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This week I offer the second of four issues [today’s column discusses pp 31-60] on John Philip Newell’s 2008 book “Christ of the Celts: The Healing of Creation”, in preparation for our after-church book study on Sunday April 7th, which itself is preparation for Newell’s visit to St John’s on May 10th through 12th. You are encouraged to purchase this fine book and read along with me over the next four weeks. Copies of many of Newell’s books will be for sale (and signing!) when he is with us.
John Philip Newell is fascinated with sound—the song he says the earth itself makes. He observes that physicists speak of being able to detect sound vibrations in the universe that come from the beginning of time. Not audible to the human ear those sound vibrations nonetheless reveal rhythms according to which all things move in relationship.
As I read Newell I’m also reading a book by Paramahansa Yogananda (and one by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as well) and it’s fascinating to see how often there are points of intersection between the texts. Like Newell, Yogananda dips into physics—superstring theory in particular—to note the “vibrational” quality of the universe. He quotes a university physicist: “The theory suggests that the microscopic landscape is suffused with tiny strings whose vibrational patterns orchestrate the evolution of the universe.” Song—and sound—are really nothing more than audible vibrations. These tiny strings, which are hundreds of billions times smaller than atomic nuclei, comprise an ultramicroscopic string symphony, vibrating matter into existence. [1] So Newell is not off the mark when he speaks of the earth’s creative song.
Thinking of the vibrating nature of the Earth helps makes sense of what Newell means when he writes, “Creation is viewed not simply as something that occurred at one point in the past. Creation is forever being born. It is forever coming out of the Womb of the Eternal, and God sees what is being born as sacred.”
Newell cites the second-century teacher Irenaeus of Lyons, who speaks of Christ as recapitulating Creation. Newell explains that to recapitulate is to repeat something in a way that brings it into sharper focus, shining light on what has been forgotten or become obscured. Newell calls Christ “the recapitulation of the original utterance of God.” This assertion parallels Richard Rohr, who says that the Eternal or Cosmic Christ was present and active at the Big Bang.
Newell writes that Irenaeus describes Christ as recapitulating the primal, connecting us to the “most truly primitive energies within the body of creation and the human form.” This contrasts sharply with what many of us were taught about Christ—namely, that he was and is spiritual and transcendent. Not so, says Newell (and Irenaeus): Christ and Creation are holy matter both emerging directly from the heart of God.
So, Creation—matter—is good. Newell cites Eriugena, a ninth-century Irish teacher, who said that “if goodness [i.e., if God] were extracted from the universe all things would cease to exist. Newell also cites Columbanus, an Irish teacher three hundred years earlier, who said that “if we wish to know the Creator we must come to know the creatures.” Such teachings stand over against more typical doctrines of Western Christianity, which tell us that bodies, matter, and primal energies are to be distrusted and suppressed in favor of the spiritual and transcendent. In fact, all are emanations of God, and no one more holy than the rest.
All Creation longs for unity writes Newell, and in this, he again echoes de Chardin, who claimed that “every element in the universe feels the tremendous power of attraction and connection, from the nuclear bonding in the smallest atoms to gravity’s pull on planets, stars, and moons.” [2] Creatures, says Newell, know the rhythm of the earth that we humans have forgotten.
God speaks to us, writes Newell (again citing Eriugenia), not only through Holy Scripture but through Creation as well: “To listen to one without the other is only to half listen. To listen to scripture without creation is to lose the cosmic vastness of the song. To listen to creation without scripture is to lose the personal intimacy of the voice.” In both “texts” we listen, says Newell, for the heartbeat of God.
Newell closes the fourth chapter of his book with a discourse on Western Christianity’s doctrine of creation. Since the wedding of Christianity and the Roman Empire, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo has been taught. Simply put, it says that God created out of nothing. I think it precedes the Roman Empire, for I recall my Old Testament professor in seminary explaining that when Genesis was written, other ancient near eastern cultures were compiling their own creation myths in which their gods shaped creation out of chaos. The writers of Genesis wanted to “one-up” their competitors and so asserted that the Lord God was so powerful he didn’t need chaos as a starting place—he could create out of nothingness.
Newell argues against this, claiming that Celtic Christians have always taught that creation doesn’t come out of nothingness—it comes out of God. He says that the creation ex nihilo distances God from the equation and clears the way for empire to exploit the earth. He says that out of this flawed doctrine the church developed the doctrine of the virgin birth and the perpetual virginity of Mary, reasoning that if creation comes out of nothing then so does Jesus. Newel pokes holes in this doctrine, pointing out that according to the early New Testament manuscripts Jesus had siblings.
He urges us to revere Mary not for her supposed chastity but for her motherliness, as the “conceiver and bearer of sacred life.” He further says that “at the birth of every child, the Holy is born.” We are, writes Newell, “what Christ is, born of God, and…at the heart of every human being and every creature is the Light that was in the beginning and through whom all things have come into being.”
There is something most ancient and holy, then, in each one of us. It is something helpful to keep in mind as we move through our days and endeavor to live our baptismal promises, chief among them to “strive for justice and peace among all people and [to] respect the dignity of every human being.”
[1] The Yoga of Jesus, Paramahansa Yogananda, Los Angeles, CA: Self Realization Fellowship, 2007, 26
[2] Teilhard de Chardin on Love: Evolving Human Relationships, Louis M. Savary and Patricia H. Berne, Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2017, 20
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