Paul Suffolk

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The impact with the hard plastic knocked him to the ground.He had only just discovered the joy of running but already had decent balance, so it was hard to understand what had happened.Is it possible he did not see the box?We ran to him, picked him up.He had a broken nose, but no crying, no tears.Dumbfounded, I asked him what had happened.He said he was running with his eyes closed.When I asked him why, he said he wanted to see what it was like.Nothing more than that.Running at full blast with his eyes closed to see what it felt like.Thomas Ian, distressed, stayed close to his mother.Moving our residence was yet another disruption for a young child.After setting up in Tacoma where Thomas had friends both in the neighborhood and in his playgroup, we had left that behind and moved to Chicago where, though it took some time, we eventually found a friend for Thomas.Now we were breaking that up and starting over yet again.To cheer him up, Denise talked about autumn when he would be going to kindergarten and would meet a whole new group of friends.After listening to her, he asked if Baby Sebastian would come with him to school.Not this year, but when he got to be a third grader, his brother would be a kindergartener and they’d be together.Then, as a senior in high school, his brother would be a freshman.It was unlike anything we’d seen.Denise hugged him, asking him what was wrong.We won’t be a family anymore, he said between sobs.She folded her arms around him and let him cry, pulling him close to her.It had been condemned and slated for demolition, but the day before the wrecking ball did its work, the Passionist monks purchased it.With intense remodeling they made it into a residence for four of their own, one of whom was Thomas Berry.He was standing on the long porch waiting for me.Kisco, and this was my first meeting with Thomas since our arrival from Chicago.After a brief handshake he took me around the grounds and introduced me to the community of trees, a sycamore, a copper beech, three ponderosa pines, and his favorite, a gigantic red oak in the back of the house with a commanding view of the Hudson estuary and, farther west, the steep cliffs of the New Jersey Palisades.After taking in the complex geometry of the oak’s thick arms, which spread out in every direction, I asked him how old the tree was.He squinted up at it.Arborists estimated the age between four and five centuries, which would be the middle of its potential life span.He added that Copernicus published his theory that Earth was a planet revolving about the Sun four and a half centuries ago, so the oak tree’s life and science’s discovery of a heliocentric cosmos began at the same time.Each had begun small and had become monumental.He remarked that whenever he glanced at the tree he was reminded of the entire enterprise of modern science.A series of metal rods connected the limbs and supported them from collapsing.The oak’s limbs were far thicker than the black, sticklike supports, and the thought of the whole thing coming down on us hovered in my mind.I wondered out loud why a tree at midlife would need such rods.The same arborist who estimated its age determined that it was suffering from a deadly disease with the terrible name sudden death and would probably need to be taken down.Thomas had been involved in an ongoing argument about this.He was thoroughly against the idea of chopping up this magnificent being.You’ve made the journey to New York City with its unending activity and inexhaustible creativity.What dream drew you so far from your home in the Pacific Northwest?This flustered me.I had assumed he knew.I wanted to shout, You know why!It’s because of your essay!I’m here to learn how to tell the new cosmic story!I thought that was obvious! It was far from obvious.I had never said this out loud, not even once.It was too much to admit even to myself because Thomas regularly invoked magnificent poets, such as Hesiod, Lucretius, and Dante, whenever he spoke of a new cosmic story.I was not a poet and never would be.Sitting in silence after he asked his question, thinking of what I might say, the truth dawned.All this time I had been assuming he knew about my ambition, when in fact the idea had never occurred to him.I concluded he considered the notion of cosmic storyteller beyond my range of capabilities.As if he intuited what was on my mind, he spoke directly to my real question.The new storytellers will not rise up from science per se.Science will guide the stories each step of the way by grounding us in our best empirical knowledge of the universe, but the foundation for the confidence necessary to become a storyteller is the universe itself.This pertains not just to storytelling but to all roles in society.We find our way into our destinies when we feel we are being commissioned by the whole of things, by life itself.I believe you know this.You’ve been touched by the universe, even to the point of throwing away your life in order to find your way.You will deepen your resolve when you realize that moments such as ours have happened throughout human history, he said.A tiny acorn gives rise to a huge oak that lives for centuries and then perishes, but not before scattering seeds for the next era.In terms of Western civilization, the transition similar to our own is the thirteenth century when the European Middle Ages were coming to their end.The transformation involved the whole of society and had a bloody dimension as can be seen by recalling the ongoing war between the Christians and the Muslims.We think of Western civilization as being primarily Christian, but after the fall of Rome, control of the Mediterranean was up in the air for centuries.Christian warriors pushed their way into the Near East.Muslim soldiers, after sweeping across Northern Africa, attacked from both the Iberian Peninsula in the west and the Balkan Peninsula in the east.More than once they made their way to the gates of Vienna.It is important to remember that these were internecine wars.Both Christianity and Islam came from the same parents, Israel and Greece, and while Christianity brought together the faith of Israel and the mind of Greece in one way, Islam did the same in its own way.They were brothers fighting for control of the kingdom.In the midst of this upheaval, the pope called Thomas Aquinas to Rome to deal with this threat at the theoretical level.Christian thinkers were at a disadvantage in confronting Islamic scholars in the sense that Europe had only recently discovered the thought of Aristotle.Aquinas’s first act was to order fresh translations of all the Aristotelian texts.Drawing upon these and traditional Christian scholarship, he reinvented Christianity by incorporating Aristotle’s comprehensive science and metaphysics.His Summa Theologiae provided medieval Europeans with a cosmic story powerful enough to hold the community together.It provided answers to life’s recurrent questions.They knew who they were.They knew why they existed.They knew what was good and what was evil.These orientations of Aquinas, at one time the sinews of Western civilization, lost their power when modern science entered history.This happened not just in Europe but throughout the planet, in every major civilization.The brilliant visions of Asia, Africa, and India were reduced to the category of mythological stories.Now we come to our time.Both the challenge and the threats of our moment are orders of magnitude greater than what Aquinas was dealing with.The situation is ambivalent in the extreme.At risk now is not just Western civilization but the wildness and beauty of Earth itself.Our greatest hope is to meet this challenge by telling an integral, cosmological story, one that will guide us into a future flourishing with life.