The Hours of the Universe

#80    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

Part 1:  This “Bending Low” of God,

This “Foolish Nearness” of God  

Reflections on the Inner Depth Dimension

of All Creation

The discoveries of quantum physics are becoming more and more revelatory of an astonishing world. From a faith perspective these new and exciting discoveries are rendering the word “being” tired and limp, impelling a new understanding of existence that reflects the dazzling energy fields of matter. If quantum physics has staged a revolution of being, then what is God?  Language falters as we approach the divine mystery, for God is more and more the ultimate energy of dizzying love, living quite comfortably on the edge between order and chaos.

We constantly pray to God to make order of our chaotic lives, but what if God is the very source of our chaos? What if chaos and disorder are not to be shunned and avoided but attended to and embraced?  Nature shows us that life is not meant to be nice, neat and controlled but lived on the edge between order and disorder. Perhaps what we need is not planned retreats but unplanned contemplation that can take place anywhere and anytime ~ the alert mind in a dynamic world.

Jesus was a “strange attractor.” (The term strange attractor is part of chaos theory and refers to a basin of attraction with a system which can pull the system into a new pattern of order over time.

Jesus was a strange attractor in the midst of a chaotic culture, driven by the Spirit of love into radical relationships, dangerous choices, confrontation, and ultimately, self-sacrifice. His deep interior oneness with God expressed itself in a consciousness of the whole. Like Jesus, Christian life requires an incarnational commitment to living on the edge between the orderly known and the chaotic unknown of unlimited possibilities. Discernment is filtering out the factors impeding new choices amid random possibilities. Consciousness must be centered on the whole of cosmic life so that randomness and wholeness are not opposites but quantumly entangled.

Our nice, neat doctrinal formulas and Sunday services blind us to life’s chaos. We live in the controlled center of sheltered existence. We fear disorder and random-ness; death frightens us. We want to maintain what we have, and at the same time we want a different world. This is not only impossible but unnatural.The world of nature tells us that the flourishing of biological life rests on the openness of existence to new possibilities in the environment. Biological life does not work as a top-down control system but as a bottom-up/top-down interplay of informational flow, more like dancing a tango than building a house.

We can appreciate the new science intellectually, but quantum-edge biology challenges us to rethink how we organize our lives spiritually.The Spirit of God is within you, Jesus said: “The reign of God is among you” (Lk 17:21). We are not called to maintain the existing order but to engage disorder as it lingers on the edge of new order. This means living with a certain level of anxiety, uncertainty, and darkness but also with faith, trust, hope, and surrender.

We are called to live with a renewed energy of love, gathering the fragments of life into new wholes and testing the possibilities of life with a sense of spiritual adventure. The life of Jesus continues to flow through the Spirit. Baptism and Eucharist quantumly entangle us with the energies of divine love, engaging us in the unlimited possibilities for new life.

The exciting discoveries of science render the church rather boring and staid at times. It does not have to be this way. The Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart said: “God is the newest thing there is, the youngest thing, and if we are united to God we become new again.” Eckhart intuitively grasped the import of a dynamic world with God in the midst of new life. We need to learn to trust our intuitive compass in order to harness this love-energy for the purpose of new creation.

Life on the edge is dwelling in the spaces of the unknown, the unlimited, the unloved, and choosing to know, to expand and to love. God thrives in between the known and the unknown, between uncertainty and hope, stretching forth into the world as our souls expand with new levels of consciousness. God does not save us from chaos because God is the source of chaos. We live in the midst of chaotic love, called to trust, hope, and endure, for from the heart of chaos God is doing new things.

Mercy and the Humility of God

Recently, as I was rushing to catch the DC Metro, I tripped over my suitcase while running down a set of concrete steps and landed flat on my face. My chin bore the brunt of the impact, and my plans came to an abrupt halt. I lay stunned on the ground, for a moment thinking that I had broken my jaw and that I would never speak again.

