Announcing the New Omega Center Website
Dear Omega Community,
It is with great excitement that we are announcing the relaunched Omega Center website. Please come visit!
Ilia and I have been working closely together for the last few months “making all things new,” redesigning the website in a way consonant with her vision of the unceasingly creative and unifying love of God flowing through all things. Our logo, look and feel, publication, and our foundational statements have been reworked to express this ebullient divine dynamism at the heart of the universe. Please do spend some time to look around—the playful surprise of divine creativity can be found throughout.
Here are some of the new website highlights:
Logo and Aesthetics
Finding our way to a new logo and look for Omega Center was great fun. We developed dozens of variations, looking for the right way to express the energy and novelty of God’s work in the cosmos. Two aspects in the logo were essential: maintaining the Omega symbol—so central to our work and the meaning of Teilhard’s legacy—and showing divine movement, development, openness, and creativity. In the heart of the logo is an “open spiral” that like God-Omega unifies by diversifying, interconnecting through the endless emergence of New Creation. Establishing the logo guided the design, as it reflects this glorious loving vitality that flows throughout created reality.
New Creation Online Magazine
The Omega Center blog has been central to our mission since the beginning of the organization. Ilia’s own essential reflections, as well as pieces from authors writing on many related areas—including science and spirituality, contemplation, diversity, and inclusion, and much more—have been core to our educational work in sharing Ilia’s vision with the world.
Our new online magazine, New Creation, that launches today with the website is an evolution of the blog. We wanted to put forth a bold voice in our name and our approach that captures the meaning of this spiritual and historical moment: something new is coming into our midst. New Creation is a magazine dedicated to that open and creative wholeness that is the dynamic relationship between God, Cosmos, and Humanity—what Ilia names Deep Catholicity, Raimon Pannikar as Cosmotheandric Solidarity, and Richard Rohr as The Universal Christ. In a sense, Creation has always been “new”—as every moment of divine becoming is a fresh revelation—yet I believe we all are cognizant that “something new under the sun” is emerging. The Omega Center seeks to be a midwife of this new creation, a “vanguard servant” that works to bring it into fullness and proclaim its Good News.
Omega Groups
The Omega Center understands that bringing forth this New Creation is not simply a matter of sharing our vision—indeed, it is simply not possible without you all. The true work of transforming our world is in your hands: in local communities worldwide and in the “laboratories of divine love” that is each Omega Group. While we will be doing more in the coming year to support the Omega Groups, our hope is that each group will develop its own unique approach to spiritual embodiment and transformation, offering to the world its singular and distinct reinventions of celebration and ceremony.
Donations
More and more people every year are reading Ilia’s books, visiting our website, attending our events, and offering their financial support. We deeply appreciate all our supporters at Omega Center and want the donation experience to be easy and positive. In January, we made the decision to make our digital materials free and open to all, based on the wise counsel of friends and on feedback we received in our community survey. We have streamlined that experience to make sure donation receipts are clear, automatic, and easy to download again later. We have also worked to ensure that every single donor receives our deep gratitude for their support. Thank you for your vision and generosity.
Friends and Future
Dear friends, as always, it is a privilege to be serving this Omega community and helping to share the essential vision of Ilia Delio with the world. We have worked very hard over the last few months to create something new for you and for the world we hope to create together. This has been a big effort across the entire organization and special thanks are owed to the whole team: our patient and supportive Omega Board members; our Communications Manager, Isabelle Robinson, who painstakingly but gleefully helped prepare every single article for relaunch; Steve Clark and his team for their fast and exceptional web design work; and particularly to Ilia, who during her intense writing sabbatical endured the many feverish calls, emails, and texts that big projects always entail. My heartfelt thanks to all.
We hope you are happy, but we also want to hear from you. Gratefully guided by your survey results from the fall, we will be releasing more features and areas of the site over the next year, and we hope to receive your ongoing thoughts and comments as well. As I always ask: contact us! I’ve personally emailed with many of you, spoken with some of you, and even shared a few cups of coffee with local Omegans (great seeing you, Kevin Barr!) who wanted to chat about the meaning of this new creation we are all working to bring forth.
We’re a very small part-time team, and do our best to keep up with emails, but please reach out—we are always listening. For perhaps the deepest meaning of Omega is that we are all in this together, for only in openness to the divine dynamism in and between us, will a new world be possible.
With gratitude,
Gregory
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Hello Tom,
i live in South Africa, our beloved country has been in a political mess especially of late, now
COVID 19 has arrived and we are in a continuing lock down and facing an economic tsunami
.[est 1 million job losses by next year, a plunging currency,, growth expected to be around -8/10%,]
In the process of tackling these huge problems in our land, the president has faced the nation with forceful leadership.
the economy will be re-structured along with the whole political arena, unheard of new measures and policies.
For us who still live in the nation [many have left S Africa] it will be exciting as our God who has favourites [the poor] is bringing political parties, who hated each other, back together again. We are waking up to a new reality.
This is unprecedented in our history.
We have brilliant medical services who are tackling the corona virus in a context of undernourished masses,, HIV vulnerable citizens in the millions.
We have faith in a God who will not allow evil to prevail, and who loves each and every one of us without exception and without limit.
[SA has a population, excluding millions of refugees and immigrants, of about 58 million souls, at least 30 % are under about 30 years of age, and unemployed , mainly youth, about 40%+ will have not much prospect of a job.]
We are confident that the God in our midst, will never leave nor forsake us.and we will become a beacon of hope for Africa.
Deo Gratias
Tony Nicholls
Super; when is Sister Delio accepting speaking engagements?
Dear Omega,
One would like to take a positive, hopeful view to the future in the spirit of Teilhard, and to see that the universe is indeed evolving in a positive direction. However, our world, on the surface, seems headed in another direction. The political mess in this country is not encouraging. We are not doing well in our relationships with other countries.
And we continue to ruin our planet, our only home. It is so sad to hear the stories of whales and fish being found full of the plastic they have ingested. And there are so many other stories of our poor stewardship. And so do we just sit back and hope that the “Omega” comes through the power of God, no matter what? Is there something automatic about this happening? I never know what to think about all that.
One wants to be positive and have hope, even when events and circumstances seem to be going in a wrong direction.
Tom – thanks for this essential and timely question. At Omega we would say the answer is definitely “No”, we cannot simply sit back and wait for something to happen – there is nothing “automatic” about saving our world. Our awesome and unique role in God’s created cosmos – as what theologian Phil Hefner called “Created Co-Creators” – means that we have the astonishing responsibility to help bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth.
This is not a brawny, Pelagian feat of strength, however – we have to align ourselves with God and act from that alignment. It requires deepening our awareness of the divine through both contemplative practice and through a robust consideration of the intrinsic God-Cosmos-Human relationship via both religion and science. This is why we see our role here at Omega Center as both educational and transformational: we want to help clarify and expand a concept of God that helps inculcate that awareness, as well as encourage and facilitate small, local, supportive spiritual communities – our Omega Groups – for seekers and believers to develop their awareness in their own practices and communities.
Ultimately, humanity has the unique cosmic role of guiding God’s creation – of directing evolution and the immanent divine becoming – and this awesome responsibility needs to be done with boldness and with compassion, with love and with courage, and through both deep personal development and committed communal action. The future is in our hands – God has placed it there – and we can only do this together.