Celebrating the Mysteries

[gurdonark]

The chemist searched for structure,
for an ordering of processes,
an explanation for a phenomenon,
as he worked on a pure science grant
as if he had been given money to find God.

We've categorized into boxes
fields that should have been blurred into
a whole,
the theologian in the school of theology
the physicist in her own department,
when the search for truth is a single search,
a search of numbers, of speculations,
a search so large that it does not fit in one
book, or one theory, or one field of study.

A child playing with a 4 inch plastic reflecting
telescope looks Orion-ward
at the M 42 nebulae, and dreams
of thought patterns of alien
forces and strange physical events,
in that dream of science
biology and philosophy combined,
he sees more of God than a hundred
sad scholars worried about getting a grant
and paying the mortgage....

We have before us a quest,
not a skirmish over Jerusalem,
or a horsetrot after arcane occultisms,
but a challege--
if we can heal our world, and free
its resources from warfares inward and
outward,
we can be about the business of learning what
there is to know....
not in our generation, or in ten generations,
but perhaps in twenty we will learn something
about reality, and God.