Transcript of Facilitators’ Gathering, December 18, 2025

Lightly edited for clarity. Here’s the Zoom link to access the recording—use passcode: !3$2Dv?G

Emily DeMoor:  Let’s take a few moments to quiet ourselves 
and remember that we are in the holy presence of God.

Now let us begin our time together by listening to the song “Stables,” by Peter Mayer
This song invites us to see the manger of Bethlehem 
not only as a place of long ago, 
but as a living symbol 
of our own hearts and communities. 
It reminds us that love 
is continually being born 
in the sacred and sometimes fragile 
spaces of our lives.  
In the spirit of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,
we can hear in these words 
the call to recognize love 
as the driving force of evolution, 
drawing us toward greater unity and wholeness.  

Stables—Lyrics (A recording of this song can be found at Stables)
By Peter Mayer

In Bethlehem a manger waits, long ago and so today, 
Where hatred-weary people pray, love will come and lay there.

And so do countless stables stand in hearts as harsh as desert lands, 
Rough shelters in the wind and sands, so love will come and stay there.

Love that opens fists of hate, heaps up gold on beggars’ plates, 
Love that shows a kindly face to enemies and strangers.

And the walls of stables tremble so, when the winds of fear and judgement blow, 
For a stable hopes in love alone, and knows that love’s the answer.

O love the prophet’s only word, the only lesson left to learn, 
The only end of heaven’s work, and the only road that goes there.

Love that sees with mercy’s eyes, holds its arms out open wide, 
threads its loom with sep‘rate lives, and weaves them all together.

So may the lamps of stables glow brightly that their light may go, 
For miles in the darkness so love will find its way there.

(© 2005 PeterMayer/Blueboat Publishing)

---

May we nurture the sacred within us, 
so that love may take root and radiate outward, 
transforming fear into communion 
and guiding us toward divine wholeness
in our time together here,
in our Christophany Groups,
and beyond.

And so now, I would like to turn it over to our, Executive Director, Dr. Robert Nicastro, and Claire will give us a final, reflection at the end.

Robert Nicastro: Welcome! Thank you for being here, everyone. It’s great to be back with those whom I’ve seen and encountered before, and those of you I’m meeting for the first time who have shown interest in perhaps becoming a facilitator of the Christophany Groups. That’s really encouraging and great to know! Thank you, and thank you most of all for holding space for something that our culture has almost entirely forgotten how to do.

And I’ll name it this way. We’ve forgotten how to pay attention together to what’s being born in us and among us. And I think that’s very important, not to forget.

So let’s be blunt about something. We are living through a convergence of crises, unprecedented in human history — climate catastrophe, democratic erosion, religious fundamentalism rising in an unhinged fashion, while mainstream religion seems to be collapsing under the weight of it all. An epidemic of loneliness so severe that recent statistics have shown that the Surgeon General has declared it a public health crisis. As we know, especially such an enlightened group as this, these are not separate problems. They are rather symptoms, symptoms of a consciousness structure that has reached its absolute limit.

And here’s the issue, I think, that keeps us from addressing the issue. We are constitutionally incapable of responding in a coherent way. And this is the reason for this presentation this evening, by the way.  Ilia and I got to talking, and we realized that the Christophany groups are beginning to grow by leaps and bounds, and that by itself is absolutely wonderful. But given the great cacophony of noise, the sympho-cacophony of noise, as it’s somewhat described in some of the literature, we thought it would be good to review the vision of the Center and how the Christophany Group fit into this framework, and I know many of you are familiar with much of this, but it often needs repeated. 

After all, given the sociological data, many of us need to hear something at least 40-plus times for it to get into our DNA stream and become habituated. Of course, I’ve said this before in other discussions, but I want to keep saying it again, because I do believe in this statistic. So, while all of us here pretty much have a sense of what the vision of Christogenesis is about, and where the Christophany emphasis fits into that larger vision, I just want to make sure that we continue to be on this same page. Not because we lack information, necessarily. Or not so much that we lack the technology necessary to bring this vision to a fuller flesh, or that we lack the good intentions, that’s not it at all. It’s because our fundamental way of organizing reality as a population or what we might call our religious imagination, the thisness that actually gives energy to a larger way of understanding things, is built for a world that no longer exists. So it’s important for us here, who are educating and helping us engage in new forms of relational and theological practice, to keep these visions in mind.

