I was asked to give the invocation for the 86th annual technical meeting
of the Oklahoma Academy of Science at USAO on November 7, 1997, a meeting
attended by participants from a wide spectrum of cultural and religious
traditions. I am a practicing Catholic, but this only strengthens my
intuitive conviction that the Divine Source by any name or none is truly
"catholic/universal" and embraces all of us with tender passion wherever
we find ourselves whether we know it or not. I wanted this prayer to be
meaningful for anyone, from Atheist to Zoroastrian.
Invocation
Oklahoma Academy of Science
7 November 1997
Let us give thanks for chaos and
logos and implicate order; for dark matter, bright galaxies, and nonlocal
connections; for crystals and continents; for Lucy's skull and Mary Leakey's
footprints in volcanic ash; for Thales’ water, Heraclitus’ fire, and Pythagorean
forms; for the Indian zero, algebra, and algorithms; for the oscillations
of the Yin and the Yang; for acupuncture, Su
Sung's astronomical clock, and Huang Tao P'o's textile technology; for
Arabic alchemists on the Old Silk Road and Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine;
for Euclid and Newton and "God playing dice"; for Kepler’s snowflake and
Kekulè’s dream; for Mendel’s monastery peas and the genetic Tetragrammaton
on the spiral staircase of life; for fractals, ferns and fall foliage;
for caterpillars and cocoons; for the infant’s first cry; for Pachelbel’s
canon; for stained glass windows, Leeuwenhoek's microscope, and the Galileo
probe; for the World Wide Web to help us become conscious of cosmic interconnectedness;
but most of all, let us give thanks for the twin passions which make us
fully human--the yearning to transcend the boundaries of time and space
by learning and by loving.
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CHICAGO CENTER FOR RELIGION AND SCIENCE