#25 Awakening Consciousness
The Not-Yet God:
Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin and the Relational Whole by Ilia Delio, OSF
Précis by Helene O’Sullivan, MM
End of Chapter 9 Church as the Phylum of Salvation
(A phylum is a term of biology to describe a group that has common characteristics or features.)
One of the most enduring lines of Christian theology was written by Saint Cyprian of Carthage in the third century: Outside the Church, there is no salvation. This means essentially that “all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body.” In the twentieth century the Vatican II document Lumen Gentium confirmed this patristic belief: “The Church, now sojourning on earth as an exile, is necessary for salvation. Christ, present to us in His Body, which is the Church, is the one Mediator and the unique way of salvation.”
If becoming whole and wholly united with God requires an institution, it is no wonder the Church is losing members. Many people today are discovering ways of connecting with God, one another, and the earth without relying on institutional religious norms.
Should the Church rethink its mission? Teilhard reframed theology for a world in evolution. The Church, in his view, exists to foster the energies of evolution. If it does not do so, it loses its reason for existence and diminishes with each passing age of evolution.
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He thought the future of the Church depends on its ability to provide humanity with access to those energies that are working now to create the future. Teilhard envisioned a Church that could support a process of Christogenesis in which the universe, unfolding in and through us, is God’s becoming. Each life process contributes to the mutual completion of God and humanity in the dynamic process of ongoing complexification, or what he called, “pleromization.”
Pleroma or fullness is synonymous with wholeness. The human evolutive effort toward personhood completes God in a very real sense; we help build up the pleroma by bringing Christ to fulfillment. Jung contends:
“Only those who are self-possessed or possessed by the self are in a position to give of themselves.”
Personal and divine completion are two sides of the same process. Teilhard writes in a Pauline spirit:
“Christ encompasses us on all sides, like the world itself. What prevents you, then, from enfolding Christ in your arms? Only one thing: your inability to see Christ.”
As John Dourley points out:
“The obstacle to seeing is uprootedness from the sense of the sacred energies of evolution around and within the individual. For those not so blind … nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see.”
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THE CHRISTIC
To speak of the Church as a “phylum” suggests that the Church could be a source of a new type of humanity, Christified humans, or Homo Christus. The Christic is the new God-person who lives from the deepest level of Christ consciousness. Such persons are dynamically engaged in holistic God-life, which springing from their own inner selves into the world. As a wholemaker, the Christic is being saved through the creative energies of love.
The Christic is a new complexified God life, one in whom the Holy Spirit is active and alive, living on the edge of change in the evolutionary flow. The Christic is the basis of the new community, the Church which Teilhard envisioned as the reflectively Christified portion of the world.
The Church is to continue the dynamic activity of God’s creative love in the world. It is to spread its inner life and hyper-personalism in a movement of greater consciousness, always ascending until the completion of the Body of Christ.
This “completion” of the Body of Christ is the Parousia, the moment when Christ appears in history again, that is, when divinity is completely incarnated in every person of the earth, and beyond the earth, on every conceivable planet with intelligent life.
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The key to cosmic wholeness is awakening to the realization that evolution is holy.
Everything, Teilhard said, “Every exhalation that passes through me, envelops me or captivates me,
emanates, without any doubt, from the heart of God Every element of which I am made up
is an overflow from God.” Incarnation calls for participation in the world’s becoming. We are to throw ourselves into the creative energies within us, around us, and before us, for these energies are of God and are divinely aimed toward the maximization of love and all that love entails—beauty, goodness, truth, justice.
This is Teilhard’s Mantra:
We are saved by an option that has chosen the whole. To do so is to accept the cost of unification, the trials and tribulations of a world in movement. The cross, then, symbolizes the creative effort needed to move to a higher level of life.
Teilhard’s entangled holism means that faith in God must be faith in the world, for God is revealed in and through conscious material life. Liturgy, therefore, should be nurturing the consciousness of a cosmo-theandric entanglement, nurturing our participation in creating toward Omega.
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Coming together in the name of the One
who is the Whole, the divine Trinity of Love, should ignite in us our deepest vocation, to become new persons, Christics, those who live on a higher level of conscious divine life. We are saved, made whole,
not as individuals but as a collective community, a body imbued with a living Spirit of life, the pulsating energies of love. We are made whole for the future of those who will follow us and continue the work of wholeness in the pursuit of Omega.
The Christian is one who is connected through the heart to the whole of life, attuned to the deeper intelligence of nature, and called forth irresistibly by the Spirit to creatively express one’s gifts in the evolution of God, self, and the world. The universe is unfinished, we are unfinished,
the earth is unfinished, and much to our amazement, God is unfinished, as well. We are co-creators of the great movement toward Omega, the complexified wholeness of empowered life.
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As Thomas Berry wrote: "The human community and the natural world must be seen as a unified,
single community with an overarching purpose: the exaltation and joy of existence, praise of the divine,
and participation in the great liturgy of the universe.” We will go into the future together
or not at all!