On June 22, 1633, Galileo was condemned by the Roman Inquisition as being vehemently suspect of heresy because his teachings contradicted Holy Scripture. Also because he believed the sun was not the center of the world and that it didn’t move from east to west but rather it was the world that moved.

     Galileo escaped the fiery fate of Giordano Bruno, the monk philosopher who supported the Copernican theory along with other false ideas. He was declared in 1600 a heretic and was burned at the stake in Rome. The Polish scholar Nicholas Copernicus died before he was declared a heretic in 1616, but not before releasing his teaching that the sun, not Earth, was the center of the universe. Galileo avoided a fiery death by humbly denying his findings and submitting to being “suspect” of heresy. He agreed for the rest of his life to be silent, and live under house arrest, and died that way in 1642.


Once heretical, here now three prayers for a twenty-first century cosmic believer.

A Middle of the Night Prayer


Awake in the darkness of outer space,
restless now in this night, soon to end,
westward revolving as Earth rolls on
pulled to our Great Star magically.
I feel none of this laying still in my bed.

I believe but don’t feel Earth’s spinning
towards our light and life generous Star,
full of promises of a newer, better day
like Eden’s first hydrogen explosive dawn.


Morning Appearance of Our Day Star

Blindingly your laser-like golden light
erases night’s darkness of space.
You, our favorite star of our Galaxy’s
more than two billion sun blazing stars,
are one star calling us to today’s work.

Once you were worshiped as god of gods.
We salute you, healing Sun Sacrament
of life and light, clock of day and night.
You our sky icon of the Source of All Life.


Nightly Disappearance of Our Day Star

This day is done; its work and toil are over.
Earth fades away in the turquoise twilight;
as the cosmic curtain silently rises we turn
outward to behold a dark sea of silver stars
from which, as dust, once we have come.

Glittering diamond lights of cremated stars
millenniums dead, your light still lives on in us,
and some of night sky’s other sun-stars.
One with Earth may I spin asleep in peace,
westward confident of a new day of promise.

March 11 ~ Third Week

3/11/2015

 
Picture

March 11 ~ Third Week

Picture

Dear old and new friends,

     Easter Rabbit believers are looking forward to his visit in only a couple of weeks. He along with Santa, fairies of lost teeth and hidden treasures, dancing Leprechauns and other impossible wonders, delight the young inhabitants of the world who believe in fantasy. Uncouthly they soon become victims of child abuse; around the age of seven to nine, even three (with sophisticated parents), their belief in fantasy and the unimaginable evaporates. It can be the education by some “wise” kid or a slow evolving skepticism and doubt that the once unbelievable could actually exist in this harsh nitty-gritty world evaporates. 

     The Spring Renaissance’s good news is that we’re born into an unimaginable, fantastical place! Childhood fantasy’s enchanted world was our kindergarten for living today and being aware of where you are and of the surrounding wondrous neighborhood. You live on planet Earth circling around our daystar, the sun, 93 million miles away. If you desired to take a trip to the sun (the largest object in 25 trillion miles of nearby galactic space) driving at 55 miles an hour it would take you 193 years!




     
             




     Buckle your fantasy safety belt. If you wanted to drive to the sun’s closest star in the galaxy, Alpha Centauri (a cluster of three stars), at 55 miles an hour the journey would take you 52 million years! As for enjoying the scenery as you drive, there’s nothing, just emptiness. Now put on your awe-shock helmet: If our local neighborhood of our solar system of the sun and nine planets was put inside a coffee cup in Kansas City, our Milky Way galaxy with its 300 to 400 billion stars would be the size of North America. And our galaxy is but one of an estimated 100 billion galaxies in the universe!

     Is class over yet? It’s barely begun! The space between our daystar the sun and Alpha Centauri is empty, as is the space between all the other billions of stars. John Davidson said in 1989 that declaring space is empty is grossly misleading; it is more correct to use the term “creative vacuum.” Today, scholars believe this “empty” space and the vastness of all outer space is a massive whirlpool of raw potential life forces, unknown fields of energy. But this vacant vastness is essential to planetary existence as a cooling down space for interaction between stars.

     Our cosmos needs massive amounts of empty space…and we, too, need empty space and time! However, remember we fear, even dread, emptiness and so fill it with music, chatter, noise and ever-present television. To cure your fear of emptiness seek out an uninhabited church; go in and sit in the holy hollow silence so this creative vacuum can calm and replenish you. Other cures include the practice of meditation, common old fashioned fishing devoid of noise or sitting on your front or back porch doing nothing but being entertained (and inner-trained) by the fertile purposelessness of nothing. I know personally that this isn’t easy, yet like for the cosmos it is essential.

