Hours of the Universe by Ilia Delio
Living into a New Consciousness
The Hours of the Universe:
Reflections on God, Science, Living into a New Consciousness
The Hours of the Universe:
Reflections on God, Science, and the Human Journey by Ilia Delio ~
From the Précis by Helene O’Sullivan, MM
Concluding Part I and Beginning Part 2
God is the “I” and I am “God’s Thou”
Raimon Panikkar was a Catholic priest and one of the great mystics of the twentieth century. The son of a Hindu father and a Spanish Catholic mother, Panikkar wrote of himself: “I left (Europe) as a Christian; found myself a Hindu; and I return as a Buddhist, without having ceased to be a Christian.
Panikkar lamented that our Christology was too small to meet the needs of our age. His real concern was the disconnection between faith in Christ and the cries of the poor, including the earth. Most Christians, he said, are apathetic regarding the problems of the world and are concerned with only their inner political polemics and private problems.
Consumerism dulls the human heart amid an ecological crisis, while a massive humanitarian crisis of poverty and hunger is ravaging many parts of the Third World. Panikkar points out that many people around the world live in subhuman conditions, thousands of children die daily due to human injustices, wars kill every day, and warring religion is still very much alive. His question, therefore, is what does contemporary Christology have to say about all this? What is the relevance of Christian belief to the burning issues of our times, and how does it relate to Christ?
“A Christology deaf to the cries of Humankind,” he writes, “would be incapable of uttering any word of God.” Christ is not a postscript to our otherwise comfortable lives. “If the mystery of Christ is not our very own . . . it might as well be a museum piece.”
In Jesus, the finite and infinite meet; the human and divine are united; the material and spiritual are one. The humanity of Jesus is our humanity as well. “Jesus is a sign of contradiction,” Panikkar writes, “not because he separates me from others but because he contradicts my hypocrisy, fears, selfishness and makes me vulnerable, like he is. Whoever sees Jesus Christ sees the prototype of all humanity.”
“Jesus is Christ but Christ cannot be identified completely with Jesus. Christ infinitely surpasses Jesus.” Christ is not only the name of a person but the reality of every personal life, whether Jew, Muslim, Buddhist or atheist; that is, Christ does not belong only to the Jesus of history but Christ is the living human Person united with God at the heart of the universe.
Thus, Panikkar points to a deep inner center in the human person with the capacity to manifest Christ, what he calls Christophany. Each person bears the mystery of Christ within. The first task of every creature, therefore, is to complete and make whole his or her icon of reality, because “Christ is not only the name of a historical personage but a reality in our own life” (Phil 2:7–11). To know Christ is to discover Christ within. This is where Panikkar and Meister Eckhart cross paths. Eckhart’s famous words: “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.”
In Birth of a Dancing Star, I wrote:
“The ‘I’ is wrapped up with God, like the double helix of a DNA molecule, in a seamless flow of life, in this dynamic complex of ‘Godlife-mylife,’ embedded in the ongoing creativity of cosmic life. . . . Deep within the cave of my heart (a depth that belongs to me alone) I recognize a fire that burns brilliantly and glows with warmth. Through that glowing fire I see the outline of a face, the face of Christ, but I also see my face, and then I began to see Christ’s face as my face; and sometimes I cannot tell Christ’s face from my face, and all at once I recognize a single face whose eyes are looking inward and outward.”
The more we enter into the mystical depth of our personal lives, the more we realize there is no “I” apart from a Thou. The “I” or the ego is a contraction of self-awareness seeking to expand in this journey of life. God is mystery, and we too exist in that mystery. God is the source of my being, so that everything that I am, including what I define as “mine,” is pure gift. Everything is grace.
In Panikkar’s view, I am not the ground of my existence, but neither does that ground exist outside of me. In other words, the ground is not an “other,” but a “thou” an immanent transcendence in me. Therefore, “God is the I, and I am God’s Thou.” This is the genuine experience of Christian non-dualism.
This divine indwelling, the inner fountain of every person’s life, is an invitation to manifest the divine, to become another Christ.
Every person is called to live from the inside, the “I-I” inter-abiding, rooted in our own deepest experience of spiritual seeking and finding. Christ then is no longer an external object of adoration but the deepest reality of every person’s life, indeed, all life.
Panikkar states that the task of Christians today may be the conversion of a tribal Christology into a christophany less bound to a single cultural event. By seeing the whole reality in the Christ mystery, he claims, every being is a Christophany.
Christophany is a planetary Christology without dogmas or narrow stipulations;
it is the root reality that binds us together.
Part 2: Matter is the Incarnating Presence of Divinity
Laudato Si and Evolution
For Teilhard, matter is the incarnating presence of divinity; God is present in matter and not merely to matter. This core belief is still foreign to Christian ears, for we pray as if God is not here but there, in heaven, awaiting our attention:
I lift up my eyes to the hills—
from where will my help come?”
(Psalm 121:1–4)
In prayer we seek to “lift up” our weary spirits from the heaviness of matter, focusing our attention on God above. But the Christian God is here, in matter. Prayer is to lead us into the heart of matter.
God is in matter, meaning that God is the ultimate horizon, the depth and breadth of matter, other than matter (transcendent) yet intimately present to matter (immanent). When everything can be said about a particular form of matter, for example, a leaf (it is green, veined, etc.), we have not exhausted that which draws us to it, such as its beauty. What draws us, that which cannot be adequately spoken or described, is the presence of God.
The church is missing out on the most vital opportunity to reinvent itself for a world in evolution. God comes to light in human consciousness, becomes flesh, and shapes the world with a new power. Paradigms change because the universe is unfinished, and the mind is pulled to know, to form new horizons of insight. When the level of our awareness changes, we start attracting a new reality.
Can the church be part of a new reality? There will be no greening of the earth unless we truly belong to the earth and realize the body of Christ is within, groaning aloud in the pangs of new birth (cf. Rom 8:22).
Laudato Si supports evolution without explicitly saying so. The Pope writes that God is “creating a world in need of development,” and God’s role in this process is one of selfless love.
Using the Jewish notion of zimzum
(divine withdrawal), the Pope states that “God in some way sought to limit Godself” in this creating process, thus allowing new things to emerge (no. 80).
The Pope sees God’s love as “the fundamental force in all created things” (no. 77, emphasis added) and the power of love “intimately present to each being, without impinging on the autonomy of the creature,” allowing creaturely life to unfold in freedom (no. 80).
Hence, Pope Francis points to a theology of evolution in this encyclical in a way that promises a new vision for the world. The Pope seeks a renewed humanity, but a new humanity cannot be found apart from a renewed cosmology and a renewed theology.
Raimon Panikkar reminds us that the name God is a cosmological notion, for there is no cosmos without God and no God without cosmos. In short, if our cosmology has changed, so too our theology and anthropology must change.
These three realities
~ cosmology, theology and anthropology ~ are deeply intertwined
and they must be held together
if they are to be understood together.
and the Human Journey by Ilia Delio ~
From the Précis by Helene O’Sullivan, MM
Concluding Part I and Beginning Part 2
God is the “I” and I am “God’s Thou”