So the question I want to put to us tonight is not necessarily how do we solve the problems that were mentioned on slide 2? It’s not necessarily about solving anything. The question, I think, is deeper. Stranger, perhaps even more uncomfortable. Why are we, who are fundamentally religious people, fundamentally spiritual people, and fundamentally, I think, thoughtful people, even when it’s not so obvious, especially in the United States these days, so profoundly unable to think and act at the scale this moment demands. I think if we were to gesture toward a guess, it’s because our religious consciousness was formed in a cosmology that no longer exists. And cosmology, as we’ve heard from Ilia, and perhaps have even understood and deepened from our own study, colors the complexion of everything, especially how we think and act.  And for most of Christian history, we’ve, as a corporate people, especially in the Christian context, have imagined God as the supreme being outside of the universe. This can’t be emphasized enough, because many persons, even those who are more enlightened, in our groups, in our parishes, in our communities, in our families still imagine a God outside of the universe, perfect and unchanging, occasionally intervening from the outside.

Salvation in this context — What happens to us after death? What happens to our loved ones after death? – a vital consequence of such an image — means escape from this world to another one.

Holiness, in a similar vein, means withdrawal entirely from matter, from the body, from the mess of history itself. Prayer, similarly, is petition to a distant monarch so that our souls might one day be assimilated into this otherworldly realm. So faith, by natural deduction, is accepting doctrines about realities that are not only not seen, but are no longer coherent or acceptable in the new scientific story.

So I want to be clear, this older cosmology that’s being described now, at least in brief, has in fact produced extraordinary beauty.  Cathedrals, and mystics like Meister Eckhart, and moral frameworks that … were the glue that held civilizations together. So we’re not trashing it by any stretch of the imagination.  But what we know now about the world, about humanity, About life. We can’t unknow.

And what is that? It’s the universe is not static. It’s evolving. Galaxies themselves aren’t fixed objects. They’re events, relationships, processes of unknown, mysterious quantities. Life itself is not a divine insertion or an intervention.  It is emergence, complexity arising through billions of years of experimentation. And consciousness, as we now know, quite fundamentally, at least in more open-ended philosophy of science communities, isn’t a ghost in a machine. It’s not an epiphenomenon. It is a fundamental dimension of matter itself.  And in a theological context, its spirit become flesh ever more fully. It is the content, matter is the content of spirit that gives it its life, its purpose, and its meaning.

And so, if the universe is evolving, then either God is absent from evolution, which makes God irrelevant, or God is in evolution, ahead of evolution, luring evolution forward toward greater consciousness, greater complexity, greater love. And all of that, in a brief sense, needs to be always held in tandem.  And it’s something that I’m sure we all know, or we’ve all been fed on a steady diet of, but it’s also something that needs to be held as a wager.  It was Teilhard’s wager. He made that clear in his Human Phenomenon. It’s the Center’s wager. We make it clear in almost every offering that we have, at least the ones that Ilia and I give. And it’s our wager, as those of us who lead and deepen this transformative vision of religious consciousness in our time.

And so, Teilhard called this Christogenesis.  This is ongoing incarnation, quite literally. It’s not Christ frozen in dogmatic categories 2,000 years ago. It’s rather the whole, the universe, the one word of God, person, and world becoming more conscious. Becoming more loving. Becoming more complex. All of this is the body of Christ taking form, which means evolution isn’t something that happened. I really do worry in so many different contexts that people still speak about the world as a finished product. But rather, evolution is still happening right now through us. And if we’re going to respond to this moment with any degree of intellectual honesty to climate chaos, and democratic fragility, and existential loneliness, and a whole host of other issues that we didn’t even name, we need a religious consciousness adequate to an evolving cosmos.

And so, modern science, the new scientific story that is often introduced to us, at least here at our Center, has discovered, I think, three principles. And I’m…only emphasizing three, because I think these are the three that capture the essence of the scientific story and reshape religious consciousness. Three principles for how we understand transformation of anything, whether they be galaxies, ecosystems, societies, human persons, consciousness, awareness, reflection, contemplation, sitting in silence, or practice.