     A renaissance evening prayer after a hard day at work might be to go outside and look up at the stars…and become a child again. Have awe-filled fun imagining the unbelievable, impossible distances between the stars and the fantastic size of our ever evolving cosmos.


                  ~ For those with old Catholic Lenten backgrounds ~

     The previous reflection started with childhood fantasy. So I want to return to what was important as a child. The main part of the old Lent for children was the penance of “giving up” something we liked, and this attitude of denial endured into adulthood. I can remember as a young boy that on our kitchen table in Lent was a large Mason jar in which we put gifts of candy we had given up for the 40 days of Lent. That candy jar became our Lenten gauge since as the candy level rose higher and higher we knew Easter was getting closer, and at noon on Holy Saturday (which was the end of Lent in those olden days) we could eat the candy. 

     Everyone was expected to do penance in Lent, to endure some discomfort or pain for God. Lenten penances were how you made restitution or satisfaction for past sins now, instead of when after you died. Some gave up playing card games while others gave up beer or, even harder, smoking. To understand the concept of penance you need a medieval mind since scholars treated forgiveness of sin from a four point civil legal aspect: remorse, confession, absolution and finally satisfaction. In this feudal legal system justice required satisfaction or restitution for your sins. Early confessional penance/restitutions were very harsh: a year of fasting, going on far distant pilgrimages, and even celibacy. Later reforms in the act of confession reduced penances to saying prayers.  

     It is humorous to imagine the healer Jesus saying to a cripple, “Your sins are forgiven, throw away your crutch, and for your penance go and say three Hail Mary’s and….” We need to find wholesome replacements for those old penances in our Spring Renaissance since denial is a powerful and useful spiritual tool for growth. 

     Penances are typically forms of denial. Possible Renaissance penances could be when finding ourselves in a group where everyone is putting down someone who is absent, we deny ourselves participating in the discussion or we try to change the subject. When we find ourselves making an unfounded assumption in our mind about someone else or judging another’s status or value by how he or she are dressed or act, call an instant recess of that courtroom in our head.

Summer Solstice in Our New Neighborhood

6/18/2012

 

Summer Solstice in Our New Neighborhood

Being “indoor” people we can be unaware there is anything unusual about June 20th and that it once was the prehistoric holy day of the summer solstice when the longest day of the year begins at sunrise. In common parlance, sunrise begins a new day, even if officially it occurs at 12:00 a.m. Fascinatingly, the new day once began for Celts, Greeks, Babylonians, Persians and Jews at sunset!

To begin a new day at sunset today would require a symbolic somersault since we symbolize light with goodness and life…and darkness with evil and death. Yet to begin a new day at sunset as night’s darkness quickly engulfs earth could be beneficial: It could be daily reminder of your death. The fading of the sun could inspire you to live fully each gifted moment before you are truly embraced by death’s ebony darkness. And while sunrises are full of possibilities (including procrastination) sunsets signal an urgency to settle one’s affairs (including being reconciled), for your day is almost over.

Sunrise also reveals the expanse of your “neighborhood.” The paradox of sunset is that instead of shrinking where you live, as twilight lowers its star spangled black curtain speckled with a few sun-stars, it is vastly expanded. Then with telescopic vision we are able to see our astonishing real neighborhood—the Milky Way galaxy with its 200 to 400 billion sun-stars. If our solar system—the sun and eight planets—could fit into a coffee cup, our galaxy would be the size of North America!

But we’ve only come to the edge of our home turf, for beyond our galaxy it’s estimated there are 100 billion other galaxies with their immense uncountable number of star-suns. Thirty years ago a team of astronomers proposed that the universe is but only one of possibly billions of universes in our cosmos. If that’s true, then our giant universe has shrunk to truly a neighborhood size!

Some 2,200 years ago, a Greek astronomer, Aristarchus of Samos, argued that earth was but one of the planets orbiting around the sun. After all this time, isn’t it curious that we continue to use such flat-earth terms as sunrise and sunset? So have a “Happy Solstice” in hallowed communion with the hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of solstices in the Cosmos.


    Edward Hays


    Picture
    Haysian haphazard thoughts on the
    invisible and visible mysteries of life.

    Picture

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