As both a Franciscan Sister of Washington, DC and a theologian, Ilia Delio specializes in the area of science and religion, with a particular interest in evolution, physics and neuroscience and the meaning and impact of these on theology.
As well as being the author of numerous books, including Christ in Evolution and Making All Things New: Catholicity in an Evolving Universe, Delio is also the founder of the Center for Christogenesis, an online educational resource for promoting the vision of French priest, scientist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin and the integration of science and religion.
Delio’s 2013 book, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love, seeks to illuminate the “everywhere active, all powerful, all intelligent Love that guides and directs our new awareness of inter-relatedness and inter-being.” Writes Delio:
We all have a part to play in this unfolding Love; we are wholes within wholes; persons within persons; religions within religions. We are one body and we seek one mind and heart so that the whole may become more whole, more personal and unified in love. This is our Christian vocation, to live in the Christ who is rising up from the ashes of death to become for us the God of the future.
In the following excerpt from the introduction of The Unbearable Wholeness of Being, Delio highlights the significance of scientist and mystic Teilhard de Chardin on our collective understanding of the “unfolding Love” that is all around us and within which we have our “wholeness of being.”
Stories create meaningful lives; they provide cohesiveness and direction. For centuries Christianity told a grand narrative of God, creation, and humanity that held such power and conviction that virtually all systems were based on it. We believed everything in the Bible to be historically true. Now, modern biblical scholarship discloses that stories of the Old and New Testaments were prayerfully created for the purpose of community, rather than as historical narratives. Yet, the stories of the Bible are deeply embedded in our religious consciousness and have provided images and symbols to define our relationship with God. In the Middle Ages theologians such as Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure elaborated a system of Christian thought based on the Bible, the church fathers, medieval cosmology, and philosophy. Core Christian doctrine was formed against the backdrop of the concentric, static, and hierarchical Ptolemaic universe. To this day all our core doctrines are fitted to this universe even though, as early as the sixteenth century, modern science began to describe a new universe that departed from the static, Ptolemaic one. The inability to engage a new religious story, however, has confirmed us to the old one. The impasse we find ourselves in is centuries old, and until we can purity our memory we are heading down a dangerous path.
The church has had trouble embracing the prophets of a new age, especially those announcing new stories and new ways to think about God and God’s saving plan in Christ. In the mid-twentieth century a voice cried out in the desert declaring that a new (and exciting) story had arisen, although no one of institutional rank listened to him. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit scientist and one of the most profound spiritual writers of the twentieth century. A paleontologist by training and a specialist in the Eocene Period (fifty-six to thirty-four million years ago), he was engaged in some of the most significant evolutionary discoveries of human origins. As he searched for artifacts to piece together the human story, he spent long periods of time in the desert (mostly in China), which enabled him to reflect deeply on his Christian faith and the significance of his faith in view of evolution. Like the desert fathers of old, Teilhard was removed from the noise of modern life and pondered deeply the meaning of Christianity in an age of evolution. His unique blend of science, Jesuit spirituality, and profound spiritual-mystical insight produced a body of writings that has yet to be explored fully. He grasped and sought to articulate the import of evolution not only for science but for modern culture. He wrote without the rigor of academic theology, that is, without a particular method of theology or a defined philosophical framework. His writings, therefore, are not systematically organized and have not attracted the serious scholarly attention they deserve. Rather, his work has been interpreted largely as poetic and spiritual. He was censored by Rome because he rejected original sin in light of evolution; as a result he was prohibited from publishing his writings during his lifetime. Thus he never benefited from peer review. Despite refinement of his ideas, his insights are remarkable and prophetic. Teilhard is the new Elijah, calling forth a new path of salvation in the twenty-first century.
