SEEING GOD IN EVERYONE AND

EVERYTHING

2. Ilia Delio, “God, Entanglement, and Evolution,” Part 2, Wednesday,

September 18 , 2019

Cosmological love, NATURE,

and World Soul

“Love is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mysterious of the cosmic forces… the physical structure of the universe is love.” Ilia Delio

Although many scientists and non-scientists balk at the idea of cosmological love, Teilhard de Chardin thought from a different level of consciousness, one much closer to the medieval writers who had profound views on cosmos, nature, and world soul.

Science AND Religion

Theoloogy is not a matter of feeling or devotion but a science in its sown right with methods of inquiring logical reasoning, structured argumenrs, and insightful conclsion.“The scientific nature of theology converted me from a bicameral mind of science or religion to an integrative mind of science AND religion…..I began to appreciate the deep interconnectedness between macrocosm and microcosm.” p. 47

Ewert H. Cousins, Christ of the 21st Century, Ilia’s major professor when studing history of theology at Fordham

• We are living on the cusp of a new axieal age. Karl Jaspers had originated the thinking about Axial Ages.

• The first Axial Age gave rise to the free, autonomous individual.

• The second Axial Age evoked a new global consciousness. The new technologies of television, mass communication, mass travel, and the internet, have fundamentally altgerss our view of the world and ourselves in the world.

A New Level of Consciousness

The 1968 photo of Earth from space made our planet seem like a single tribe fo humanity. For the first time since the appearance of human life on our planet, all of the tribes and all of the nations and religions began to share a common history. Ewert Cousins called this new level of consciousness, “complexified collective consciousness.” People are becoming more aware of belonging to humanity as a wjp;e; rather than a specific group

Integrative Thinking for a New Age

INTEGRATIVE thinking

Second axial period consciousness, Cousins wrote, is communal, global, ecological, and cosmic – and advancement in the whole evolutionary process.

Cousins integrated Teilhard’s God of evolution, Whitehead’s di-polar nature of God, the nature mysticism of Francis of Assisi. I learned to be an INTEGRATIVE thinker. Thinking for a new age without the need for “analytical method of inquiry.” p. 49

I felt myself becoming a theologian of the second axial age, where science, theology, and spirituality are integrated into one evolving flow of life. – the flow of ideas on love, the spiritual life, the evolution of the world soul, the mystery of God, and the meaning of life in an expanding universe.. I found myself occupying multiple universes there in the Bronx at Fordham.

The God of Love and

Evolving Life Embracing the

Universe

In a teaching job at Trinity College, Hartford, Conn., my Italian-American God from New Jersey was growing into a much larger divine mystery embracing the universe. Then teaching at in a graduate school of theology in D.C., I was transformed from a conservative monastic to an integrative, second axial theologian. “God was born into a new vision of evolving life.” p. 50

Teaching the Franciscan theology of St. Bonaventure, which was “Christ mysticism,” I was opened up to a God of radical love.

God IS love and it is Love that flows in the Trinity.

“The power of love as the very definition of God shattered my benevolent grandfather God of childhood.”

The Primacy of Christ as a

MASTERPIECE OF LOVE

Jesus is about God’s desire to express Godself outwardly in a creature who would be a MASTERPIECE OF LOVE. So, God became human in Jesus out of love (rather than sin), according to the next Franciscan Ilia studied: John Duns Scotus (14th century). p. 52

Christ became “the highest work of God” because God desires to show the world how the world is supposed to work according to Love. This is distinct from Jesus being about God trying to punish and redeem relative to SIN.

“The world is Christified through the intimate indwelling presence of divine love.” p. 53

The next advance is understanding the primacy of energy in the universe

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit paleontologist, discovered Scotus’s “primacy of Christ,” and exclaimed “There is the theology for the future!”Whereas Bonaventure saw the journey of the individual soul, Teilhard looked at the cosmos and saw in each individual unit, the work of creative love interiorizing and transforming each individual unit AND uniting it to the whole.

So love is the primal energy of the nniverse, the energy of attraction, union, and transcendence. P. 53

Teilhard’s quest was to find the God of evolution

So, the name “God” reflects the incomprehensible wellspring of love at the heart of an expanding universe. Teilhard outlined a philosophy of love, based on the primacy of energy in the universe….The primal energy of evolving love is the energy of attraction, generativity, and creativity: Life evolves toward more complex life and consciousness.

Evolution Requires a Center of Wholeness???

As a paleontologist, Teilhard observed the process of evolution proceeding through the spheres of matter, life, and consciousness. This process requires a center, which is also its energizing goal. So, within evolution there must be “a centering point of unfolding unity, an influential center of wholeness which he called “Omega,” a center both within and ahead.

God is the name of absolute love, Omega, the power of love that attracts and empowers the future from the future because love that empowers being, transcends being as the absolute horizon of being itself..Teilhard’s God is “the power of the future.” p. 54Evolution impels us to think of God not as a prime mover moving things from the past, but of God as drawing the world from the future. p. 54

A God of A Static vs. An Evolutive World

In the case of a static world, Teilhard wrote, the creator is structurally independent of his work.

In the case of an evolutive world, God is dynamically interior to creation, a divine energy which is imperceptible, gradually bringing all things to their fullness. God acts from within, at the core of each element, by animating the sphere of being from within. Every element bears within it an Omega center who is both within and beyond the future transcendent horizon of being, which empowers things to create themselves. p. 55

God is Ever NewGod is the name of incomprehensible divine love at the heart of evolving life; the depth and future. p. 57

When the divine Word becomes flesh (Incarnation), God transcends the boundaries of separation (between divinity and creation) to become something new. God enters into bounded existence, yet these boundaries are not fixed; nature constantly transcends itself in pursuit of new, more unified life symbolized by their resurrection of Jesus Christ. The life of Jesus reveals the inner depth of nature to be protean, open to God and thus open to hybridization, to becoming something new. No one person or existent can exhaust the presence of God because God is always the more of anything that exists. p. 59

God within is also God aheadIlia Delio’s life learning so far:There is an absolute wholeness of truth and beauty that lies at the center of even a single cell. It cannot be observed or measured because it is elusive in nature; it draws the observer into its field of activity and at the same time awakens within a desire to pursue its ever receding horizon. p. 60

“I went in search of this powerful lure and I discovered a God who is hidden and humble; a God of overflowing love in whom I live and move and who lives and moves in me.” p. 60

“In the midst of chaos there is God; and where new life emerges there is God whose breathe of life is deeply woven into my life. God is the beginning and end because in God there is no beginning or end; rather there is an eternal openness to newness of life. To let go into this God is to live into the future.” p. 61