The Hours of the Universe: Reflections on God, Science & the Human Journey
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
Continuing Part 1
God in the Midst of Pain
As my spring graduate course on Christ and evolution was winding down, a graduate student in my class asked if he could write his final paper on Christ’s descent into hell. At first, I was reluctant because we had not discussed this topic during the semester. However, I gave him permission to pursue his interest, and I am glad I did because hell may be an apt description of the chaos of our age. The pandemic, systemic racism, climate change, and so many devastating events have created a fear of collapse. Our animal nature shows itself under conditions of external pressure and competition: either fight or flight.
Fear and fragility go together, and those who are fragile in their psychological and emotional makeup are having a difficult time holding life together. I once heard fear defined as deep hurt. The human person is being threatened today on all sides. There is deep hurt, existential hurt stemming from lack of love and respect. Where there is no love, all hell literally breaks loose.
God knows the beauty of the earth and the pain of the human heart. God bends low in love, to the furthest and most distant realms of life and death. This is symbolized by the cross, where we see most poignantly the poverty and humility of God. God’s love is vulnerable and unconditional; it is love completely and totally turned to the other, willing to undergo death for the sake of life. Bonaventure wrapped together the mystery of love and suffering in his classic Soul’s Journey into God. He writes:
“There is no other path into the heart of God than through the burning love of the crucified Christ.” Anyone who enters into love, and through love experiences the inextricable suffering and the fatality of death, enters into the history of the human God. For centuries the church taught that God is impassible, that God could suffer in his humanity but not in God’s divinity. This belief became difficult in the 20th century when war consumed millions of innocent lives.
The German theologian Jürgen Moltmann tells how he lost friends and family to the violence of Nazism and how he would go to church and sit for hours before the crucified Christ, wondering what kind of God could allow such destruction. After years of praying before the cross he came to the insight that God really does enter into suffering humanity—and he wrote a wonderful book called The Crucified God. God is not greater than God is in this humiliation. God is not more glorious than God is in this self-surrender. God is not more powerful than God is in this helplessness. God is not more divine than God is in his humanity. The nucleus of everything that Christian theology says about “God” is to be found in this Christ event.
For Moltmann, the idea of suffering is entwined in the act of love. Suffering is an indispensable aspect of God’s life, one that is necessary to understand the power of God’s selfless love. A God incapable of suffering would also be incapable of love. Such a God would be the God of Aristotle, a God loved by all but one unable to love at all. That is not the God of Jesus Christ.
Without love, God is forever unreachable. God’s love is absolute and unconditional, and so too is God’s suffering. God chooses to suffer in the same way that God chooses to love. Jesus chose to participate in suffering and gave his will up to his Creator God on the cross.
The choice to participate in the pain and suffering of the world shows the sacrifice and love of God. In the cross, the Creator God does not sit by idly while Jesus suffers the pain and death. Rather, God participates in Jesus’ suffering. God bears the pain of a parent watching his or her child undergo anguish and death. God enters into the human experience of forsakenness so that no violent act, no suffering, no pain is left bereft of God’s love. God is there in the brokenness of heart, the tears, the anguish, confusion, and abandonment that forsaken-ness bears. Yet love is stronger than death. Even in the midst of suffering, God’s love tenderly stoops down and embraces us, empowering us to get up again and choose life.
We have the capacity for a new world and the capacity to destroy this world by failing in love. God will not clean up the mess we have made, but we are constantly invited into a new future. It is time to let go of everything we cling to and fall in love with Love. For Love alone can bring us to the threshold of another universe.
Do We Make a Difference to God?
What motivates our actions? Does it matter how we vote or if we reduce carbon emissions or if we care for the poor? Does it make a difference if we criticize others or malign their reputations? Do our actions make any difference to God? Those who hold to the Thomistic-Aristotelian position would say “no,” they do not. We are related to God insofar as we participate in God; however, God is not really related to us. Our actions do not affect God’s life.
