The Hours of the Universe - Ilia Delio

#83  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

The Vision of Teilhard de Chardin and Part 3: 

Evolution and the Social Issues of Today

The Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

The human person emerges out of billions of years of evolution, beginning with cosmo-genesis and the billions of years that led to biogenesis. To realize that humans are part of this larger process, which involves long spans of developmental time, brings a massive change to all of our knowledge and beliefs.  In the past, Christianity had been above all a religion of order. The fundamental question Christians asked themselves was always the same: What is the significance of Christ in a world that was created in a perfect order but has been upset by original sin? The answer was unambiguous: Christ had come to restore the order destroyed by sin and to lead the world back to its original perfection. 

Now what we must ask is this: What is the significance of Christ in an evolving world, at the heart of humankind seeking its future? By abandoning the doctrine of original sin, Teilhard was able to see the incarnation more coherently in its relation to creation, so that the mystery of creation and the mystery of incarnation form a single mystery of divine love. This world is not merely a plurality of unrelated things but a true unity, a cosmos, centered in Christ, who is the purpose of this universe and the model of what is intended for this universe, that is, union and trans-formation in God.

Teilhard used the term Christogenesis to indicate that the biological and cosmological genesis of creation—cosmogenesis—is, from the point of faith, Christogenesis. 

The whole cosmos is incarnational. Christ is organically immersed with all of creation, in the heart of matter, thus unifying the world. Teilhard introduced a new understanding of Christ as the “Evolver,” the power of divine love incarnate within, who is one with Christ Omega. He posited a dynamic view of God and the world in the process of becoming something more than what it is because the universe is grounded in the personal center of Christ. 

Technology and the Noosphere

Jesus Christ is the physical and personal center of an expanding universe, and the Spirit sent by Christ continues evolution in and through us. Teilhard saw unification of the whole in and through the human person, who is the growing tip of the evolutionary process. He spoke of the human person as a co-creator. God evolves the universe and brings it to its completion through the human person. 

Teilhard saw the computer ushering in a new level of shared consciousness, which he called the noosphere, a level of cybernetic mind giving rise to a field of global mind through interconnecting pathways. He insisted that technology is a new means of (evolutionary) convergence; humankind is not dissipating but unifying by concentrating upon itself. 

We call this new level of consciousness, global consciousness, because we now have awareness of life around the globe in a way unprecedented in human history. Teilhard also saw that this new level of global mind could give rise to a new level of unity reflecting the emergence of Christ. 

Laudato Si calls for new action, but this cannot be effective unless the action sinks its roots into a new consciousness of Christian life in evolution. Pope Francis wants the world to change, but he does not see that change must take place within as well.

Unless we change the way we think and pray, we will not change the way we act. Evolution is the rise of consciousness; as we begin to see self, God, and world in new ways, so too do our actions follow. Only when a new level of religious consciousness emerges will a new reality emerge. Conversion is essential, as Pope Francis indicates, but it cannot be spiritual conversion alone. Rather, conversion must take place on every level of ecclesial life (spiritual, theological, structural, organizational, inter-religious) until the world begins to feel the spiritual impulse of love at the heart of all life.

Part 3: 

Evolution and the Social Issues of Today

The Church Needs a Theology  for a World in Evolution

Chaos theory, formulated by meteorologist Edward Lorenz in the 1960s, states that in open systems, a spontaneous basin of attraction can emerge and pull a system into a new pattern of order over time. Biological evolution gives witness to life as a series of interweaving open systems. Things break down and die, but death releases nutrients and resources for new life; breakdown is a new level of breakthrough. Life is open to more life.  The key to chaos theory is to focus not so much on the breakdown of order but on the strange attractor, the basin of attraction within the system yet different from the system.  

Paying close attention to the new basin of attraction leads to recognition of a fractal, a new pattern of order emerging from the decaying system. Fractals repeat themselves over time until a new pattern becomes visible. Life celebrates itself with novel order. What are the strange attractors in our midst? 

From thirty thousand feet one of the most remarkable attractors is the shrinking of the globe due to information networks and global travel. We are more and more one earth community. 

