Living Into the New Consciousness #87

#87  Living into a New Consciousness

The Hours of the Universe: Reflections on God, Science,

and the Human Journey by  Ilia Delio ~

Concluding Excerpts from the Précis

by Helene O’Sullivan, MM

The Evolutionary Process Involves Suffering

The whole evolutionary process is a via dolorosa in which suffering, struggle, and death are the wages of a universe in evolution, oriented toward the flourishing of life. Death is the most liberating force of life, and without it we cannot evolve into new levels of complexity-consciousness.

However, there are different forms of death. There is the death of brokenness, a type of death that resists the wholeness of life for reasons that are sometimes difficult to comprehend. Such death can be spiritual, emotional, psychological, or physical. Then there is the mystery of death, the untimely death due to accident, violence, or illness, the sudden death that leaves loved ones abandoned without reason or cause. 

While death comes in many forms, all forms of death are part of the stream of life because every death in some way contributes to the ongoing surge of life. The type of death Jesus proclaimed was a spiritual death, the death of the isolated self for the sake of greater life. “Those who want to save their life will lose it,” he said, “and those who lose their life for the sake of the gospel will save it.” (Mk 8:35). Francis of Assisi called death “sister.”

It is time for the church and all world religions to lay down their well-worn pages of doctrine, to consolidate their spiritual paths for a world in evolution, and to yield to a new religion of the earth, one that can gather spiritual energies into a new collective hope.

Only if religions work together for the good of the earth can we begin to organically grow our lives of deep interconnectivity with a vital religious dimension oriented toward the future. We go forth by accepting death as part of life; by holding on to what we cherish, what gives life; and by letting go of the baggage for the sake of greater life. We live in hope that we may move toward the full-ness of life.  To resist death is to resist life.

The irony is that the denial of death has led to all forms of greed and power, deadly forms of consumption and consumerism that have plundered the planet and alienated the poor. To deny death is to fear life, and we fill the hole of our fears by grasping for things and holding on to them with adamant self-righteousness. Only care for another humanizes us, which is why the death of the isolated self for the sake of greater life requires faith in the power of God. For where there is God, there is love, and where there is love, there is no fear, because the one who lives in love lives freely and celebrates life as belonging to another.

Mango and Eternal Life (Mango was a Cat in Ilia’s Franciscan Community)

Teilhard de Chardin realized that the prime energy of the universe is love, a unitive energy that unites center to center, generat-ng more being and life. Love is not a thought or an idea. It is, rather, the transcendent dimension of life itself that reaches out to another, touches the other, and is touched by the other. When we do not share in the fields of love, when we do not feel the concrete existence of another, we can easily abstract the other into a number, a data point, or a joke. We wind up constructing a world of abstract ontology, of lesser beings over greater beings, a ladder of existence.

John Duns Scotus (1266–1308), a Scottish Franciscan priest, philosopher and theologian, placed a great emphasis on the inherent dignity of each and every thing that exists.

We often perceive individual things through their accidental individual characteristics (size, shape, color), but Duns Scotus calls our attention to the “thisness” of each thing, the very being of the object that makes it itself and not something else.

Haecceitas (thisness) refers to that positive dimension of every concrete and contingent being that identifies it and makes it worthy of attention, that which can be known only by direct and not from consideration of some common traits. If haecceitas is that which is known by direct contact, then haecceitas best describes soul. Each living being gives glory to God by its unique, core constitutive being. Soul is what God first utters in every incarnation of the divine Word. Divine love pours itself out in otherness and comes into space-time existence through the life-giving Spirit. To be a creature of God is to be brought into relationship in such a way that the divine mystery is expressed in each concrete existence. Soul is the mirror of creaturely relatedness that reflects the vitality of divine Love.

Recent questions in ecology and theology have focused on animal life. Do animals have souls or do animals go to heaven? Without becoming entangled in theological dis-course, I want to say that our community cat Mango was ensouled. His soul was a core constitutive beingness, a particularity of life that was completely unique, with his own personality and mannerisms.  I did not have to wonder if Mango had a soul. I knew it implicitly by the way he listened to me talking or thinking aloud, the way he sat on my office chair waiting for me to finish writing so he could eat, or simply the way he looked at me—eye to eye—in the early morning.   Soul existence is expressed in the language of love. I do not think Mango loved me in the same way that I loved him, but his very presence touched my soul in a way that sharing life with Mango enriched my life.

