Guest post from Mary Southard, CSJ and John Surette, SJ
Greetings to you on this beautiful autumn day–
And a special invitation to you— “Let’s fall In love again!”
Carolyn Toben will be with us for The Well’s special program on November 8th to honor Thomas Berry, his life and work, on the occasion of his hundredth birthday. Carolyn will be sharing with us from her personal friendship with Thomas and her sensitive conversations with him during the latter ten years of his life after he returned “home” to his native North Carolina.
Thomas Berry’s work and his wise, humble, gracious, other-centered presence, invited us all into a Love story. He had come to see our troubled human relationship with Earth not only through science and a lifetime of scholarship into human cultures, but with the eyes of the heart.
For so many of us Thomas invited us deeply into the Story of Creation as a Sacred Story, a Love Story, to which we are awakening in our time. Together with Carolyn, we will have the opportunity of savoring Thomas’ long years of reflection, his hopes and his dreams— The Dream of the Earth.
For those of you who may not be familiar with Thomas, he was a cultural historian who was interested in stories. He studied the stories of all the world’s religions including those found in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, the Arabic Koran, the Sanskrit texts of Buddhism and Hinduism, the texts of the Chinese culture, as well as the stories found in our Native American cultures.
Beginning in the 1970’s Thomas began telling the modern 13.7 billion year Story of our Universe. He presented it as the overarching context of all that we are and all that we do. He told it as a sacred story because if unfolds us humans and everything else that has existed in the past, presently exists, and will exist in the future. This Story carries all that is important and of value to us. In fact, according to Thomas, we cannot fully tell our personal stories without including them in the larger cosmic story. We are parts of the Universe Story and it is present within each one of us.
Carolyn, our program facilitator on November 8th, wrote of her experience living in the near vicinity ofThomas. Her book, Recovering a Sense of the Sacred – Conversations with Thomas Berry, is a treasure based on her personal notes, practices and reflections. In living the lessons she gleaned from Thomas she opened her beautiful land to become the Timberlake Farm Earth Sanctuary dedicated to inviting children into an experience of the Sacred Universe. The Well will present Carolyn with its Sacred Universe Award in recognition of her creation of a context where educators and children could experience an intimate relationship with the living world around them.
