All that is, is holy. Not because someone wearing a funny hat blessed it. Existence itself is holy. Just by virtue of existing it is holy. So holy in fact, the holiness should be self-evident and not need pointing out. It's a uni-verse, remember.
Many of us were taught we live in a great chain of being, with the most powerful on top ordering the lives of all those below. That's wrong, and always was. We exist in a great web of being, with each node essential to the whole. And whatever you affect here will have an effect over there. Be aware and hence be wise.
I was always frustrated in school; all we did was study dots. It was only when I finally got out that I felt free to start connecting dots any way I choose. My first such effort, the month I finished college, was to study the periodic table of elements while listening to Handel's Messiah. I thought my brain would explode. The connections form networks, which form inter-networks, which increase in complexity until you come to the totality of the cosmos (leaving possible other universes aside for a moment) and then you discover it's all one waveform of energy. And that is the beginning of wisdom. (And I am nowhere near that but this is what I have heard from those who have been there.)
What a tragedy that so many feel they have to climb the Himalayas or starve themselves to exhaustion in the pursuit of truth. The truth we seek is around us all the time; we only need to recognize it.
I suspect, your Holiness, that even in your high office, with all the tradition of the Petrine line bearing down on you, that you recognize the old story is dying or dead now.
But even the scientists and engineers can learn from the gospels. It's written in Luke, "You see a cloud rising in the west, and you say, 'It's going to rain,' and it does. And when the south wind blows, you say, 'It's going to be hot,' and it is. You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky. But you refuse to find the true meaning of things; of what is behind the surface. You accumulate nearly infinite masses of information, but you place wisdom outside your remit? Why is that?
With all the worship and hope of the people focused on a male divinity outside the universe, then nature and women - the world and the flesh - are consigned to consort with the devil to form the unholy trinity in opposition.
So let's consider a way forward. Beginning in the early 19th century the study of nature became a profession, rather than the pastime of a few educated gentlemen. And since then, a series of revelations have washed over us like a tsunami threatening to drown us in a sea of facts, but without any sense of value or worth.
In 1801, Englishman Thomas Young, using crude tools at his disposal then, conducted the double-slit experiment, which showed that the very act of observing a particle has a dramatic effect on the particle's behavior.
In 1859, Charles Darwin, who once thought of entering the ministry, demonstrated the principle of evolution of life by means of natural selection.
In the later 1800s, Fr. Gregor Mendel, working alone breeding peas and bees in the garden of an Austrian monastery, created the fields of microbiology and genetic engineering
In the early 20th century a Belgian priest, Fr. Georges Lemaà �tre, put forward the notion of the Big Bang, before American Edwin Hubble refined it soon after.
In 1905, Einstein wrote four papers that changed all that we thought we knew about space, time, and everything in between. His famous equation, e=mc2, revealed that solid mass and energy waves are the same thing at the quantum level, factored different ways. Then maybe at the macro level where we experience existence, we will begin to see that grace and nature, religion and science, faith and reason, are the same thing, factored different ways.
Even chaos is now seen to be very highly ordered activity, as described in the butterfly effect by Edward Lorenz in 1963.
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