The first principle is emergence. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In other words, something really new really arises when elements connect in sufficiently complex ways. So this is what we would say is the law of life. Emergence teaches us that there wasn’t something hidden in the parts from the past, but something genuinely novel that, through great experimentation, great chance, and great intensity, births something incredible.  The universe, therefore, this holistic structure or system is not just a rearrangement of parts of various segregated and disconnected pieces. It’s generating novelty. It’s truly creative.

And so order, as we see and experience it on the level of the human person, and as we see it in the universe in all its great, dazzling complexity held together in this wholeness-seeking pattern, is not an order imposed from the outside.  Given the right conditions, self-organizing systems, or the second principle that flows from emergence, teaches us that energy, life, matter, is a flow. It’s a diversity of elements. It’s an open exchange.  It’s a system that is a spontaneous organization itself that keeps growing into a higher coherence, higher complexity, and higher convergence. 

So if we were to, in one sentence, describe what is the differentiation factor between emergence and self-organizing systems, I would say this. Emergence teaches us that there is novelty in nature, that life itself is creativity.  And self-organizing systems is teaching us that this emergence has a direction. It has a purpose. It has meaning. It has something within it that’s giving us an ethics that can move it forward.

And the third is complexity science.  So transformation, we now know, on any level, doesn’t happen to isolated individuals. There’s nothing isolated about the process at all. There’s nothing independent about the process at all.  Rather, transformation happens within a web of relationship. Relationship itself is the connection, the feedback, and the mutual influence that allows evolution to take place and continue to take place. Another word that describes relationship within a scientific context and within a spirituality of practice would be network.

So, what are the theological implications? Again, we will just name a few, as I’m sure we can think of many more. If the universe is evolving toward greater consciousness through relationship, then salvation, or what happens now, and therefore beyond the grave, is what Eastern traditions call theosis or divinization. 

That understanding, that connection from the now to the after, cannot be individual achievement, prospect or aim. It has to be something that happens between us, among us, and through us. And this is true in terms of the visions we hold, as well as the actions we embody. So personhood itself is evolving, from the autonomous individual.  …Every person is a person in community. And if that’s true, if religion as an energy of life is fundamentally about becoming capable of deeper communion or deepening personhood in relationship, in communion, then securing anything individual, salvation or otherwise, cannot be the modus operandi. It has to be about relationship, and relationship is what changes everything. 

So the center, what we describe as God, is not holding because it was never meant to hold. We are being called into a new coherence, a new way of understanding what we mean by this relationship that is the glue of life, that is the glue of the cosmos. And God, that is the glue of the glue. Or God that is the depth of the depth of everything. In other words, consciousness is what holds everything together, what gives rise to matter, what allows it to take on its form, and God is the depth of it all, allowing it to be in the first place, and therefore taking on more of God’s own life, more understanding, more learning, more self-realization. 

Again, whatever language we want to put to this, as long as we’re emphasizing that God is among us, and …the ultimate life of God is actually deeply affected and cares for what is happening now. So what I want to emphasize about the Christophany groups is not necessarily the discussions themselves, and yet what we discuss profoundly matters. Let me explain this paradox. 

Christophany groups, I think, are fractal organisms. For centuries, religious transformation has quite literally been imagined as a content delivery system. Get the right people, the churches tell us, to believe in the right doctrines, and consciousness will shift. But systems today, thinking today, human persons today, transform, we know by sociological data, when structures themselves change. So what our Christophany groups represent within this new holistic paradigm that’s unique to the Center for Christogenesis represents a new structure of consciousness in religious consciousness itself. And that structure, as the new science calls it, is a fractal. And fractals, again, just in brief, just to give us a sense of this new coherence, are patterns that repeat at every scale, so nothing previously is ever lost, including our identity. Your lungs, your circulatory systems, your nervous systems are all fractals. Because fractals are how complex systems encode and integrate information efficiently and therefore propagate patterns repeatedly.