We have our differences in culture, language, politics, etc., but underneath, there is a consciousness of belonging to the whole planet, a deep concern for the welfare of the poor. In my view, this new planetary consciousness flows from the way informa-tion and cybernetics have reorganized human personhood. Youth are born into a networked world and think across lines of relationship; they are born for a new whole-ness, a new catholicity. With the new insights from systems biology, quantum physics, and consciousness studies, and the emerging philosophies grappling with the new data, the one discipline needed to bring this budding new fractal into a meaningful framework of purpose and aim is theology. 

It is not enough to talk about finding God in the stars or the cosmic Christ or that one God creates one creation and we are all brothers and sisters. These are all abstrac-tions based on a confluence of scripture, medieval theology, and some philosophical ideas, thanks to Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger. 

Despite the many efforts to rework ethics and spirituality for a world of cultural, religious, and social pluralism, such efforts, without dealing with the stuff of matter itself, are untethered and flimsy, intellectual teasers in need of a theological vision. They may do some good, but they cannot bring about the long overdue shift needed for a world in evolution, that is, the God shift. 

Fundamental theology (the name connotes another era) must come to the party where science and philosophy are sitting at the table. Some 20th century theologians, like Karl Rahner, understood this need but did not sufficiently engage the sciences. Most theologians want to keep dead thinkers alive out of reverential nostalgia because there is no real grasp of evolution. But in evolution nothing is ever lost; rather, things are subsumed or taken up into the new so that the seeds of the old give birth to the new and become new themselves in the process.

Evolution is not linear, nor does it follow Pythagorean geometry. Rather, it is a complex process of open dynamical systems in which quantum physics, information, and cybernetics undergird interdependent systems. Most theologians do not know what to do with evolution, so they ignore it. 

Matter-Spirit-Consciousness 

Completely Entangled

In his own way Pope Francis understands the significance of the sciences for theology. Anyone who has faith in God without faith in the world and, in particular, the world of matter, does not have faith in a living God. The ancients knew that if God is Creator, then creation reflects God. Yet we have done our best, especially in institutional religion, to skirt around the mirror of creation. A mirror reflects what is visible, and the mirror of creation is a mirror of quantum strange-ness, or better yet, quantum mystery, a mirror of matter-spirit-consciousness completely entangled. 

Without looking into the mirror of creation, we cannot see the face of God.

We can certainly meditate and refocus our energies, but without engaging the mysterious stuff of life in all its weirdness, our prayers can redound on hyper-individualism. We live in an open-systems world, a world of losses and gains, spontaneity and creativity, appearances and disappearances. It is precisely the weirdness of nature that under-girds its radical interconnectivity. Unless we are at home in a world of ever-moving relationships, entangled knots of conscious matter, then we are not at home in a world with a future, because the future is the sign of a strange and unpredictable reality. We are and should be concerned about global warming and the floods and fires destroying homes and fields. But we should be more concerned about the lack of fire in the church, a fire needed to update the core truths of theology

“I came to bring fire to the earth,” Jesus said, “and how I wish it were already kindled.” 

(Lk 12:49)

We have lost the passion of Jesus to challenge the boundaries of established laws and doctrines. We do not have the courage to turn over the altar to women, to stand before bishops and priests with assurance that God is doing new things, that women can fully participate in the church as priests and deacons and God will not mind one bit. We do not have the passion to be creative and imaginative, to envision a new church and a new collaboration of religions in the world. 

We stick with the old, as if religion is immutable, the great exception to evolution. Yet science tells us that nature has the capacity to do new things. God is perfectly at home with the strange relationships of quantum reality and evolution. After 13.8 billion years of cosmic life and 4.2 billion years of earth life, nature has shown itself resilient in the face of destruction. This resilience bears witness to the hope that life will win the race. 

Theology should give voice to this hope and not stifle it by outdated otherworldly doc-trines and rituals. There is a desperate need for an earthy God, one who is at home in messy nature. Science can only bring us so far; in the end, it will disappoint us. 

It is LOVE that meets the needs 

of the human heart and binds together  in a unity that grows. 

The best name for God is LOVE!