Love makes us something; it makes us alive and draws us in to the dynamism of life, sustaining life’s flow despite many layers of sufferings and disappointments. The person who cannot love cannot suffer, for that person is without grief, without feeling, and indifferent. If God is love, then the vitality of love, even the love of a furry creature, is the dynamic presence of God. Every sparrow that falls to the ground is known and loved by God (cf. Mt 10:29); the Spirit of God is present in love to each creature here and now so that all creaturely life shares in cosmic communion.

As I reflect on Mango’s death, his haecceitas, and the mystery of love, I have no doubt that his core love-energy will endure. His life has been inscribed on mine; the memory of his life is entangled with my own. My heart grieves for Mango, my faithful companion, but I believe we shall be united in God’s eternal embrace.

Conclusion

The human person is the conscious mind of the universe, created to know and to love; the whole universe is oriented to knowledge and love, from the smallest particles of life to the inventors of tomorrow. What we know and how we know shapes what we love and how we love. All knowledge is ultimately beholden to love.

Our greatest striving is for unity and transcendence, whether it is solving a computer problem, finding a vaccine, writing a poem, or playing with the kids on a Saturday afternoon. If love is the reason we exist, then relationality is our deepest reality. We belong to one another because we belong to an infinite heart of love. God is love and continues to love the world into a unity of mind and heart. Heaven is where God’s life and our life become so intertwined that divine and created life are dynamically entangled in everlasting love.

But we are far from this ultimate reality as a collective whole and thus the universe will continue on for billions of years. I think far into the future a new species with a new God consciousness will emerge, a species that will be at home with other species of cosmic intelligent life, attaining a level of divinely centered intergalactic consciousness that exceeds anything we can ask or imagine; an intergalactic consciousness steeped in love. This will be the second coming of Christ.

So, what shall we do in our present moment? In this book, I have tried to convey meaning and direction to relieve the challenges we face. We must wake up from the deep slumber of our isolated egocentric lives and become attuned to the universe that is our home. The new universe story is the intercommunion of life itself, of each part with the whole. Everything is in communion in the vast web of the universe. The intense communion within the material world enables life to emerge into being. Living forms are differentiated, and subjectivity emerges as a result of communion within itself and with the environment. The connector of life, what holds all the different levels of communion together, is consciousness, and conscious-ness is driven by love, that is, the power of attraction.

Teilhard de Chardin saw a center of personal communion at the heart of existence itself; this center is the living God who is within each aspect of material existence and ahead of everything that exists. God is relationship, a Trinity of love. All that exists is born out of relationship, exists in relationship, and is oriented toward eternal relationship in love. Anything and everything that disrupts, thwarts, stifles, or destroys the relationality of a single life, destroys the living God.

Francis of Assisi found God in the cathedral of the universe. For Francis, nature was a place of prayer, worship, and community and spiritual transformation.

In this church of life, he learned to live in the widest embrace of love. We too need to learn from nature how to be part of nature once again, so that we can join with nature in the evolution of love. How we live is how we die, and how we die through the daily sacrifices of deepening love is how we will live forever.

 No life is inconsequential; every life has ultimate value. To have faith is to believe in the other who we are related to on the fundamental level of life. Without a consciousness of interrelatedness, we are entrapped in the illusion of separateness. Today we must rediscover God in order to be at home in the universe with one another and the wider world of nature.

 There is no easy or sure path to God and the fullness of life. The whole of life is a trial-and-error experiment and the only thing we can do well is to remain faithful. For God is faithful and will not fail us, even if we blindly destroy our planet. God mourns the profound loss of life we inflict on the planet, but remains ever faithful in love. God is love, and we are continuously invited to rise up from the deadness of our lives and love anew. God is the name of absolute hope and future.

 In this moment, in this day of our life in the universe, we must make every effort to love. In this moment the whole universe awaits the final reason for my life, summed up in one question that each of us must constantly live into: How well did I love this day? For in the evening of life, love alone will determine how we shall live forever