June is a special month at the Center for Christogenesis. Each year, our staff takes time to reflect on our mission and vision. We take time to revisit our goals for engaging with our community and bringing the Teilhardian vision of Ilia Delio to life in our world.
This month our staff took time to think about what it means to truly see with eyes that are open to a deeply interconnected world. Teilhard de Chardin writes in How I Believe about the forces of entropy and arrangement in the world. Without the ability to truly see the world, to reflect on the interconnectedness of all materiality, we can quickly become subject to the forces of entropy. You see, for Teilhard, the world isn’t something that “happens” to us – we are not meant to be overwhelmed by the forces of entropy. The human person, through deepening her vision, can overcome the forces of entropy and take part in the arrangement of the universe in evolution. As human persons, we are evolution become conscious of itself.
Teilhard’s vision of the human person and evolution is a vision of hope. He places a positive view on the value of science and technology and creates a religious vision that embraces cosmic and biological evolution that recognizes change as part of life, and God is at home in change. Most of all, it is a vision grounded in the energy of love. Despite the forces of entropy we have the capacity for a unified planet because love is the physical structure of the universe. When we are able to see anew and recognize our lives as vital in the deepening of the universe in evolution, we move toward a deeper unity in love.
As our month of “Seeing Anew” draws to a close, it is my sincere hope that you all were able to take some time to read, reflect, and practice seeing anew together through our emails and coffee hours. While the “Center for Christogenesis” may be an online forum, the real Christogenic center is each person: the center is you! When we learn to see anew, we move toward a deeper wholeness in love, together.
And therein lies our hope. Let us share it together!
A counterpoint: Integral seeing and knowing are rarities, relatively speaking. Commonplace they are not. Necessary they must be (in a wholesale way) to stem the momentous tide of human-induced entropy. Science has left us with wonderful things, along with several illusions or falsities. The latter, in its preoccupation with control, is the assumption that history itself and its current troubling trends can be controlled or improved upon. Not likely, because science has no value system or transcendent views. Though religion does have a value system via the transcendent, it makes the same presumption; do X and U will follow. Adopt a different world view and a better world will follow, etc. However, it’s truths have never been realized en masse in the collective. Not ever. In reality, there is little evidence that history can or ever has been constructively controlled by the relatively few “all in one” seers which, only by grace, have been thinly but colorfully sprinkled over the dark pages of history. What has been painfully evident is that human destructive power has been limitless, having increased to the point where a single madman (or virus) could end it summarily. As for the rarity of seeing clearly, John Ruskin said it best, and it holds more so today than ever, “Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, all in one.” These days, our hope seems to be more in earnest supplication than in action (activism), namely, Lord “send your kingdom soon” (Luke 11:3, Living Bible translation).
Oh thank you Jillian – your writing captures a dynamic that sometimes I need to see in words so that I can live it in spirit and action. Much love to you!