I’ve been praying through Ernesto Cardenal’s “Cosmic Canticle” (481 pages) with ever-increasing awe – and yes, I have to say it, quite decidedly religious awe. Heavens, literally! – here’s wind in my wheels. I’ve long sensed, and still sense, deeply, and always and everywhere, that our humanity is on the cusp of one of the greatest evolutionary leaps it has ever known, and I am spiritually awestruck – and grateful for the perception:

100,000 million galaxies can be seen through telescopes now …

There are numbers in the universe which cannot be written
except with a universe of zeros.
In spite of everything you are important, you, molecular structures
on a middling planet of a common or garden star
in a suburb of an average galaxy.
We are self-conscious spacetime.
We are the explanation of the Cosmos according to Hawking.
We are the mid-point between atoms and the stars
and between the mini-particle and the observed universe.
– The decidedly strange form of the human body

Ernesto Cardenal
Cosmic Canticle, p208

Yes: I believe the prayer-book canticle, “Christ is the image of the unseen God” – Colossians 1.15.

My entire life has depended upon this Christ. But this Christ, the Christ, is not ‘just’ the homely, humanly church-tameable Jesus, carefully and deliberately holed up within the walls of ‘church’, the Christ who appears – to some – to appear only between the pages of a somehow infallible scripture or prayer book. This Christ, the Christ, is Christos, the ‘Anointed’ of whom Richard Rohr has written – here –

“The Primal Anointing – “Christening” – of all matter with Spirit, which began in Genesis 1:1-2, is called “the Christ” in Christian shorthand.”

– and of whom, of himself, Jesus of Nazareth spoke when he said “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” (… and the works that you have seen me do, you can do too …). The Cosmic Christ, the Source of the universe’s evolving, is, as Richard Holloway once famously described him, a “tombstone roller” – here.

And we’re all, absolutely and universally, evolving. So we can absolutely and universally own “faith” – even where we’re unable, in company with billions, to subscribe to an understanding of a particular religion. Cosmic faith. “Cosmic Christ.” Cosmic Canticle. There are numbers in the universe which cannot be written. But the “primal anointing” in all of us tells us that

“In spite of everything you are important …”