Frequently I have discussions with people who want to de-center humanity from the most important place in the universe, in order to help us realize that we are part of a greater whole as people who live interdependently with the rest of creation. This attempt is noble, because many have misused Scriptures such as Genesis 1 where it tells the first humans they are “made in God’s image” to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth and rule it” along with the creatures who dwell on Earth. A dominionist reading of this can lead to a theological form of “manifest destiny” which makes humans entitled to pillage and pollute creation in order to gratify selfish desires for consumption and domination.
The result of this misuse is found in a host of industrial and consumer activities which cause harm and destruction to our environment, from local levels such as paving over natural beauty and polluting rivers, to global concerns such as climate instability and islands of garbage floating in our seas. The rhetorical solution to this sad situation is often as extreme as the dominion theology that spurred it on: If the idea of being specially made in God’s image is a cause of dominionism, then we must make humans feel like they have no special value at all (and perhaps are actually less valuable than other created beings because of our misuse of nature). In the words of Agent Smith from the Matrix, we must treat humanity like a “virus” instead of like children of God. And along with this devaluing of human life, we must de-center our identity and role in the universe. Instead of living on an important planet in the center of God’s gaze, we live on an unremarkable speck, lost in a vast and uncaring cosmos.
But if abuse of our environment comes from the pendulum being raised too high in a “theocratic” direction, does an extreme pendulum swing to demean and decenter human life accomplish the healing of creation? Does it not rather encourage a passive nihilism that since none of us matters, and none of this cosmos matters, then: Why not consume and use and abuse the world because we only have one shot before our candle is blown out forever? If humans are of no value, then what value does it have for us to value creation? What check is there on allowing the richest and most powerful of us to commodify, consume, use, and discard nature and persons as they see fit?
It seems that instead of devaluing humanity, we ought to magnify human worth by amplifying human responsibility to the utmost degree as children of God. If we are made by God to reflect God in creating and caring for the world, then we ought to emphasize this and demand that humans take responsibility for their divine role as caretakers and stewards of creation. As Spider Man’s uncle says: With great power comes great responsibility. And since we have maximal power in this portion of the cosmos, we also have maximal responsibility and accountability to the Divine Love that made us.
And instead of decentering us and relegating us to the backwaters of our universe, perhaps we should re-center EVERYTHING and EVERYONE as “the apple of God’s eye”. God is infinite and immanent, within and through everything, for in God “we live and move and have our being”. Furthermore, in an ever-expanding universe, there is literally no center for anyone, anywhere. Topographically, everything is the center and nothing is the center of our universe. So, from the perspective of God’s immanent infinity, and from the perspective of the universe’s ever expanding nature, there is no center, and therefore everywhere is the center. And in places in the universe where the cosmos has become aware of itself– such as here on the third rock from our local star– we become a special kind of center and nexus of consciousness, as the cosmos reflects on itself through our eyes, and can find itself in relation with its Source in God’s Love.
Perhaps there are also countless other places with countless other beings through whom the universe has become aware of itself. And perhaps they too understand themselves as children or offspring of God, who can know and love their Divine Source. And if those places and persons exist, they too are the center of the universe, with infinite value, because they are in conscious relationship with the One who is the Infinite Source of all worlds. And perhaps we all have the same Divine Vocation and responsibility, to be creative creatures who care for creation and enhance the creative potential of creation, by working with the Love of our Creator. Such a re-valuing and re-centering of our identity and role in Creation seems to be the solution we are looking for, far beyond the wild pendulum swings of theocratic dominionism and secular diminution.
My favorite vision of this radical re-valuing and re-centering is found in the mystical vision of "The Great Dance" in Perelandra by C. S. Lewis. In this Science Fiction tale, an angel gives the protagonist a vision of how God relates to life forms and persons on innumerable planets, giving the Divine Self to them in ways appropriate to their culture, limitations, and biology. Although the text is far too long to quote here in full, relevant portions include:
"The Great Dance does not wait to be perfect until the peoples of the Low Worlds are gathered into it. We speak not of when it will begin. It has begun from before always. There was no time when we [angels] did not rejoice before His face as now. The dance which we dance is at the centre and for the dance all things were made. Blessed be He!"
