the beginning or the end

This is a remarkable time.  To me and many primitive cultures this year, 2012 seems a pivotal year.  Seems as if all that is or was familiar is shifting and while uncomfortable and out of our control, it is an amazing time to be alive. 
I have a little book in the bathroom written by a really cool priest Edward Hays who while Catholic doesn't buy into all the catholic and who blends Zen and Native American and all philosophies into reflections.  I don't read him every day.  This morning I picked it up opened at random and looks what I found.

March 22
the end times or the beginning

The brillant Jesuit theologian and paleontologist, Teihard de Chardin, who died in 1955 wrote years before his death "Once upon a time everything seemed fixed and solid.  Now everything in the universe has begun to slide under our feet."
Amazing. If this insightful visionary sensed the universe was shifting under his feet in the relatively calm times in the middle of the last century, would he describe what is happening now as an earthquake?  For Teihard de Chardin this cosmic displacement was not some apolocalyptic collapse of the once stable realities.  It was rather a beginning breakthrough birthing of an ever-evolving creation that requires frequent upheavals of the fixed status quo.

Banish any temptation to judge
these evil times as a breakdown,
for they are breakthrough times
of promise arising out of chaos.

As unstable as these times seem, 

there is something remarkable

 about being a part of all this.