So traditional religious structures, we understand, at least in a Catholic Christian tradition, and certainly other religious traditions as well, are understood to be hierarchical pyramids, hierarchical structures. We have the Pope.  Beneath the Pope is the cardinals, beneath the cardinals are the archbishops, beneath the archbishops are bishops, beneath the bishops are priests, beneath the priests are deacons, and way at the bottom, almost too insignificant to even name, is the laity. So transformation, in this uniquely religious sense, I think we would all agree, requires that this structure—this top-down approach—change. 

Because, as we know, this is not how effective governance, effective thinking, effective transformation happens. So our Christophany groups are unique, and wonderfully so, in that they contain the whole pattern in a miniature, holistic sense. Each group is a whole within a whole, a fractal within a fractal—not a piece—the whole pattern. So, like a hologram, for those of us who might be familiar with a hologram, every facet of that hologram, or that marble, or that piece of art contains the entire image within it.  And depending upon which way you turn it …the perspective in which  you are looking at it, it takes on a new hue, a new facade, a new way of focus, but nothing is lost, something is gained, something is emphasized, something is brought into a new consciousness by its turn, but it’s a whole in movement. And from each side, each person contributes to that hole in movement, or that growth. The great process philosopher Joseph Bracken would say, it’s the great growth of the cosmic womb. There’s something that continues to grow within, so that it takes on greater consistency and therefore becomes more compelling. 

So, what’s the pattern? Teilhard’s offers us a reliable model by way of his structure of evolved consciousness — what is that in few words? I would say it can be captured in a three-prong sense, or if we were to call this a three-prong stool on which we stand, or on which we continue to advance this vision. First is differentiation. Unity through diversity, not through uniformity. Interiority, depth of creativity or depth of relationship, not just performance. Communion, relational coherence that transcends boundaries. So, when… enough people carry this pattern, something happens at the macro level. Workplaces, churches, environments, experiment with non-hierarchical structures. This is certainly true on the local or the micro level, and if evolution is right and transformation happens first on the local before it happens on the macro, we can extrapolate what we see happening on these lower levels into the higher levels. 

So, in the sense of these environments, these churches, these cultures, whatever, experimenting with these non-hierarchical structures that we’re suggesting, we can say educational systems – schools themselves – and I think of the Center as a school – value questions over answers, or insight over well-defined solutions.  Activism becomes intersectional. What looks like something that might be disconnected on the outside, or experiments that, because they’re experimental, might not appear to be coherent or focused on the outside, are actually single patterns emerging simultaneously at multiple scales, and that is how complex systems shift.

In hierarchical systems, transformation requires institutional approval. In fractal systems, transformation happens through pattern replication. So, the pattern propagates through our presence, and through our ways of thinking about these things, they cannot help but come out in how we act, how we talk, how we move. So, this is revolution not from above, but emergence from within and ahead. I don’t even like to use the language of below, because even depth itself doesn’t necessarily mean below, it means more than, not other than.

This requires a revolutionary integration, something that all of us here, I know, do quite well. So, if nothing else, I’m just reiterating or speaking to the choir. When your group wrestle with, say, Teilhard’s notion of God as the within of things, the within of evolution, the discussion itself changes. Over time, how people understand the physical world, because environmentalism is about honoring everything, because everything has a divine depth. Matter itself is holy, because matter itself is the face of the divine. The scientist, I think, is the mystic, because the scientist, even before the theologian, is the first to see the face of God. The scientist is the one who grapples intimately with that matter. And so has the powerful potential to see the luminosity of what is leading them to a new discovery or a new insight. That’s not to say we don’t, or anybody here has not, it’s just to say that we want to value both sides, science and religion, as an interdependent way of seeing the one world, the one whole, you and I, as comprehensively and as clearly as possible.

And in this way, because technology is now the new level of the evolutionary horizon, technology is very much part of this consciousness, part of the cosmic whole itself awakening to itself, becoming more self-aware through this greater interconnected stream and web of life. So when our groups, the Christophany groups, the Center for Christogenesis, anyone going deeper into this vision, explores evolution’s direction that that self-organizing system teaches us about emergence, that directionality, that purpose, what we would call Omega, that understanding then generates not despair or merely optimism, but hope rooted in cosmology; hope that there will be something more, provided we contribute to its ongoing development, its ongoing maturation, and its ongoing movement toward the fullness of love. 

