An Incarnate Universe

Dear Friends of the Center,

In June we launched a successful fundraising drive that exceeded our expectations. I want to express a heartfelt “thank you” to all who supported the Center for Christogenesis in some way. Your notes of gratitude, your financial support, and your shared comments offered on our blogs and webinars help us shape our work of forming a church of the planet.

Today, I was reading Teilhard’s essays on Christianity and Evolution and I cannot begin to tell you how prophetic and insightful he was more than sixty years ago. He realized that the geometry of religion must change if it is to have any vitalizing influence on earth. He emphasized the need for integrating humankind’s total religious experience into a new spirituality for a new world being born. Even the ancient mystical traditions must be supplanted by a new mysticism of convergence and action, he said. Humankind needs a positive, world-oriented spirituality which can sustain human effort and constructive activity. None of the ancient mysticisms are any longer sufficiently adequate and there is need for a new path today in all religious traditions. We need a new religious breakthrough in our understanding of faith as a core element of being human, and in our practice of spirituality in a world of cultural convergence and greater social interaction.

Teilhard recognized that religious diversity is part of the human phenomenon, just as racial and cultural diversity are. He spoke often of the convergence of religions and how our understanding and coming to terms with religious differences must develop along new lines and lead to new attitudes. He saw that religion is intrinsic to biological life and that, as religion goes, so too does culture. The death of religion is the dissolution of culture; the vitality of religion is the zest for life and the energy to build the earth into a greater unity.

The past is over or rather sublimated into the present and the future is begging for our attention. We need to spend our energies wisely and to love well in the moments and breaths of life that we are given. For the sake of a sustainable future, for a world hungry for meaning and purpose, for a human community that longs for love and justice, each day we have a choice to make. Teilhard made the choice for incarnation, for a world in formation in which God is part of the evolving process of life. Each day we are called to see the world in a new way; for as we see so we love, and the more perfectly and purely we see, the more perfectly and purely we love.

The Center for Christogenesis chooses to love this world as the very place of God’s becoming. We are committed to incarnating the universe, giving birth to a new religion of the earth. We are grateful to all our friends and co-journers who choose to be part of this commitment.

Blessings and peace.

Sr.Ilia