by Christina Watkins | Sep 23, 2022 | Uncategorized
There is exciting understanding coming into our consciousness about what many people call ‘Our New Creation Story.’ The talk is about the film footage coming across our television screens from the James Webb Space Telescope this past summer. The talk is about elementary particles, flashing then fluttering into existence out of a realm of nothingness. We are talking about the attraction called allurement between particles, which can also be waves. We are amazed that fluctuations give rise to the formation of atoms, which then come together as stars which then create all the elements of the universe and release them. We wonder at the meaning and implications of the words ‘radiance’ and ‘allurement.’ We wonder how we can participate in interrelationship with our fellow earth community of brothers and sisters.
Do you remember or know about the song Joni Mitchell sang at Woodstock :
‘We are stardust, billion year old carbon… We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden?’
In the mid 1980s, I and my friend and seminary classmate, Valerie, attended two summer workshops over a period of a very few years, at what was then the Roman Catholic Passionist Retreat Center at Port Burwell on Lake Erie. Cosmologist, Brian Swimme, Theologian, Thomas Berry and then Dominican priest, Matthew Fox, gave talks over a week-end. These three eminent thinkers and leaders were there just hanging out with each other and also with some people lucky enough to know about them.
I was one of the lucky persons. My husband and our family lived in North York, Toronto, a few blocks from the Passionist Centre there which was called ‘The Centre for Creative Ministries.’ Port Burwell is just down the road a few miles from our family summer cottage at Port Stanly. The Centre was sold to a private family a few years later. When my friend and I were there, the group all ate our meals together, no more than 35 people. The sleeping accommodations were separate small cottages spread out over the sandy landscape.
My wonderful spiritual director for many years, Eldon Shields, and his wife, Marcella, worked out of ‘The Centre for Creative Ministries’ in North York. Through an enormous stroke of Grace, Valerie and I were welcomed into the group those two weekends.
All three of the presenters at those workshops have been major contributors to the movement towards ‘Ecological Consciousness,’ which Brian Swimme calls ‘Integral Consciousness.’ He and others say that we are in the process of waking up to ‘Cosmic Consciousness.’
All three of these leaders are writers contributing to the growth of our understanding of ‘The Cosmic or Integral Consciousness Movement.’ Here is a list of the most recent of their books which I have read and recommend heartily:
- Hidden Heart of the Cosmos: Humanity and the New Story Revised. by Brian Swimme, 2019.
- Matthew Fox: Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality Selected with an Introduction by Charles Burack. by Matthew Fox 2022.
- The Great Work: Our Way Into The future. by Thomas Berry.
In my book, Poems for the Journey, 2021, the little poem, ‘Waves,’ on pages 13,14, uses some of the words of Particle Physics in a playful way. I hope you enjoy the poem.
by Christina Watkins | Aug 23, 2022 | Poems
Thoughts on ’ Building the Earth’
Most people would admit to hoping that the world will be a better place because they have been in it.
Some people, perhaps most of us, desire to grow into the people love calls us to be.
So where do we look for ideas on how to build the world, the earth or the cosmos? Of course, we look
to people we have known who have made a difference in our lives – our faith leaders and heroes,
people in our families and communities and people whose books we have read. Their stories have allure
for us and tell of allure in other people’s lives that helped people become who they were called to be.
Our experience tells us that love heals wounds and is also alluring to us as we grow towards building
new things.
One of my heroes is the Jesuit priest, Teilhard de Chardin. He talks about ‘Building the Earth’ in his book
of the same name and in many other of his books. Here are some quotations I have collected over many
years from lecture notes and books about and by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:
‘We are one, after all,
You and I.
Together we suffer,
Together we exist
And forever will
Recreate each other.
Everything is sacred.’
‘The most telling and profound way of describing the evolution of the universe would undoubtedly be to
trace the evolution of love.’
‘Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.’
‘Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the
energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have created fire.’
‘Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come
into being.’
‘We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human
experience.’
‘It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though the limits of our abilities do not exist.’
I wrote a little poem about what ‘allurement‘ feels like to me. We feel the pull of being drawn to
someone or something because there may be something we will do together with someone else or with
a group that will help ‘build the earth, ’as Tielhard de Chardin puts it. My poem is ‘This One’ and ‘Este.’
It is on pages 26 and 27 of Poems~Poemas.~
by Christina Watkins | Aug 12, 2022 | Poems
On The River
On land good dialogue is difficult.
Seasons tell us when to rest and when to grow.
The river is the place for easy flow.
Flotsam and jetsam float on by.
The daystar and night stars light our way.
Huck and Jim were friends
on the river.
I offer this poem, which I wrote in 1982, not because I think it is a good poem. I offer it because it came
to me and has stayed with me. I hope some poems come to you and stay with you. I hope you honour
your insights.
I took a course in American Literature when we lived in Northern Ontario. After reading and being
smitten with Mark Twain’s novel, Huckleberry Finn, I had some thoughts and feelings about the novel’s
two main characters, Huck and Jim. They were close friends but their social relationship and power in
the community were not equal. Sometimes I identified with Huck and sometimes with Jim.
Jim, who in the story believed he was still an enslaved person, was naïve and gullible but was also
honest and sweet in his friendship with Huck. Huck treated Jim badly and got away with it because he
was a white boy. He painted Jim blue which humiliated Jim. He tied Jim up and sometimes threatened
to ‘turn Jim in’ because Jim was thought to be a runaway.
