#92 Living into a New Consciousness
by John F. Haught
From the Précis by Helene O’Sullivan, MM
#4 Action and #5 Spirituality
#4 ~ ACTION
The philosopher Immanuel Kant thought
that each of us needs to keep asking three big questions: What can I know? What must
I do? What may I hope for? Today, though, we may add another: What’s going on in the universe?
Teilhard’s contemporary importance consists in great measure of his almost unique
realization last century that understanding the universe is relevant to right action.
Having a sense of the awakening already going on in the universe can give us a new
“zest for living,” a sense of being part of a great cosmic adventure, and this awareness
can refocus our moral lives. We may experience a new jolt of moral aspiration
especially once we realize that we are part of a great cosmic project of bringing about “more-being.”
Traditionally, the Abrahamic faiths assumed that the universe is inherently meaningful.
Most of our religious ancestors had considered the universe and our lives to be
timelessly grounded in a transcendent principle of meaning and goodness.
Religious lives were shaped by an assurance that the cosmos was at heart
governed by a principle of “rightness,” and a religious sense of belonging to this
indestructible sphere of being was essential to ethical aspiration. Ideals that shape the ethical sensitivity of
most humans today, still draw on the moral heroism of ancient predecessors whose
lives were shaped by religious trust in a meaningful cosmos.
= 2 =
Why and How to Act With his eyes fixed on the achievements of science, Teilhard developed a vision of
reality in which seeing what’s going on in the universe (and not just in the life-story)
is essential for understanding what we must be doing with our lives. He spied
something momentous coming to birth in the cosmos ~ if we only had eyes to see it ~
and this great drama includes at least general instructions for shaping, or
reshaping, human action. A scientifically informed awareness that our own lives and
labors are woven into an awakening universe can give new zest to life and hence to moral aspiration.
For Teilhard, the universe, as given to us after Einstein, has had an overall tendency
to become more. In Teilhard’s futurist cosmology “becoming more” means becoming
more alive, more conscious, and more liberated from blind determinism. Teilhard
calls this process of liberation from the fixed past the emergence of spirit.
Spirit is a name for the awakening now going on in the very same cosmos that
earlier gave rise to molecules and living cells. It includes the new dimension of
thought, the intensifying of our sense of beauty, our religious longing for meaning,
and our natural creativity including our technological inventiveness—anything that
elevates the cosmos beyond the state of captivity to what has been. The need to act arises in our hearts, when we experience how our own lives are woven into the great cosmic work of intensifying
life, consciousness, and spirit that is already under way. The universe is giving
birth even now to more-being, and so, morally, our human vocations, whatever
they may be, must universally be that of contributing to the arrival of fuller being in
the grand drama of a cosmic awakening.
= 3 =
For Teilhard, the cosmos is the matrix of emergent complexity, life, consciousness,
personality, and spirit. For Teilhard, there has to be an eternal ground of all the
possibilities that become actualized in the course of the unfolding of the world,
whether as life, consciousness, or spirit. The ultimate source of these possibilities is
what Christians refer to as God. Christian hope for redemption, Teilhard proposes, must cover the whole universe and not just the individual soul’s destiny. Along with the life of Jesus, divine
compassion assimilates everything that transpires in the story of the universe, not
just in human history. God is the savior of the entire universe, and God is the constant
stimulus to the universe’s becoming more. Teilhard even allows that God, without in
any way undergoing diminishment, is in some sense changed by what happens in
the world. If so, this is a deeply significant reason for right human action.
Were it not for a religious intuition that the universe is intertwined with something
everlasting, we could never attain a profound sense of the importance of our moral lives and human action. A zest for living is essential to serious moral existence, but there can be no such zest
without a conviction: FIRST, that something of utmost importance is already occurring in the universe,
And SECOND, that our lives and struggles are so enmeshed with the universe that
they make a permanent difference to the encompassing cosmic drama of awakening
and hence to the life of God. Only a “passion for being finally and permanently more” can lead to a
consistently enthusiastic participation in right action. Such aspiration, however, will
eventually go limp apart from a belief that the universe has a meaning that is sealed into it everlastingly.