Teilhard de Chardin, however, thought otherwise. First, he held that God and nature belong together; they are mutually affirming opposites. Second, he believed that creation was essential to God, that it contributed to God what was lacking in God’s divinity, namely, materiality.
Teilhard believed that without creation, something would be absolutely lacking to God, considered in the fullness not of God’s being but of God’s act of union. Teilhard proposed that union with God “must be effected by passing through and emerging from matter.” Hence, God and creation have a real relationship; what takes place in the physical world makes a difference to God. By highlighting an inner spiritual depth to physical evolution, Teilhard cosmologized religion, broadening its biological function. The true function of religion is “to sustain and spur on the progress of life.” Thus, the religious function increases in the same direction and to the same extent as “hominization,” that is, the emergence and growth of religion corresponds to the growth of humankind.
Teilhard held that God is at the heart of cosmological and biological life, the depth and center of everything that exists. God is within and ahead, the field of infinite possibilities; God’s invitation (grace) activates or motivates our choices. God does not determine what is good for us; rather, God invites us to make choices. Our nature is already endowed with grace, and thus our task is to be attentive to that which is within and that which is without—mind and heart—so that we may contribute to building up the world in love. Every action can be a sacred action if is rooted in love, and in this way, both Christians and non-Christians can participate in the emerging body of Christ.
Teilhard argued that the work we do throughout our lives to improve our world is the primary exercise of our Christian faith. Since God is involved in evolution, our love for God requires cooperating with God’s activity in building up the world. Sanctification means freely participating in this stream of life that is ascending toward fullness, that is, being incorporated into God’s life in this evolving world.
As Teilhard writes, “We will be saved by an option that has chosen the whole.” Illuminating Teilhard’s ethics, Ed Vacek writes: “The moral upshot is that human activity is now necessary for the building of the world. No carpenter, no house. Without human beings, God cannot accomplish what God wants to accomplish.” God uses and depends on our thoughts and affections in figuring out how to build the earth. “Put more sharply,” Vacek writes, “the will of God is not an antecedent plan to be discovered by us, but rather it is a plan to be co-created through the exercise of our own minds and hearts.”
Centeredness and Interiority are Necessary for Moral Action
For Teilhard, centeredness and interiority are necessary for moral action because what we do makes a difference to God. Our worldly successes and failures make a difference to God. Whereas most biological evolutionists see human activity as fundamentally serving the propagation of genes, Teilhard sees this activity as contributing religiously to the pleroma of Christ. That is, part of God’s perfection is to be related to all that is good. If God could not be really related to what goes on in creation, God would be less than perfect. Our lives and our work, therefore, fill out God’s relational self. Thus, God receives into God’s self the good that occurs in creation.
Put poetically, Teilhard says, God penetrates everything. God thereby is also changed by the activities of creation, so the traditional doctrine of the immutability of God is no longer appropriate. That is, when God relates to the world, a real relation in God is created.
The greatest significance of our work is that it affects God’s own relational life. When we contribute to the building of the world and to developing ourselves, we make a positive difference to God’s life.
Teilhard’s emphasis on the future has the salutary feature of making us responsible for the future. Teilhard’s ethics is for people who are on the move. He proposes an ethics based on evolving into a future of more life, more being, and more consciousness—what he called ultrahumanism. He does not seek to maintain the status quo but to create 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. In short, Teilhard holds up the future as the basis of ethics in a world of change.
Teilhard’s ethics for a world in evolution is not a willy-nilly playground of ideas. Rather, his ethics must be seen in the wider scope of Christogenesis. Our lives have meaning and purpose. We are created to participate in something that is more than ourselves; that is, we are made to contribute to the fullness of Christ and thus to help bring about the unity of all things in God. Just as the cells in our bodies make a difference to our bodily function, so too our lives make a difference to what the world becomes. We either help build this world up in love or tear it apart. Either way, we bear the responsibility for the world’s future, and thus we bear responsibility for God’s life as well.