The Heart of Matter: Evolution Shows us That Change is Integral to New Life.
Welcome to our first The Heart of Matter, a new contemplative email series from the Center for Christogenesis. Every Tuesday you will receive an email with a passage from one of Ilia’s books to ponder. Our invitation to you will be to read those passages every day to give them time to reveal their deeper and hidden riches.
Too often we live in a dissociated state, where what happens in the head stays in the head, and The Heart of Matter will also attempt to bridge that separation by presenting different incarnational practices to “embody” those weekly readings, using our physical senses to experience the divine presence more directly in moving the text from the head to the body. Read more
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Tuesday, January 4th 2022
“The whole creation, with humanity as its growing tip, emerges from an evolutionary process, exists in evolution, and develops through convergence and complexity. Evolution shows us that change is integral to new life.”
—Ilia Delio, The Emergent Christ
An Incarnational Practice: Reading Aloud
“Silence is the think tank of the soul”, says acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton. This week’s invitation is to use the sound of silence as a way to listen to this passage. Silence is not the absence of sound but the absence of noise, and we invite you to use your voice to read this passage aloud every day, listening to the pauses, the intonation, the cadence and hear where each word lands. Let your voice resonate in your heart and lift the words meant to touch and guide you.
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What is being revealed? What is being moved? What is being asked?
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“While panentheism is a helpful concept, the language of pantheism and panentheism is based on concepts of ‘being’ and ‘nature’ that can lead to misguided images of distinct beings in…
My question also and at this point are we the tip or the anchor or even worse.
What is being revealed is our obligation to the planet and all planetary beings, to take whatever action we are capable of, to make this world a better place.
What is being revealed is our obligation to our fellow humans and to the planet, to take whatever action we might be capable of, to make this world a better place.
We are interconnected with and support by all of creation in our evolving process toward new life each day. This interconnection creates hope, reduces anxieties in moving toward the unknown and encourages my creative self.
Little me… I am important enough to be part of this ongoing evolution of the world, of the cosmos, of all life. How expansive, how deep, how constantly creative! I feel blessed to join this ever-changing group of people in hope and ever increasing in love, which in Christ and on our God knows no boundries.
I am grateful for these invitations to listen into our own sacredness….to what am I attuning…what is my heart’s call…what is emerging…
Creation? Evolution?
Perhaps a creative evolution in which things converge in relationships of increasing complexity.
Our knowledge of God is equally evolutionary and creative and is a constant invitation to enter into a complex affective and cognitive relationship with matter and beings.
“The whole…emerges” This also reminded me immediately of Octavia Butler: “All that you touch
You Change/All that you Change/Changes you/The only lasting truth/is Change/God/is Change.”
We are becoming One with the Christ! One in all of life, One in Love! It will go on!
I am so looking forward to this opportunity, the timing is perfect. I recently viewed two different NOVA episodes, one about Black Holes. Usually those shows leave me just plain inspired…this time, something like fear crept in. I AM SO TINY….an expanding universe SO BIG. I wondered about my ‘place’ in such a world. I can agree that evolution shows us that change is integral to new life…and can be wonderful, too! But there is also the unwanted change, the kind that tips us upside down for a while…until we are ‘righted’ and comfortable with the newness. (I experienced this with the recent loss of my Mother.)
The NOVA shows both drew me in with the amazing images of the far reaches of space and recent discoveries about the Big Bang; they also humbled me and brought to mind that truly it is love that casts out fear and I have known that Big Love. If the Universe is always expanding, maybe I can too!