Recently we have been reflecting more deeply on the amazing achievement of fifty years ago, when for the first time ever, man travelled to, and landed on, the moon. Many of today’s youth almost take this for granted, as the rapid advance of science has enabled various types of space exploration. For those of us who followed, with baited breath, the events of fifty years ago, however, there were so many uncertainties, so many possibilities of things that could go wrong with this enterprise, that we became very conscious of how small we were in relation to the huge Universe beyond our known world. Even today, the bravery of those involved in the Moon landing is astounding. They were willing to take all the risks involved, in order to learn more about the world beyond our own planet. They were able to look beyond the known, into the unknown.
In many ways, that is what we are being invited to do in our daily lives, to look BEYOND ourselves, and also to look deeply WITHIN ourselves. When we do this, we discover that the God who created the Universe, which has been changing and evolving since the beginning of time, also created human life as we know it on our planet earth. Just as the Universe, created by God, grows and evolves, we too, created by that same God, need to recognise that we are called to grow spiritually in relation to our Creator, our Universe and the people around us. The Universe continues to develop and change, to interact in ways we humans do not understand. The challenge is for us to be open to the growth that our Creator is holding out to us.
In more recent times, I was reflecting once again on these truths, and now offer the following short poem arising from such reflections.
The Expanding Universe
Our small world
Can become our whole world.
Many times, all our energy
Gets focused, burned up, in the trivia.
Yet out beyond us
Our Universe is expanding
In that huge world of
The Cosmos.
Energy there reaches out
Beyond itself, combining
With “the other” to create
New realities.
In this creation I see
Great beauty of movement,
Colour, light, in an explosion
Of new life.
And we, as humans,
Where do we fit
Within all this
Immensity?
We stand, humbled,
Before this expression
Of our God ‘s
Creative love.
We gaze in wonder
At this Dance of the Universe,
The vibrant yet delicate
Movements within the Cosmos,
And we realise
That the God Who made all this,
Made us, too, to be God – like
As we tread lightly within
God’s Creation.
Maria McMahon, RNDM.