= 4 =
#5 ~ SPIRITUALITY
Spirituality can have many meanings, but at the very least, it is a quest for something to
which we can lift up our hearts, something that can give us what Teilhard calls “the
zest for living.” The new scientific picture of an unfinished universe can make a difference in our
spiritual lives. Science has opened up before our eyes a 13.8-billion-year-old
cosmic story of creation about which the ancient and medieval spiritual guides knew
nothing. The dramatic new story of the universe, because it is not yet over, may
now provide a brand-new horizon for religious aspiration. Scientific discoveries,
as we have learned over the last two centuries, clearly imply that nature is
narrative to the core and that the story of cosmic creation is far from over. This
promise, as Teilhard said, is to be a source of spiritual joy! The cosmos is a transformative story of
gradual awakening into which we may now weave our own lives, moral aspirations, and
spiritual longings as never before. The whole universe, as it turns out, is being
called into a new future, and we along with it. Together with Abraham, the prophets,
and Jesus, we can taste the kindom of God today by anticipation of a new future for the
entire cosmos. We look forward not to “another world” but to the transformation
and new creation of this one. The Cosmos is Open to Ongoing Creation Through the increasingly intense connections and interrelationships of atoms, molecules, cells, and organisms, the
universe has become more during all of its major transitional stages to the present. So
now that conscious persons have recently emerged in evolution, it is only by way of
interpersonal communion among these unique centers of thought and action that
we may expect more-being to be actualized.
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Only mutual love, along with “a great hope held in common,” can bring these distinct
personal centers together into a rich and differentiated communion.
The cosmic function of Christian faith, hope, and charity is to foster the building of
community and in this way contribute to the ongoing growth of the universe. Our new
scientific awareness that the world is still coming into being can serve, then, to lift up
our hearts and give new incentive to our spiritual lives in the age of evolution.
The long cosmic journey gives evidence of a measurable intensification of organized
complexity accompanied by a corresponding degree of awakening. One can only
wonder what this mysterious tendency toward complexity and consciousness may
lead to in the future. In any case, as visible matter has become more complex
outwardly, an invisible subjectivity, interior-ity, centricity, or “insideness” has also
become gradually more intense, leading the universe toward increasing consciousness.
For Teilhard, the incarnation of God in Christ continues to stir up the world. The
entire cosmic process of creativity is always being called irreversibly and
everlastingly into the life and redemptive compassion of God. Nothing in the story is
ever lost or forgotten. Evolution means that creation is still happening, and that God is
creating the world from up-ahead. All things are still being brought together in
the Christ who is coming. As a devotee of the apostle Paul, Teilhard was convinced
that what is really going on is that the “whole creation” is groaning for the
renewal wrought by God in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Through the spiritual longings of each human heart, the universe shows that it is
still restless for further creation. Is something really big still taking shape up ahead?
= 6 =
And are our visions of the coming kindom of God and the building up of the body of
Christ expressing through us the universe’s own ages-old anticipation of more-being?
Can anything lift up our hearts more forcefully than a sense that our “intervening
duties” are contributing, no matter how insignificant our individual offerings may
be, to the emergence of more-being on the horizon of the cosmic future?
So, the Second Vatican Council was justified on both scientific and biblical
grounds in connecting our “intervening duties” to the final destiny of the universe
in God. After Darwin and Einstein, our action in the world matters because it
contributes both to the deeper incarnation of God and to the redemptive gathering of
the whole world—and not just human souls—into the body of Christ.
Teilhard’s cosmic vision allows that people of faith, are born into, and borne along by, a
general drift of the entire cosmos in the direction of a full awakening to God in
Christ. Our new awareness of nature’s immensities—in the domains of space,
time, and organized physical complexity—provides us with the opportunity to enlarge our sense of God far
beyond that of any previous age!