redac#24 Awakening Consciousness
The Not-Yet God:
Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin and the Relational Whole by Ilia Delio, OSF
Précis by Helene O’Sullivan, MM
Chapter 9
ARE WE SAVED?
For Christians, Jesus Christ is savior of the world. However, we emerge from a whole and we belong to a whole. Salvation (from the Latin salvare) is essentially the act of being healed and made whole. Can one unique person save the entire species of Homo sapiens, a species that is in evolution? Where does salvation itself begin? Does it begin with Homo erectus, about 1.6 million years ago? With the life of the cosmos, about 13.8 billion years ago?
Today, the story of salvation must be told from the perspective of the whole earth and all its creatures. The new story of salvation must be one of relational holism. Twentieth-century theologian Karl Rahner recognized the importance of relationality when he argued that God creates humans to become ourselves by responding in freedom to God’s self-communication.
While persons are determined by cultural and biological factors (including interpersonal relationships), Rahner said that persons who possess reason ultimately have the trans-cendental and categorical freedom to realize who they will become before God. We must choose to accept or reject God’s self-communication, to be attentive and open to that which is pulling us beyond ourselves.
Rahner’s position approximated what Jung and Teilhard perceived and what the new story of salvation must become today. The human person has within oneself the capacity for God and, thus, the capacity to be made whole as an act of freedom.
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However, we must make a radical choice to be made whole, to be saved. Jung put the question of salvation in terms of choice and decision. He suggested that it is not God who saves but we who must choose to save ourselves by reconciling the inner darkness with divine light. That is, we must connect to our divine nature within. Salvation is a co-creative process of choice and decision, a cooperative relationship of divinity and humanity. The choice to become fully human is the choice for God, and the choice for God is the choice for wholeness.
The decision to save oneself is the desire for life, the decision to overcome alienation and indifference. Salvation is not based on fallen human nature, unless we understand fallen-ness as the unreconciled and unfinished human. Salvation is the choice for whole-ness, and we can become whole only when we heal our inner divisions in creative cooperation with God. The key to salvation lies within us.
EVIL AND EVOLUTION
Like Jung, Teilhard did not think we are born into sin because of some aboriginal sin of a primitive Adam. Rather, sin is the law of the universe, the cosmic condition of a world in evolution. In a universe this large, evil is statistically inevitable at every level of evolving life. The work of the unification of all things in Christ inevitably involves the pain of reconciliation. Teilhard called this the “creative pain” of unification, a necessary pain if we are to evolve and not regress to a lower state of existence that returns us to multiplicity or dissipated existence.
Teilhard was somewhat more optimistic than Jung because of his belief in the power of Omega at the heart of evolution. Everything now depends on the human person and how each of us grasps the reins of evolution and the evolution of God.
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The presence of Omega does not guarantee a successful future. Rather, the future fullness of life depends on how the human person sees the whole, which is why contemplation is essential to evolution. Mind and matter must work together in this holographic cosmos. Like Jung, Teilhard lamented that our religious symbols and language of God fail to provoke the self’s discovery of the psyche; instead, religion paralyzes the mind. The human’s inability to access the numinous seems to reverberate in projected anger.
The frustrated religious ego becomes the warring ego, the wars within us become the wars among us; the violence within us becomes the violence among us; inner self-hatred becomes outer hatred of others; the inner war of rejection becomes the outer war of rejection. What we cannot realize within ourselves is projected onto others, often the innocent of the earth.
God becomes a plaything of the isolated ego, crying out in agony on the cross of alienation and rejection. Institutional religion wants to heal suffering and pain by the therapeutic transcendence of divine grace, as if supernatural power can eradicate the unresolved self. The struggle for the God-person to emerge is a constant challenge to the childlike dependency fostered by the institutional Church.
SALVATION AS INDIVIDUATION
Putting on Christ means actualizing God in the flesh; the personalization of God is salvific for the life of the planet. If faith is the basis of salvation, then we are to have faith in ourselves if we have faith in God. We must awaken to the vitality of divine love within, as Saint Paul wrote: “It is with your heart that you believe and are justified” (Rom 10:9).
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We are so sure divinity is not within us, however, that we are constantly searching outside ourselves to be saved. God is the personal divine depth immanently transcendent within every aspect of cosmic life. God is the personal mystery, the ground, of every human person. By placing the choice for salvation on the human person, both Jung and Teilhard indicated that Christianity needs a new birth if it is to survive.
Christ must be reborn from within:
“The Messiah whom we await … is … the Christ of evolution.”
Love’s actualization in the universe must become personal; the actualization of love requires the ego to dismantle its protective barriers and free the mind to embrace the difficult task of transformation that leads to Christ consciousness. Love is the basis of God’s entangled reality open to completion through the human capacity to love. To love is to live courageously by suffering through trials and failures into the promise of everlasting love.
It is to let go into the wider flow of evolution, conscious that we are fractals of an immense reality, as if the entire universe is one magnificent stained-glass window radiating light through each beveled piece of glass. The beauty of light in a stained-glass window is the summation of many pieces of glass of various shapes and colors radiating light. Similarly, the radiance of love’s energy forever exceeding our power to grasp and control, and it is the vital force within us.
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Every person has a Christic Center because every being has a divine root. When one strives to live in the archetypes of love, peace, compassion, forgiveness, and non-violence, Christ is alive and active in that person, even if one has never heard of Jesus or accepts the Gospel. Jesus anticipated a new understanding of salvation by calling us to awaken to God within: “the reign of God is within you” (Luke 17:21).
Jesus was a faithful Jew who entered into the depths of his own God consciousness. He spoke of a new law of love and enacted a deep awareness of a Godly-human life. He was a deeply relational person and genuinely human. Jesus was an explosion of love in the midst of a politically chaotic situation: “I have come to cast fire on the earth and how I wish it were ablaze already” (Luke 12:49). His intimate experience of God and his unitive identity with God
“My Gracious God and I are one” empowered Jesus to act in the name of love, healing, and reconciling all that is unloved and unlovable.
Throughout the New Testament, we see the explicit contrast between the mere religiosity of following the law and the consciousness of love that binds together and makes whole. For Jesus, deeply centered wholeness is everything. The mind directs the heart to see God in everything. Sin is a failure to see and thus a failure to love.
If God is love, then the Spirit is love’s dynamic energy. What we can say is that incarnation is the Spirit-energy of divine love bringing matter to life. Teilhard wrote:
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“As a direct consequence of the unitive process by which God is revealed to us, God in some way ‘transforms God-self’ as God incorporates us.” On the level of human life, God is transformed in us if we devote ourselves to the work of love, to be convinced not only of the merit of what we do but also of its value. We must believe in ourselves and in our actions. Teilhard wrote: “I feel that the more I devote myself in some way to the interests of the earth in its highest form, the more I belong to God.”
If salvation is grace that comes from God, then we are already steeped in grace, for the love of God is the field of love energy seeking to expand into the widest embrace of life. We engage this field of energy within and without. In doing so, we build our souls unto eternal life. Soul expansion is salvific. By choosing the whole, we save ourselves, and by saving ourselves, we save God from oblivion. Salvation is a cooperative act of love. God cannot be saved without us, and we are not saved without the wellspring of divine love. ted