Evolution is a controversial word. . . . While scientific materialists maintain that evolution is self-explanatory and self-sufficient to address life’s deepest questions, religious fundamentalists fear that evolution opposes the work of God by contradicting scripture and crushing the dignity of the human person. Yet, evolution kindles the dawn of post-modernity because it marks the break from a closed, static world of law and order to an open world of change and play. Evolution is less a mechanism than a process – a constellation of law, chance, spontaneity, and deep time. Evolution tells us that nature is not a closed, causal system of events but a complex series of fluid, dynamic, interlocking, and communicative relationships. From a scientific perspective evolution provides a framework for understanding nature’s intricate mechanisms. Although I am not using evolution in a scientific manner, I am using the concept as a paradigm based on modern science to understand the meaning and purpose of Christian life today. In this respect I follow the path of Teilhard de Chardin but widen his thought in dialogue with twentieth-century thinkers. In my view, evolution is the story, the meta-narrative of our age. It is not only a scientific explanation for physical reality; it is, rather, the overarching description of reality, the cosmological framework for all contemporary thought.
. . . Teilhard spoke of evolution as the emergence of consciousness and complexity. As entities become more complex in nature, consciousness increases or develops. I understand consciousness as the mindfulness or awareness that underscores, in some way, evolution’s direction. The question of consciousness belongs to philosophy, and Teilhard himself sought to articulate a new philosophy based on the energy of love. . . . and thus a radical shift from the world of being as substance to a world of love-energy and consciousness.
. . . Love is the fundamental energy of evolution. . . . Love is a consciousness of belonging to another, of being part of a whole. To love is to be on the way toward integral wholeness, to live with an openess of mind and heart, to encounter the other – not as stranger – but as another part of oneself. When we enter into the heart of love, that integral wholeness of love that is God, we enter into the field of relatedness and come to see that we are wholes within wholes. This is the consciousness we need today, an integral wholeness of love that is open to new life; a being-at-home in love that can evolve. By centering itself on the fundamental energy of love, Christianity (and all religions) can find new meaning and purpose by allowing modern science to challenge its stories and, at the same time, to offer the world of scientific reductionism a creative vision for the world. To do so, we need to pull back, pray, and reflect in our inner worlds who and what we want to be in our outer worlds.
“The Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not be at all,” Karl Rahner remarked. We need to discover the inner desert of the heart, that “still point” of love within us that empowers us to do new things. This center of love is God, the inner power who seeks to evolve, to become more conscious and unified. . . . Our challenge today is to trust the power of love at the heart of life, to let ourselves be seized by love, to create and invent ways for love to evolve into a global wholeness of unity, compassion, justice, and peace-making. As a process of evolution, the universe is incomplete, and we humans are incomplete. We can change, grow, and become something new. We have the power to do so, but do we have the will? We need a religious imagination that ignites our energies to move beyond mediocrity and fear, one that anticipates a new future of planet life.
Our failure to be enkindled is because our image of God is old. Evolution discloses a new God, an immanent-transcendent fullness of love that inspires us to create anew, a new earth with a new God rising from within. The Gospels tell us of God’s faithful presence. We are invited to trust, surrender, and believe that this world can be different, that justice and forgiveness are possible for the earth community. God’s love is ever new, always with us yet ever before us. To live in this love is to be committed to the whole, to live in the whole, to think the whole, to love the whole, to be “turned to the whole.” Evolution is “whole-making” in action, the rise of consciousness that realizes self-separateness is an illusion.
– Ilia Delio
Excerpted from The Unbearable Wholeness of Being:
God, Evolution, and the Power of Love
Orbis Books, 2013
pp. xv-xvii, xxi, xxv-xxvi
Excerpted from The Unbearable Wholeness of Being:
God, Evolution, and the Power of Love
Orbis Books, 2013
pp. xv-xvii, xxi, xxv-xxvi
See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Ilia Delio
• “The Most Authentic Statement of Created Life”
• Our Bodies Are Part of the Cosmos
• The Holy Spirit: Giver of Knowledge, Light, Inspiration, and Guidance
• Surrender Yourself
• A Kind of Dancing Divinity
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Judy Cannato
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Beatrice Bruteau
• Biophilia, the God Pan, and a Baboon Named Scott
• Michael Morwood on the Divine Presence (Part I)
• Michael Morwood on the Divine Presence (Part II)
• Michael Morwood on the Divine Presence (Part III)
• Remembering Cletus Wessels, O.P. (1930-2009)
• Remembering and Honoring Dorothy Olinger
• Prayer and the Experience of God in an Ever-Unfolding Universe
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