The Heart of Matter: Our Everyday Experience
January 23, 2024//
“The fundamental basis of everything that exists is nothing like our everyday experience of the world.”
Ilia Delio, The Not-Yet God: Carl Jung, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Relational Whole, Ch. 1
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“La base fundamental de todo lo que existe, en nada se parece a nuestra experiencia cotidiana del mundo.”
Ilia Delio, The Not-Yet God: Carl Jung, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Relational Whole, Ch. 1
What is being moved? What is being asked?
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Today’s reading led me to visit its context in chapter one. Ilia writes,
“Modern physics is, in a sense, a mystical science that stands in opposition to the notion that “science explains everything” or that “science gives us the truth.” Physics is in fact a description not an explanation…integrated descriptions that use creative abstract concepts…and the abstract language of mathematics. The goal is to provide a “model” or “representation” of the measurable objective aspects of our experience. Physics is an abstract description of nature, although there are no abstractions in nature. What you see is not necessarily what is there. The map is not the territory.”
I’m also reading Vincent Puzzuto’s wonderful book, Contemplating Christ: The Gospels and the Interior Life, and I noticed how his words (below) gave me pause to the implications of Ilia’s featured quote. The paired texts lent appreciation to “physics” as an apt metaphor—understanding one thing in terms of another—for “the body of Christ.”
From Puzzuto:
“So if you are the body of Christ and its members, it is your own mystery that has been placed on the Lord’s table; what you are receiving is your own mystery.” (Augustine)
“As the contemplative mind begins to shift from thinking about God to being in God, so too is there an evolution from praying to Christ as an object of devotion to living in the Spirit as member of Christ’s body. Christ is no longer an object of analytical thinking, imaginative projection, or external devotion outside and beyond ourselves, but the very subject of our subjectivity, the heart of our heart, and the soul of our soul.”
Puzzuto’s words, for me, embody the charism and praxis for Ilia’s notions of relational theology and neologism “Theohology,” inviting Us to ever-already-evermore-become Our mystery and Our love.
. . . no more than a shadow resembles the object that cast it, or a signpost the town it points to, or an appetizer the main course that is to follow. Material reality is a like a giant bread crumb trail spread out over the vast field of space-time. Look deep enough into a single crumb, any crumb, and you will discover the eternal whole it belongs to, and is a tiny part of. All things are metaphors.
We are being asked to clear our mind of all theories and thoughts about the future and go with the flow of change in our COSMOS.