"All which is not itself the Great Dance was made in order that He might come down into it. In the Fallen World He prepared for Himself a body and was united with the Dust and made it glorious for ever. This is the end and final cause of all creating, and the sin whereby it came is called Fortunate and the world where this was enacted is the centre of worlds. Blessed be He!"
"Each grain is at the centre. The Dust is at the centre. The Worlds are at the centre. The beasts are at the centre. The ancient peoples are there. The race that sinned is there... The gods are there also. Blessed be He!”
"Where [God] is, there is the centre. He is in every place. Not some of Him in one place and some in another, but in each place the whole [of God], even in the smallness beyond thought. There is no way out of the centre save into the Bent Will which casts itself into the Nowhere. Blessed be He!"
"Each thing was made for Him.. He is the centre. Because we are with Him, each of us is at the centre. It is not as in a city of the Darkened World where they say that each must live for all. In His city all things are made for each. When He died in the Wounded World He died not for me, but for each man."
"If each man had been the only man made, he would have done no less. Each thing, from the single grain of Dust to the strongest [angel], is the end and the final cause of all creation and the mirror in which the beam of His brightness comes to rest and so returns to Him. Blessed be He!"
"And now, by a transition which he did not notice, it seemed that what had begun as speech was turned into sight, or into something that can be remembered only as if it were seeing. He thought he saw the Great Dance. It seemed to be woven out of the intertwining undulation of many cords or bands of light, leaping over and under one another and mutually embraced in arabesques and flower-like subtleties."
"Each figure as he looked at it became the master-figure or focus of the whole spectacle, by means of which his eye disentangled all else and brought it into unity – only to be itself entangled when he looked to what he had taken for mere marginal decorations and found that there also the same hegemony was claimed, and the claim made good, yet the former pattern not thereby dispossessed but finding in its new subordination a significance greater than that which it had abdicated."
"He could see also (but the word 'seeing' is now plainly inadequate) wherever the ribbons or serpents of light intersected, minute corpuscles of momentary brightness: and he knew somehow that these particles were the secular generalities of which history tells – peoples, institutions, climates of opinion, civilisations, arts, sciences, and the like – ephemeral coruscations that piped their short song and vanished. The ribbons or cords themselves, in which millions of corpuscles lived and died, were things of some different kind. At first he could not say what. But he knew in the end that most of them were individual entities."
"If so, the time in which the Great Dance proceeds is very unlike time as we know it. Some of the thinner and more delicate cords were beings that we call shortlived: flowers and insects, a fruit or a storm of rain, and once (he thought) a wave of the sea. Others were such things as we also think lasting: crystals, rivers, mountains, or even stars. Far above these in girth and luminosity and flashing with colours from beyond our spectrum were the lines of the personal beings, and yet as different from one another in splendour as all of them from all the previous class."
"But not all the cords were individuals; some were universal truths or universal qualities. It did not surprise him then to find that these and the persons were both cords and both stood together against the mere atoms of generality which lived and died in the clashing of their streams: but afterwards, when he came back to earth, he wondered."
"And by now the thing must have passed altogether out of the region of sight as we understand it. or he says that the whole solid figure of these enamoured and inter-animated circlings was suddenly revealed as the mere superficies of a far vaster pattern in four dimensions, and that figure as the boundary of yet others in other worlds: till suddenly as the movement grew yet swifter, the interweaving yet more ecstatic, the relevance of all to all yet more intense, as dimension was added to dimension and that part of him which could reason and remember was dropped farther and farther behind that part of him which saw, even then, at the very zenith of complexity, complexity was eaten up and faded, as a thin white cloud fades into the hard blue burning of the sky, and a simplicity beyond all comprehension, ancient and young as spring, illimitable, pellucid, drew him with cords of infinite desire into its own stillness."
And so, we finally come to rest at the Center of all. There we find we are all at the center, because the Center is within us, animating our very being and supplying the very freedom we need to be separate selves from the Self who is in all. And it is this Self who calls to us in the still small voice in the center of our being: I am yours and you are mine, so join with me in the healing and fulfilling of the world.
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