By Maurice Lange, OMI

“Tell me a story!”  As children, how often did we so plead with our parents at bedtime?! Let us now ponder:  from where does this deep and continual yearning for story arise?  Humans, both young and old, seek to live in a world of meaning.  Children, especially, appropriate a world-view like a sponge absorbs water.

What is the story, the big story, that we are telling our children?  Culturally, we tell the big story in so many ways (and not just at bedtime).  This big story is told both by ordinary folks like us and by masterful tellers as well.  This big story is actually a cosmology.

A cosmology imparts a view of the world, it answers the profound questions like:  “Where do we come from?” “How did we get here?” “What is our place in the world?” “Where are we going?”  Cosmology (through providing answers to such questions) happens whether we realize it or not!

By examining tribal existence in our human history, we find that each clan would have its designated storyteller.  Gathered around the nightly fire, the teller, by the use of story, would entertain, enchant and evoke the depths of the listeners.  These stories consisted of interactions with the gods, with other humans, and with the rest of the natural world.  Meaning would be created as the actions and morals of the stories would be heard and reflected upon.

Even though we as a Western people do not live in tribes, a cultural story is nevertheless told to us and to our children.  This story surely shapes and molds our worldview.  It guides a relationship (or lack thereof) with the Divine, with each other, and with the rest of the natural world.

As illustrated by physicist Brian Swimme, even though we no longer gather nightly around a fire in caves like our ancestors of old, we still yearn for and are told a story.  Only today, the cave has been replaced by what?  The TV room!  And the fire?  Well, the television burns bright and fixes our gaze!  Who is our current day storyteller?  Advertisements. With our children watching 30,000 ads before they enter first grade, they can’t help being formed by these stories touting the religion of consumerism and materialism.

Is it any wonder, then, that we live in a nation that represents 5% of the world’s human population, but consumes 25% of the world’s resources?  How did this come to be?  What perpetuates it?  What could bring about its healing?

The dominant story or myth of our time is that the Earth exists solely for the use of the human.  We are immersed in a worldview that says the Earth has no meaning in and of itself.  The message we receive is that the planet is basically raw material waiting to be refined into consumer items.  The point of our lives, we are told, is to get jobs so that we can be happy by buying stuff.  And yet, as the priest and cultural historian, Thomas Berry reminds us “The Earth is not a collection of objects, it’s a communion of subjects”.  This too, leads to a cosmology.  And this worldview greatly challenges the dominant story of our culture.

If we live in a worldview absent of deep meaning, then our lives, our actions, and our faith will reflect that absence.  However, if like so many of the ancient ancestors, our culture has a functional, deeply meaningful story, then our lives can be rich, vibrant, and well lived.

The new story that is now breaking into our consciousness is that the Universe fundamentally is a story.  Humans discovered only in the last century that we live in a Universe that is both expanding and developing.  It is a 13 billion year story that continues to emerge even in your reading of these words.  The Universe from its beginning is a spiritual as well as a physical reality.  We come from and participate in that immense, Sacred story.

As humans, we now wield technological power of the magnitude that this is altering the ongoing story of the Earth. If we are to live in a sustainable way now, and ensure life for future generations, we need a world-view that sustains and ensures life.  The story that needs to be told to our children, and to our culture, is that we come from the same numinous energy that gave birth to galaxies, mountains and microbes.  The Great Work for us and our children is to consciously enter into the Sacred story of the Universe and help create a mutually enhancing human-Earth relationship.  Now that’s a cosmology that is functional, a story where all can live together in justice and peace.

Father Maurice Lange is director of the Oblate Ecological Initiative, based in Godfrey, IL, and editor of La Vista Visions