Evolutionary theology, when it truly meets evolutionary community, who we are – that’s when transformation becomes unstoppable, becomes so compelling that it is literally the oxygen without which we cannot breathe. The anthropologist, the great 20^th-century anthropologist Margaret Mead offers us great, great hope, just like Teilhard. Never doubt that a small group of any size, as long as it be thoughtful and committed, can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.  And there’s another great adage that is not attributed to any individual source, but it goes something like this to complement Mead’s observation. If the people will lead, eventually the leaders will follow. Evolution really does happen at the local level.

And when it’s done with seriousness, conviction, and …with a consciousness that can meet the consciousness of the whole, it has macrocosmic consequences. So it all comes down to networks, relationships, fractal organisms animated by an evolutionary vision large enough to live by. And that vision is calling us to be incubators of transformation.  And so I consider this to be a practical mysticism, and Teilhard would use the language, mysticism of action.

There are four core practices I think any of us who are doing the work of Christogenesis should be keeping in our minds. And these are always subject to shift, and this language is not necessarily important, as long as the synergy of what’s happening here, in fact, is in play. 

1. So the first is holding space. Always maintaining the conditions necessary for emergence to continue to take place.
2. Deep attentive listening. Attending to real insights, and not just a repetitive stream of old cosmology or old God ideas. While those ideas might be true and good and necessary as the raw material out of which insights to emerge, the process of truly identifying and naming an insight is important for taking that step into transformation.
3. Third, pattern recognition. Noticing when new consciousness actually breaks through, when there is something that’s so, so novel and so creative that it captures our imagination, confounds the heart, and stirs the waters of thought. Very important. 
4. Gentle provocation, really probing the depths of what has yet to be born. This is perhaps the centerpiece, or the center of the centers that holds the other three dimensions together. What I call gentle provocation, increasing people’s or the group’s tolerance for complexity, making sure that everybody is open to being an incubator of transformation, and …open to crossing that threshold to a new horizon of insight, or a new horizon of God consciousness, God awareness.

And so, I would like to start concluding now, because I wanted to make this brief for discussion. Let’s return to the beginning, we are indeed living in dark times that can get us down. But these, I think, if put into a larger evolutionary frame of billions of years, these dark times could also be necessarily understood as a liminal space, or the space between Holy Saturday and resurrection. Death and new life. The place where something creative and unimaginably rich is still waiting to be born. So, in this darkness, or the place where the great prophet Isaiah says, we walk first to see and experience a great light.

Each Christophany group is the campfire. It’s where we gather as a community of Christogenesis, where we tend the flame, where we illuminate that small fractal of our forestry, of cosmology, or our greenery,

our life-giving fodder of life within the cosmos. But we know fire calls to fire. And when enough fire burns, when true complexity, emergence, the will to communion is distributed across the whole landscape, the forest glows but is not destroyed. And that’s Christogenesis. Not in an institutional sense, but a network sense, a network of lights, collectively illuminating the world.

So I consider all of us here who are about this business to have an ontological vocation, a vocation of a new framework, a new way of being in the world, a place where we hold out space for doubt, because that very holding out of space for doubt is, in fact, demonstrating what the cosmos, what the evolutionary process has taught us from the beginning, that faith is trust in the process itself. And when we connect with others in our groups, outside of our groups, in our churches, wherever, we’re strengthening the network of life that just might save us.

Within that ontological vocation, we become evolutionary artists, where the canvas is consciousness. The paint is human encounter; the frame is the cosmos waking up to itself. And certainly, indeed, as evolutionary teachers, as we all are, transformation, we know, we must be convinced of, happens through connection, happens through relationship, happens through feedback, happens through our being fractals, and within it all, through love, making itself more transparent. 

So thank you for doing your part to tend the fire, sharing your light, and trusting the network. And with that, I have a series of discussion questions that I think will really help us frame where we are and where we probably should go, but I want your input, too. I don’t want to be domineering by any stretch, but I really do want us all to be on the same page here, because I think this is vitally important. So here are three questions that I’ll throw out, and if you could just maybe take a word or two of note.

