Copernican Revolution

by Ginge Sivigny - 3/4/2011 

             

The time has come for me to let go

of the old world view, 

the one ingrained in me from childhood.

Earth sandwiched between

heaven and hell, 

supervised by an 

all-knowing, personally intervening 

God

(whether loving or judging doesn’t matter.)

 

Letting go

exacts every bit as much courage

 as giving up belief

in a flat, stable earth, 

daring to define myself 

as peripheral, not central , 

standing on a spinning,

cosmically miniscule,

dynamic bio- sphere,

tethered to it only by 

an unseen force.

 

At what point did I make the leap from

hiding behind the veil

of religious doctrines:

    incarnation, resurrection, original sin, redemption?

 

When did I begin to place my trust instead

in scientific truths—or theories

(perhaps comprehensible to others, but)

equally mysterious to me:

    evolution, quarks, neutrinos, black holes, pulsars?

 

I am ready to discard discredited

proclamations of popes and priests,

finding it

less absurd,

less violent to my psyche

to trust

explanations and explorations

of scientists—even as they 

consistently and continuously

disprove their own past certainties

in the quest to unravel truth.

 

It is scary

to shed the cloak of certainty

which I used to name faith,

to forego the security 

of an omnipresent Fixer on Demand.

 

For many years I’ve asked

To whom am I praying?

and long ago began rejecting

gods made in the image and likeness of man.

 

But now to stand without the crutch,

to admit how little I know,

how little I understand,

is finally to genuflect to 

Ultimate Mystery.

 

I do consider it acceptable 

to name that Mystery

GOD.

 

So this spring is for me

a new genesis.

A time for renewal, 

not of my baptismal vows,

but of my sense of self,

my sense of my place in time and space, 

open to an adult understanding

of eternity and universe.

 

Realizing who I am,

and knowing profoundly  

that I am intrinsically connected,

interwoven with all life and all lives,

responding to and reflecting

the same creative force,

participating in the same being,

that ground which permeates all beings, 

animate and inanimate.

 

This is my Easter:

to break through my fear

into freedom.

Freedom to grow, to ripen, to age

in and into 

the fullness of life

which is Love.