# 85 - 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
Concluding Part 3 of the Precis
Praying in Teilhard’s Universe: Contemplation is to SEE God in Everything
Thomas of Celano, the first biographer of Saint Francis of Assisi, wrote that Francis did not so much pray as he became a living prayer. I think the same could be said of Teilhard de Chardin.
What does it mean to be a person of living prayer?
And how does such a person live in an unfinished universe?
First of all, prayer is my awakening to the fact that I am held in being by God, who is the source of my life, the divine ground of my life, who is other than I yet at the heart of me. Prayer is God’s breathing in me by which I become part of the intimacy of God’s inner life and God becomes the active living presence of my life.
A person of living prayer lives from a deep wellspring of God-centeredness in such a way that, through prayer, God and self are continuously born into a new existence, a new person in Christ.
How did Teilhard arrive at this mystical embrace of matter?
Through long periods of contemplative prayer, nourished by solitude in the desert, slowed time, and attention to the movements of the Spirit, Teilhard came to a deep personal awareness that his life and the world of matter were one, a unity held in being by the dynamic love of God incarnating the world into the Christ.
So when Teilhard speaks of a power in matter, he is speaking of the ultimate power that eludes our ability to grasp or measure it.
Here is the amazing insight that both Francis of Assisi and Teilhard realized: the power at the heart of matter, of a leaf, for example, is the same power at the heart of my life—it is the power of God.
I am drawn to the leaf because I am drawn to the truth of my own life—the leaf is a mirror of my deepest self. The center of the leaf and the center of my life are the same center—God-Omega.
Teilhard reframes contemplation within a new paradigm of evolutionary consciousness. As the universe is being formed, the human person is being formed, and as the human person is being formed, so too, the universe is being formed. God is the ineffable power of love within every aspect of created existence and the future of that which exists.
Evolution is the rise of God in such a way that God is revealed as evolution progresses. In this respect the fullness of revelation has yet to be known, for God will be fully revealed only at the highest stages of consciousness toward which evolution is oriented. Faith and hope in God and the world become faith and hope in God through the world.
Why should we practice contemplation as a form of life?
We do so to build the earth, which means to continue the work of creation through faith and hope in this evolving God-world. For Teilhard, faith in God is faith in the world. To believe and to have hope is to become one with the world.
His incarnational approach to contemplative action means that there is more to building the earth than activism alone. The Christian builds the earth by a certain quality or manner of activity, a way of being in the world, where matter is constantly forming and reorganizing itself on new levels of conscious existence. Contemplative prayer grounds us in this letting go process as we engage in a world of change and complexity.
For Teilhard, contemplation is to see God in everything, to see that God is calling to us from the world of matter. How we respond in love will matter to the future of God.
Contemplation and Vision
The first Christian systematic theologian, Origen of Alexandria, saw contemplation as the highest activity of the human person. Contemplation was not a period of silent prayer followed by a burst of activity. Hence, contemplation did not precede action or even give rise to action. In fact, distinguishing contemplation and action in the early church would have been unthinkable.
For the early writers there was no distinction between being and doing;
rather being itself was a form of activity flowing from a deep centeredness in God. Contemplation was the highest activity of Christian life because it was ultimately the transformation of the mind in God.
To consider placing a conjunction between “being and doing” or “contemplation and action” would have been unthinkable.
Rather, to live the gospel life was to live a deep prayerful life rooted in the belief that Jesus did not come to change the world but to change the human person. The goal of the life was to acquire a new mind and a new heart and see the world in a new way.
The contemplative was to see out of a new center and act out of a new energy of love. After all, if we want a different world, we must become a different people.
In the early church the active life was preparation for the contemplative life, not the other way around. It is not that we must contemplate in order to act; it is rather that action must lead to contemplation, and contemplation must lead to new vision, and new vision must lead to new structures of relationship.
If God is deeply entwined with the world, then messy struggle is necessary for creative freedom in love to emerge. The contemplative is one who struggles through to a higher love and lives through the many deaths of the ego to attain freedom in Christ and creatively engage in a new reality.
Teilhard de Chardin speaks of religious experience as having evolutionary significance through centration of the universe. Contemplation maximizes consciousness building up what Martin Laird named a “contemplative energetic” who centrates, animates, and organizes the universe, increasing consciousness.
An old woman praying alone in an out-of-the way chapel can move the universe by “entering directly into receptive communion with the very source of all interior drive” ~ the source of LOVE!
In Teilhard’s view, God-Omega exerts its pull upon the universe through the human, who, as the evolutionary spearhead of the universe, has the greatest capacity to be pulled. Only inner transformation can escape cosmic entropy and thus centrate energy on higher levels of complexity.
Martin Laird writes:
“Through divinization the mystic becomes a doorway
through which Christ-Omega enters and transforms the world
in the Divine Milieu.” The Diaphanous Universe: Mysticism in the
Thought of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,” Studies in Spirituality 4 (1994): 222.
To put this another way:
~ Contemplation must become the radicality of being itself so that one sees the world with new eyes.
~ We participate in the act of creating when we ourselves open up to being created or re-created by the power of God’s love. One must also be able to see a new reality.
~ One eye must look out to the world with its sorrows and tragedies and failures, and one eye must look ahead to what does not yet exist; the two eyes must work together as the third eye of the heart.
~ The only thing that can change structures is the power of love. And the degree of love that changes the structures of relationships is an unthinkable love.
If you see what does not yet exist, and you act according to what you see, you will likely be seen as a little crazy. But If you stay true to what you see because the power of God is the light of your vision, then you will change the world because you yourself will be changed. You will usher in a new reality by your own transformed being-in-love. This, Ilia Delio believes, is the heart of Christian discipleship.
In sum, contemplative vision is the heart of the Christian life by which we are brought into a new reality, connected through the heart to the whole of life, attuned to the deeper intelligence of nature, and called forth irresistibly by the Spirit to creatively express our gifts in the evolution of self and world.