Transcript of John Seed’s spoken introduction to a live Cosmic Walk, August 2023. Companion piece to The Cosmic Spiral, the ritual script itself.

This process was devised by Sister Miriam Therese McGillis, a Catholic nun from a community called Genesis Farm in New Jersey, who was a colleague, devotee and perhaps disciple of the late Father Thomas Berry, the most respected, progressive Catholic theologian of the second half of the 20th century.

It was quite late in his life that Thomas had this epiphany where he suddenly realized he was no longer a theologian but had become a “geologian” — because he understood that the God he’d been worshipping all his life, that particular conception of godness, was a product of the Earth, just as all the other creation myths of humanity were products of the Earth.

He understood that every culture has a creation myth. Everyone needs an answer when the kids sit around the fire and ask: how did all this happen, how did we get here? Everyone comes up with a story. And all of these stories, Thomas said, are utterly beautiful and an important part of the human heritage. But there are 10,000 of them, each of which thinks it’s the correct story, and each of which is at war with the others — because the reason we are “us” and they are “them” is that we’ve got a different story. It’s not just that the Christian story is at war with the Muslim story, but that the Protestant story is at war with the Catholic, and the Sunni with the Shia — these stories are always at war with each other. And it’s too late for that. We now need a story that’s going to unite humanity rather than divide us.

Thomas thought the only story that looked like it had any chance of doing that was the story revealed by empiricism — by science, by telescopes and microscopes. If a Buddhist astronomer reports what he saw, a Hindu astronomer or a Christian astronomer will agree. There’s no difficulty agreeing on what we’re seeing out there.

However, we can’t leave it to the scientists to tell the story, because they don’t know how to tell a story in a way that leaves the listeners utterly transformed and transfixed and stunned with awe and wonder. That’s how these stories are correctly told, and that’s the role they play in different societies. So Thomas called upon the artists and the musicians and the mystics to tell the story correctly, and many have done so.

The script we use tonight I got from Sister Miriam, and I’ve made some changes — and you should do the same. When you get this script, if there’s a bit where you wonder “how could they possibly have left that out?” — then put it in. Just add another candle, or remove one. Make it your own. The page I’m sending you to includes a dozen different versions of this, including the one we’re using tonight (Glenys Livingstone’s “MOONCOURT” version). I’m not suggesting mine is any better than the others — it’s just the one I’ve ended up with.

What the story reveals is not just that we live in this incredible universe that somehow flared forth 13.7 billion years ago, but rather that we are that universe at the moment it has become complex enough, in the human, that — perhaps for the first time, for all we know — the universe is able to slowly turn around and look back over its own shoulder, and its jaw drops in utter astonishment to see the trail it has trod. For the first time, it understands how it got here.

That’s the spirit in which this was written. I did this with Father Thomas before he died, and with Sister Miriam at Genesis Farm, and at a certain point I realized that a song that had been part of the hippie festivals back in the early 1970s — the Down to Earth Festivals, the Rainbow Festivals — called “Child of the Universe,” was a perfect fit. So I started including it in the process, and now, alongside the script, I teach the chant and do the song.