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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I feel a hopeful movement continually bringing forth a new way of life. One can not have a growing tip if what it comes from is not acknowledged and treasured as essential. Our relationship by which we are connected is vital.
Evolution shows us that change is integral to new life.”
—Ilia Delio, The Emergent Christ
These words ground me in the wild hope that the messiness, confusion, and division that we are experiencing should not fill us with fear and anxiety but ground us in the mystery of God pulling us and transforming us to something ever new. Our society is waking up to the heart of matter.
Listening to my own voice reading aloud, brought an altered resonance to the words.
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This reflections leads me to reflect on quotes from Ilia’s THE UNBEARABLE WHOLENESS OF BEING. “The Creator is continuing to create in and through us.” page 196/’ and ” Hope must be born over and over again for where there is love there is hope.Christian life is birthing love into greater unity; it is our contribution to a universe in evolution.’ page 198. my question is what does this mean for me in my life, today and at this very moment.
When I listen in the silence of my heart I cut through the noise of obsessive thinking and new information becomes available to me…
When you do that, you can actually feel the energy fields touching. What a great idea for this meditation.
All in existence and life have evolved. The mistake us humans make is that we think that we are special and more important than the rest of the world around us.
Sometimes I hold an invisible sphere with my hands and move them closer together and further away over and over again as a reminder that this is what’s happening. I like the way you described this.
All ends pass through origins, meaning things evolve (ripen or mature) in the space-time field, appearing as hardware or material and psychic reality. At a certain point on their trajectory, the energy turns back toward origins again, converging or converting back to the software (Spirit) from whence it came. Because Alpha and Omega are the same place, personal and collective history are not linear but circuitous. En route, their energy in the form of souls are allowed to wander in the wilderness of space-time for a season before returning once over, say, as salmon return to their river beds of origin, or raindrops the ocean, becoming one with it again. The return is a beginning, the beginning a return.
Thanks for sharing, Gail