But, Jim was blessed with natural intelligence. He knew that a storm was coming because of the way
the birds were behaving. He recognized the two main fraudulent characters in the story, the King and
the Duke, and knew it was best to stay away from them. Jim was stalwart in his friendship with Huck.
He was a good friend. When the two boys were together on the river in the raft, just the two of them,
they were both sweet and respectful of each other, good friends.
The boys’ friendship issues were more or less resolved at the end of the story. Jim had been given his
freedom by Miss Watson and had not known it. Huck did eventually leave. He ‘lit out for the
Territories. ’It was something he had thought about and talked about.
My two ongoing questions about the story are: What and where are ‘the Territories’ in people’s stories?
And, are Huck and Jim forevermore connected because of their love for each other?
I remember that the structure of metaphysical poems is in this order:
remembrance, understanding and will.
Many poems are loosely structured in this way. For me, ‘the Territories’ in Mark Twain’s novel could
represent understanding or, in more modern terms, consciousness. ‘The Territories’ could be Huck’s
understanding that he will need space and movement in the world if he is going to’ grow’ into his true
adult self.
In the case of my little poem, ’Witness’ and ‘Testiga’ on pages 22 and 23 of Poems~Poemas, the ‘will’
part of the structure of the poem would be my vowing to remain open to whatever newness I witness.
The insight is the importance of the freedom to be open to what is new.
by Christina Watkins | Jul 16, 2022 | Uncategorized
This line, which can be useful every day, is from American poet and painter, e.e. cummings:
Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love if the stars walk backward.
The 1990s were some of the years when I learned most about loving relationship. We lived in Denver,
Colorado and then Scottsdale, Arizona.
Early on, my hairdresser, who was friends with ‘ puppeteer’ Jim Hensen, suggested that I volunteer
with Colorado AIDS Project, a dynamic local organization that helped people living with HIV/AIDS join in
community with people living with the same disease and also with people who wanted to walk with
them. I was a volunteer who gave support to the volunteers who were ‘buddies’ to people who wanted
a ‘buddy.’ As a new volunteer, I filled out the same questionnaire everyone did. I noticed that, like
most people there that day, I had left behind community and was seeking a place of respect where
participating in loving relationship might be possible. We all knew that we would be sharing in the
suffering of others and also our own suffering. It was a community.
My experience with those volunteers and the people they were walking beside was extremely powerful
for me. I witnessed depth of love, bravery, faithfulness, kindness, respect and hope which I will
remember always. At the same time I was involved with Colorado AIDS Project, I was volunteering
through the Methodist Church teaching ‘English as a Second Language’ to legal and illegal Spanish
speakers. My experience with Colorado AIDS project was opening my heart and mind to a larger
understanding of freedom and loving participation in suffering. I was with people I could care about.
Another experience of witnessing loving relationship in Denver was my friendship with Sister Mary Luke
Tobin, one of Denver’s beloved and well known people. She had been the only American woman invited
to attend VaticanTwo. My spiritual director in Toronto had asked her to meet me.
We became very good friends. Age and status were not considerations at all. She was in her 80’s and
90’s when I knew her and I was able to witness the way she was always fully present to every person
she met. She was vulnerable to who they were. It was disarming for people. She asked me to drive her
to events at which she was speaking and to meetings with other people active in the Peace Movement
or other activities she was involved with. (She laughed when she confessed to me that she liked me to
drive her because some of the other people who wanted to drive her were not good drivers.)
Mary Luke was a very effective story teller. I wrote a poem telling of her sharing a story with me about a
priest who had died that week in Denver and another priest who had been sent out from the east to be
with the dying man through a time of suffering until the end of his life. It is a story of coming to
consciousness about what largeness love is. I hope you enjoy it.
Travelling with Sister Mary Luke Tobin,’ Poems for the Journey, p.1
Also, I remember that great song, ‘He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother’?’ It is a good song to sing.
by Christina Watkins | Jul 5, 2022 | Uncategorized
We were in Buena Vista over Memorial Day Weekend on the first warm day of the year as a party of six –
– four senior adult people, two couples, and our friends’ two dogs. The older dog was a senior chocolate
lab and the other a young black lab and pointer mix. We were all respectfully friendly with the young
and older hikers we met on the trails. They were all extraordinarily outgoing and welcoming to us. It
was remarkable to me, a Canadian living in British Columbia. I admired the outgoing energy of these
beautiful people in their late afternoon activity.
When we all reached the parking lot below, a boy of 8 or 9 was standing near our vehicle holding a
white and red toy assault weapon. He was watching us. He wore an unattractive grin on his face. We
saw the boy raise his plastic AR-15 toy to his shoulder. He fired at the adults first – streams of red light
which landed on us one after the other in a rush. Then he shot the dogs.
I looked around to see if there was a second toy shooter in sight. If there was a second shooter I
couldn’t see him. Perhaps his brother was out of sight. I saw a group of people who might have been
the boy’s parents. I thought of going and speaking with them but instantly knew that would not be the
appropriate thing to do.
Instead, I am writing this piece and thinking of how like the 18 or 19 year old shooters of real AR-15
grown ups’ assault weapons we see in TV footage these days move like this 8 or 9 year old boy.
Auden’s tribute to Herman Melville says:
Evil is unspectacular and always human,
and shares our bed and eats at our table.
I hope that the boy we saw that sunny day will have some experience which will make him want to
work towards peace. I hope he meets people with fire in their hearts about peace. Perhaps peace will
come to him on the wind in the mystery of love.
See my poem titled ‘Peace’ in English and ‘Paz’ in Spanish on pages 80 and 81 in Poems~Poemas.
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