1. On Christogenesis as lived reality:   when have you witnessed someone becoming more capable:  more able to hold paradox, stay present across difference, or trust emergence?  What does this reveal about how Christogenesis actually unfolds?
2. On your group as a fractal node:  If your Christophany Group is meant to embody and spread the pattern of evolved consciousness (differentiation-interiority-communion), where is your group succeeding at this, and where is it being called to grow?  What would it mean for your group to take its role in this evolutionary network more seriously?
3. On propagating the vision:  The Center exists to catalyze a shift in religious consciousness adequate to our evolutionary moment.  What is your group discovering – theologically and relationally – that must spread to other groups, other communities, the wider culture?  What are you learning that the world desperately needs?

As we go through these, I can stop sharing my screen and we could come together. The first is specifically focused on Christogenesis as a lived reality. So, in your individual group, or as a facilitator, or as someone who’s observed these …groups at large in the world coming into a greater coherence. When have you witnessed someone becoming more capable, more able to hold paradox, stay present across difference, or trust emergence? What does this reveal about Christogenesis – How it actually unfolds in life? How it actually takes on flesh in a concrete sense?

Number two, focusing on the fractal that falls from the theological framework of Christogenesis. If your Christophany group is truly intended and meant to embody and spread the pattern of evolved consciousness – that differentiation, interior communion, I noted, where is your group, do you think, succeeding at this, and where is it being called to grow?  What would it mean for your group to take its role in this evolutionary network more seriously? Because we all have more to learn, we all have more to do in order to mature in this consciousness, this stream of life. And as we mature in this stream of life, we talk about propagating the vision. So the center, as we know, exists to catalyze a shift in religious consciousness adequate to our evolutionary moment, which means that that transformation expands as our understanding of evolution and emergence expands. So, what is your particular group discovering, theologically and relationally, that you think must become more infectious — must infiltrate other communities, with which we’re familiar, or the wider culture, if we really want to shoot for the stars, because I think we do. We’re very ambitious people. 

And finally, what are you learning that the world desperately needs, and how do you think your group can do its part to offer that need?  Again, nothing is small here, even if it seems small. Everything has cosmic ripple effects. The great physicist David Bohm said, pick a flower, you move the farthest star, to describe the phenomenon of quantum entanglement. And so, I really do believe that that is true even of us here, if not more so.

So with that, I’d like to stop sharing my screen, unless somebody wants to view these for another minute or so. I don’t want to be too premature here. …I would just invite us to have this discussion or even mention things that might be tangential to those questions that you want to bring forward, or ask me something, that’s fine. I just really want to make sure we’re all kind of thinking along the same lines, so we could really allow this vision to take root and grow. It takes time, but you folks are the arms, legs, and minds of everything that we’re about, and you’re deeply valued. I really wanted to take this time with you to make sure that you know that, and that you feel empowered to go forward with that as a conviction.

Claire’s closing reflection:

And so, I invite each of you to just sit in some quiet for a moment. 
And I invite you into reverence and gratitude 
for what has been offered here today —
what we have offered and received from one another 
in our words through our attentive listening 
and through the sheer power of loving presence. 
And finally, to reverence, with a sense of gratitude 
for what has arisen and what you have received from within yourself.

What thoughts have been stimulated
 – a word or a phrase that will continue to engage you?
Perhaps a sense of energy or enlightenment.
Perhaps the gift of a sense of belonging.
And then the questions that linger.
The questions that keep us engaged; 
that draw you tonight, as you sleep, 
tomorrow, and many days ahead as you continue.
And as we enter the last few days of Advent.
I offer this simple prayer.

May we encounter the Christ who is at home in all of the textures of this world.
In the dust that formed us.
In the waters that cradle us.
And the landscapes that hold our stories.
May God meet you in the artistry of creation.
In shorelines, and sidewalks, and sky.
In wind-caught stone and water-worn sculpture.
May this season teach us that God’s nearness is not abstract.
But as close as the ground beneath our feet, and the breath within our lungs.
And may the God that inhabits all creation. 
Draw us into deeper love.
for this world, and for one another.
For all of us.

Amen.

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