I looked up and saw the face of a young man whose dark eyes were looking intensely at my ripped and bleeding chin. “Ma’am, are you all right? Can I help you?” He gently took my arm and lifted me up (only then did I realize that I had injured my knee as well). I had just met the Good Samaritan of Luke’s Gospel in Washington DC! He helped me up and brought me into the Metro police quarters; he waited with me until the ambulance arrived, assuring me that I would be properly cared for. This young man, whom I had never met and whose name I still do not know, was in that moment a brother to me. I do not know if he was Catholic, Muslim, or of no particular religion. In the midst of being wounded, I saw in that young man the face of Jesus. 

God is Love

The medieval theologian Bonaventure described the incarnation as “the eternal God humbly bending down and lifting the dust of our nature into unity with God’s own person.” Divine love is not an abstract concept; it is deeply personal, shown to us in the humble birth of a tiny baby. This mystery of divine love boggles the modern mind. We cannot quite get a handle on what God is because we treat God like a concept. Christianity sees the mystery of divine love in a particular way expressed in the person of Jesus Christ. Divine love is personally self-expressive and self-giving; the Word became flesh and dwells among us. Heaven has come to earth.

The Christian God requires the right brain of deep connectivity, passion, vision, and freedom. The emotional brain is called to connect through the senses: touch, taste, sight, sound, and smell. What does this divine Word made flesh call us to see? That the mystery of absolute divine love is absolutely given to us; divinity is relinquished into humanity (and the evolution of life leading up to the human). The gift is in the given, which means the source of All, Love unconditional, lies at our core.

Faith, Love and Suffering

In his own day Jesus was immersed in a violent culture, a culture of conflict and anxiety. But he also knew of the deeper truth hidden beneath the surface of human judgment, namely, that this broken, anxious world is oozing with God. He asks us to have faith, to believe that the reign of God is among us and within us. Jesuit Patrick Malone writes: “Faith is more than a magical formula to conquer the worry, regret, shame and resentments that cloud our visions and make us jaded and tired. Having faith does not remove every trace of self-absorption and doubt. Those things are part of the human condition. Faith is what brings us into the deepest truth that says we are in the image of an unlimited, unrestricted, unimag-inable love. And when we forget that, as Jesus reminded the religious authorities of his day, then religion does become a shield, a crutch, a closed refuge instead of a way to boldly throw ourselves into a harsh world, knowing that is precisely where we discover a generous God” (America,  May 27,2000, page 22).

Anyone who enters into love, and through love experiences the inextricable suffering of fragile humanity, enters into the human history of God. That is why it is hard to explain logically a religion in which God gets absurdly close, that we are forced to discover the face of God in all the mess of the world, no matter how confusing or abrasive—racial injustice, terrorism, poverty, global warming. Too often we want a God who will hear our cries and fix things for us, who will be strong enough to push our painful experiences away. But the mystery of Christmas tells us otherwise. It is not that God is deaf to the cry of the poor. It is, rather, that God is poor. It is not that God does not see our tears, but God too is weeping. Only a humble God who bends so low to pitch it all away in love can heal us and make us whole. God has nowhere to dwell except in us, for salvation requires our participation.

The young Dutch Jew, Etty Hillesum, came to this realization as she awaited deportation to Auschwitz Concentration Camp where she was killed.  She wrote:

“All disasters stem from us. Why is there war? Perhaps because now and then I might be inclined to snap at my neighbor. Because I and my neighbor and everyone else do not have enough love. . . . Yet there is love bound up inside us, and if we could release it into the world, a little each day, we would be putting an end to war and everything that comes with it.”

Etty opened her heart to divinity and found God dwelling in humanity despite the atrocities of the Holocaust.

This “bending low” of God, this “foolish nearness” of God, says to us that God lives in human hearts. God’s compassion needs human hands, human eyes, and human touch. Our only credible action is to bless this world by allowing God to break through our less-than-stellar lives. We have enormous power to heal this wounded world through merciful and loving hearts, that welcome the stranger and accept the suffering of another as our own. The Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky says that God is “a beggar of love waiting at the soul’s door without ever daring to force it open.” Each of us must make a personal decision to open the door. In my experience at the DC Metro I met a young man who must have let God in, knowingly or not, for he looked at me with eyes of love and compassion. In his face I saw the face of God!