Heart of Matter: Stability of Balance

5 Comments

1. George Marsh on March 25, 2023 at 11:19 am

   Language can be so tricky! While I revere Teilhard and admire Delio, I must say that the material and the spiritual are not antithetical in reality, but only in the sphere of human thinking. God is incarnate not only in Christ but in every one of God’s creatures. Nothing exists but in God. Richard Rohr (especially in The Universal Christ) finds this true and uses Scripture, tradition and inspired logic to show that “Every Thing is Sacred.”

   
   
   
2. Dr Thomas B. Lucente on March 25, 2023 at 1:43 am

   Indeed, the answer seems so simple! We have indeed become discombobulated by the shift in Cosmology and our place in the universe. Teilhard and Francis of Assisi have for our “interconectiveness” and some many of us are mired in the cosmology of the Middle Ages. Sr. Ilia Delio treats this problem and expounds on Teilhard’s rendering of “the balance of in the direction not of matter but of spirit!”

   
   
   
3. George Marsh on March 21, 2023 at 4:41 pm

   From Mr. Masterleo’s view (in the last sentence) the average person in the average parish is doomed to a fairly primitive concept of God, from which progress to a more mature concept could take centuries. I hope that the Spirit will work hard to lead humans, one way or another, to the Light. I also hope that Love will motivate actions which are somehow consistent with the will of God.

   
   
   
4. Mary on March 21, 2023 at 3:20 pm

   Thanks, Joe. This does help me to understand better that we are all one.

   
   
   
5. Joe Masterleo on March 21, 2023 at 11:51 am

   All deities, mythologies, persons, and everything in the universe are digital metaphors (forms) that originate from, are transparencies to, and orient themselves around a unifying spiritual center that lends them “consistency, stability, and balance.” That means that thinking beings “are without excuse” (Rm. 1:20) because every discipline is (or should be) a portal to this center and substance (singularity) known by different names among the sciences, tribes, and religions. It’s as if one set of parents gave birth to several children, then gave each child fifty different first and last names, when the children, all unique, have a single set of biological parents consisting only of their distinctive DNA. And that would be not only parentally absurd, but likewise, as the apostle declared, inexcusable (“without excuse.”) So, what is humanity’s excuse? A feeble one; its closed-circuit understanding of divinity and the created order limited to what the apostle named the “carnal mind” (dualistic thinking), one “at enmity with God” that sees all things concretely and divided rather than transparently and whole – with a myriad of first and last names (as nations, tribes, and tongues), as opposed to the SAME spiritual DNA from the SAME preternatural source. So, humanity’s vision and language of the spirit has been lost, and that of a more effective post-modern Christian apostolate. Jesus, nature, and all created things don’t refer past themselves as they once did, universal energies from the SAME center that, like different siblings, are all preternaturally antecedent to their personification in space-time, namely “He who has seen as seen the Father” (Jn 14:9). And as transfigured, his Father’s consistency. But to carnal minds Jesus remain inexcusably “closed and concretized,” exclusive to a given tribe. Hence, Christianity will remain hindered as merely tribal until it plausibly names the universal organic (Teilhardian) basis of the Christ (Spirit) who “fills all things,” giving them “consistency, stability, and balance” everywhere.