(from Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the Forward to The Green Bible)

At the centre of the Christian faith and the Bible is the Cross.

And God says, “Help me. Help me. Help me realize my dream.”

(Now), Come back with me into a story we all share, a story whose rhythm beats in us still. (drum beat begins – to the rhythm of a heartbeat)

The story belongs to each of us and to all of us, like the beat of this drum, like the heartbeat of the living universe. With the heartbeat of the drum we hear the rhythm that underlies all our days and everything we do. Throughout our sleeping - through all our playing, working, loving, our heart has been beating steadily.

That steady inner sound has been with us all the way - and so it can take us back now, back through our lives, back through our birth. In our birth mother’s womb there was that same sound, that same beat, as we floated in the fluid right under her heart.

Let that beat take us back farther still.

Let’s go back, back far beyond our beginning in this body back to the first flaring forth of energy and light. There we were, traveling out with the speed of light, through space and time, in great swirls of gas and dancing particles.

Ten billion years later, one of the more beautiful swirls split off from its blazing sun – the sun we feel now on our faces – and became the shape we know as Planet Earth. At first all was volcanic flames and streaming rains, and the bones of the Earth, called tectonic plates, shifted slowly, pushing into one another. To the heartbeat of the drum you can imagine you are the fire of those early volcanoes, the strength of those tectonic plates.

Then we became life in the water with our gills and fins. The salt from those early seas still flows in our sweat and tears. And the age of the dinosaurs we carry with us, too.

When did we appear as mammals? If the entire life of Planet Earth was collapsed into 24 hours, mammals appeared only 30 minutes ago.

And when did we become human? Only one second ago. Humans are a very, very new species on Planet Earth. For a long time we humans lived in small groups in Africa. Can you imagine you remember?

We don’t have the speed of the other animals or their claws or fangs, but we have our remarkable hands. Our thumbs can move separately from our other four fingers, and we can shape tools and weapons.

And we have in our throats and the frontal lobes of our brains the capacity for speech. Grunts and shouts turn into language.

Those days and nights on the edge of the forests, as we weave baskets and stories around the fires, make up the longest chapter of our human experience.

Then, in small tribes we begin branching out. We move all across Planet Earth. We learn to survive in the cold and hunt mammoth, and we learn the powers of the plants and trees.

Only a little while ago in Planet Earth time, humans begin to farm crops and raise animals to eat. We build great cities. Major religions are created.

There is born a man named Buddha, and shortly after another named Jesus, and a while after that, Mohammed.

What we now think of as our world, with its machines and computers, is so new that if you take the whole time humans have been here and see it as 24 hours, the world we know today has been here much less than a second.

With the heartbeat of the drum, travel through the lives of your great-grandparents and your grandparents, through the lives of your parents to the moment you were just ready to be born.

Take their strength and their love. Your parents offered you a great gift – your own life to live.

New parents may have come to you early in your life or you may have kept your birth parents. Move, now, through the years of your own life. Accept the gifts of your experience - own your joys and your sorrows – your unique precious self.

Come now to this moment and stop (drum stops).

You are on the edge of time.

You cannot see clearly the way ahead or imagine what will be asked of you. But you will carry with you the knowledge that it is a blessing you were born. When you go out from here, listen to the drumbeat (drum beat starts again).

You will hear it in your heart. And as you hear it, remember that it is the heartbeat of the universe as well, and of Planet Earth, and your larger self.

(from “Coming Back to Life,” by Joanna Macy and Molly Brown)

It is possible to have a new kind of world, a world where there will be more compassion, more gentleness, more caring, more laughter, more joy for all of God’s creation, because this is God’s dream. And God says, “Help me. Help me. Help me realize my dream.”