New Consciousness #84
The Hours of the Universe:
Reflections on God, Science, and the Human Journey by Ilia Delio ~
From the Précis by Helene O’Sullivan, MM
Part 3: We Belong to One Another
Modern science has revealed new information about the human person. If we drill down to the depths of nature, we see that we are wholes within wholes communicating information across complex fields of energy. Physicist David Bohm speaks of fundamental reality as an implicate order that has endless depth and movement:
“As humans and societies we seem separate but, in our roots,
we are part of an indivisible whole and share in the same cosmic process.”
On higher-ordered levels of nature we are beginning to see that systems in nature do not work on principles of competition and struggle but on cooperation and sympathy. Peter Wohlleben’s book, The Hidden Life of Trees, is a radical disclosure of nature’s social justice. Wohlleben, a forester by training, found a tree that had been cut down centuries ago was still alive. How was this possible since without leaves, a tree is unable to perform photosynthesis, which is how it converts sunlight into sugar for sustenance?
The ancient tree was clearly receiving nutrients in some other way—for hundreds of years. What scientists have found, Wohlleben writes, is that neighboring trees help one another through their root systems—either directly, by intertwining their roots, or indirectly, by growing fungal networks around the roots that serve as a sort of extended nervous system connect-ing separate trees.
Wohlleben pondered this astonishing sociality of trees and wondered about what makes strong human communities and societies. Why are trees such social beings? Why do they share food with their own species and sometimes even go so far as to nourish their competitors?
The reasons are the same as for human communities: there are advantages to working together. American forest ecologist Suzanne Simard found that primeval forests, that is, “natural” forests undisturbed by humans as opposed to “plantation” forests managed for commercial benefit, have a layer of fungus called mycelium under the topsoil, which connects individual trees. This layer forms a kind of dense “social” network that Nature magazine dubbed the “wood wide web.” Trees use this layer to exchange nutrients and food, to “support” those sick or weak and to “inform” each other of threats.
The hidden communal life of trees is reflective of nature’s wholeness. What we can say is that nature is a communion of subjects functioning on principles of wholeness that include mutual cooperation, sympathy, and synergy. In distinction to the natural world, humans have become individual consumers, self-absorbed, who relate to one another as foreign objects.
Nature works along lines of cooperation and organization, while humans work individually, according to principles of competition and power. Nature is like a weaver, constantly threading together the myriad layers of energy fields, whereas humans are like individual atoms bumping into one another. Biological nature lives in harmony with the cosmos, whereas humans have come to live “acosmically.”
Refocusing God and World
Teilhard de Chardin realized that the gap between science and religion lies at the core of our systemic dysfunction. Religion has become fossilized, while science has discovered an entirely new universe. Nature reveals a luminous thread of justice coursing throughout its systems, while religion sputters around on a circular road, like moss in a stagnant pond.
Teilhard struggled to redefine Christianity as a religion of evolution. Despite the long history of the universe, evolution continues in a direction of increasing complexity, suggesting a force in nature that resists entropy and empowers newness. Teilhard named this energizing principle of wholeness as Omega and identified Omega with God. God is not found through opposition to matter (anti-matter) or independent of matter (extra-matter) but through matter (trans-matter). We take hold of God in the finite; God is rising or emerging from the depths of matter, born not in the heart of matter but as the heart of matter.
Teilhard was concerned with the evolution of justice. Rather than positing an idealism of the common good, he realized that the heart of matter is consciousness, which expresses itself in love-energy. God is entangled with nature in a way that divine consciousness seeks to raise unconscious matter to new levels of consciousness and thus new levels of love.
Our task is to wake up to the truth of our reality (by truth Teilhard means that which glues life together and renders it fecund). This waking up requires interiority and centeredness. Hence, the first step toward justice is focusing the mind on higher-ordered levels of love.
Life in evolution requires living inward and moving outward, that is, living from an inner unified space of conscious aware-ness and presence whereby we see the divine light shining through every aspect of our world—even the ugly parts—because nothing is outside the embrace of God’s love.
Life in evolution means that we are moving, we are becoming something new, not just individually but collectively because we are unfinished and God is doing new things.
Faith in the World
To participate in the world’s becoming we must have faith in one another and faith in the world. This is what it means to have faith in God. As early as 1916 Teilhard wrote:
“There is a communion with God, and a communion with Earth,
and a communion with God through Earth.”
Human beings complete themselves in the higher consciousness that is part of the evolving process of formation. What constitutes the “good” is everything that brings a growth of consciousness to the world. What is best is what assures the highest development of consciousness and thus the spiritual growth of the earth. A new morality of growth is one that will foster and catalyze evolutionary change, a growth into a new formation of being, a deepening of what we are together in which care for another humanizes us.
In Teilhard’s view, religion should empower the evolutionary process by inspiring us to take responsibility for the earth and for the future and the evolutionary process itself.
In this respect religion must be primarily on the level of human consciousness and human action rather than in institutions or belief systems, except insofar as these manifest and give direction to the former. A rightly understood faith in the future and the idea of a possible awakening of a higher state of consciousness are both seen as necessary for preserving in human beings the taste for action.
Teilhard’s vision of a new religion of the earth means that individual spirituality is no longer enough. Religions need to recalibrate their vital centers with the cosmos. We need to find a way to harness the mystical currents of the established religious traditions and refocus them on gathering the human community into a common spiritual center so that cooperation and working together for the future may be enkindled.
Teilhard spoke of an ethics oriented toward the future,
which means nurturing the values
that gather us in, bond us together, creating a global consciousness
and a cosmic heart.
These values are not fixed;
rather, they must be continuously discovered and discerned.
The future is our reality; it is our common good.
We are responsible for the future. Integral to this emerging future
s the development of personhood and self-actualization.
Justice is the work of humanization
and personalization, and therefore it is mutual in nature.
In the words of Beatrice Bruteau:
“We cannot wait for the world to turn, for the times to change
that we may change with them. . . .We ourselves are the future
and we are the revolution. If and when the next revolution comes,
it will come as we turn and the world turns with us.”
Beatrice Bruteau, like Teilhard, realized that we can only build the world together if we are becoming persons together.