November 20, Becoming: a Sunday Scriptures blog

There is a clue for us in the last word of the official title of this Sunday’s feast day: The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. Perhaps in the past few months you have marveled as I have at the amazing pictures of our universe taken by the new Webb Space Telescope. The one here shows a star-forming nursery in the Eagle Nebula, roughly 6,500 light-years away, named “Pillars of Creation.” King of the Universe focuses us on the meaning of “Christ.” It asks us to let the here and now fall away so that appreciation of the “without end” of divine activity can imprint on our minds and hearts. In the first centuries of Christian history, one image of God was of an architect or artist. Creating something needs three acts really: the intention to create, an idea or image of what is intended, and the execution of it. God as artist is a trinitarian image wherein Christ is the idea or pattern for the intention the artist has in mind. The Divine creating, the accomplishing, is ongoing, and is happening throughout the universe always. The pattern of creating has some constants to it. One constant is dark and light, disintegrating and forming, death and life. In today’s Gospel we see this pattern in the last days of Jesus of Nazareth as he accepts death for the sake of new life as the risen Christ, or the “universal Christ” of Richard Rohr’s writings. We also are being formed in that same pattern because we are parts of God’s ongoing creation. Can you see the pattern of things falling away and others building up into newness in your own life history?

— Blog entry by Sister Mary Garascia; The Pillars of Creation as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; J. DePasquale, A. Koekemoer, A. Pagan (STScI)

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