Dear Friends,
The twentieth-century theologian, Karl Rahner, was once asked by a colleague:“Wouldn’t it be better to keep quiet about God? After all, the word has been so misused, so tainted, so violated. It is the most loaded of all human words.” To which he replied: “Precisely for that reason, I may not dispense with it.” Rahner certainly had his finger on something important here. He realized that in order to speak or write, we must use language, so we must say something about our encounter with God, the “incomprehensible mystery” as he named it, however inadequate. Instead of ceasing to talk about God, or simply talking about God in ways that have been misused for political or ecclesiastical ends, it is crucial for philosophers and theologians in particular to learn to talk anew about God.
The Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was acutely aware of the need to update our metaphors for God. He believed that we have yet to find a God whom we can truly adore, a God commensurate with the vastness of the cosmos. In 1950, he noted in his diary: “God is not dead— but CHANGES.” And later, in a letter to a friend, he writes of our task to effect a “transformation . . . of the ‘God of the Gospel’ into the ‘God of Evolution’—a transformation without defamation.” In Teilhard’s view, the dimensions of classical Christianity and of religion generally are not large enough, not sufficiently dynamic to animate the contemporary world and develop a process of spiritualization that parallels our advances in scientific knowledge and technology.
Concerned with the great spiritual needs of our time, the Center for Christogenesis is committed to a bold revisioning of contemporary theology, one that offers meaning, direction, and hope in a world in crisis. Like Teilhard, we believe that the profound hunger for a greater vision and zest for life are found in the creation of a new “spiritual atmosphere,” in which the love of God is resolutely connected with faith in the becoming of the world. This is a vision of a deeply personal God, operating as the engine of evolution and growing with us from within into ever higher levels of consciousness. As Teilhard wrote at the end of his final essay “The Christic”: to see this radiant vision “appear only once, in a single mind, is enough, for it is impossible for anything ever to prevent it from spreading universally and setting everything ablaze.”
As we work to realize Teilhard’s transforming vision, we continue to ask for your support which provides us with the means to carry out the plans and projects needed to grow our message universally and to set everything ablaze with the fire of divine love. Indeed, it is only because of your sustained graciousness and generosity that we are enabled to reap new life in the world and create a better tomorrow . Please know that every donation, large and small, is a “gift of encouragement” that helps us together give rise to the type of spiritual awakening and theological renewal for which Teilhard hoped. Many thanks in advance for your kind consideration!
Every best wish,
Robert Nicastro
Executive Director