Peter Costello
Brian Grogan SJ Creation Walk: The Amazing Story of a Small Blue Planet
by Brian Grogan SJ (Messenger Publications, €9.99)
Brian Grogan is a well-known writer and teacher, author of many books. But this new book may well be one of the most effective that he has written some may feel.
I have often wondered, reading or listening to some theologians, as to whether they are actually aware of the real world they live in. Their model of the world, while not exactly fixed at 4004 BC, is strangely medieval, and hardly attends to the ideas and the real knowledge of the cosmos that has developed over the last century or so.
Brian Grogan’s new book aims to set that right, by outlining in a religious context the nature of what is now known and its meaning for all of us living on our gravely threatened planet today.
This is a short book, a mere 90 pages of text, but they are pages packed with information and insight. The book was directly inspired by a new project at Knock Shrine, where a ‘Creation Walk’ has been planned and had begun, before all our present troubles descended on us. This path is an ambitious project to which this book would provide an authoritative piece of background reading to the experiences in a literary way the effect of “walking through the history of the cosmos”.
The book is divided into three parts. The first deals with “the new story of creation”. The second part, derived from the generalities in the first section, describes the thirty stages, step by step, by which the walk when completed will be experienced by visitors in a calm, planted environment.
Themes
The third part, takes up the themes so recently expounded by Pope Francis, asking and trying to answer the question what hope is there for “a small blue planet” — alluding, of course to Sir David Attenborough’s majesterial television series, which he rightly assumes most people will have seen.
All of this, covering as it does some 13,800,00,000 of cosmic history, is truly awesome. And, as I say, all of this in a mere 90 pages, an achievement in true popularisation and recontextualising that will appeal to many whose ideas about cosmology are vague and uncertain. Uncertainty may still remain – the new cosmology is a very wide subject – but some of the vagueness that the general public have may be dissolved away, like a morning mist in the light of a new day.
The cosmos may be infinitely large and beyond comprehension, its creator seeming remote in space and time, yet within this all this immensity there is a place for love, not just our love for each other, but that even greater love, that stands behind the cosmos, or perhaps within the cosmos.
Brian Grogan, in all his writings, sets great faith, as perhaps we all can, in the assertion of Pope Francis in relation to our natural fear of comic isolation, that “when everything is said and done, we are infinitely loved”.
The Creation Walk at Knock Shrine
Recently a new concept was conceived by those running the shrine at Knock. On the extensive grounds that lie between the basilica and the old parish church there is in the process of being laid out a Creation Walk, with some 30 stages, which will illustrate and illuminate for visitors the history of the cosmos and its divine purpose as seen by theologians.
This is a lovely idea, a fresh and novel response to Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’, a reminder in the gentlest way that “nothing in this world is indifferent to us”.
Through a combination of design and natural planting the Creation Walk will invoke for the visitor’s contemplation and reflections the real world we live in and to which we call us, every human being, not just every Catholic or Christians, owe a supreme duty of care.
Also the present natural event which has involved Knock as much as Ireland, has prevented this scheme moving ahead as had been planned. But in time, when the present painful episode in our history has passed, as pass it will, the work will resume and be completed. And a new aspect will be provided to what is by now one of the most popular shrines in Europe, with one and a half million pilgrims a year.
For further information about all aspects of the Shrine and the Basilica visit the website or email. As yet no reference is made to the Creation Walk, but look out for it. Fr Grogan’s book, however, will be the best preparation for an eventual visit.
For further information visit www.knockshrine.ie email info@knockshrine.ie; or telephone +353 (0) 94 938 8100.