Evolution

Our spiritual life should not be boring. If it is, perhaps we are standing on the sidelines of our journey. Science has shown us that our world has been evolving for aeons and our universe is bursting forth in a continuous expansion. How about us?

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin can light a fire in us. He wasn’t afraid of what science was revealing. Science, he said, reveals God to us. For him, evolution was the heart of spiritual life, and our job to lovingly grow and expand.  

“The heart of Teilhard de Chardin’s spirituality is truly linked to the transfiguration of ordinary life into an ardent adventure of the spirit,” writes Ursula King. “As Teilhard understood evolution as an increasing process of spiritualization, he was particularly interested in the awakening and rise of the spirit in the world.” 

Theologian Ilia Delio further summarizes: “Christians are not conscious of their divine responsibilities, he claimed, but see Christian life as a series of observances and obligations, not the realization of the soul’s immense power. This leads to a static Christianity….. Christians lose consciousness of their divine responsibility, which, in his view, is to evolve. Evolution, he said, is what Christianity is about.”

Teilhard saw Christ as cosmic and he described an Omega point of convergence where the spirit is moving the whole of creation. “Whereas traditional theology postulates God as the cause of all things,” Delio writes, “Teilhard postulates God as the goal toward which all things are moving. He described the God of the future, the God “up ahead,” as the ultimate force of attraction for the universe, drawing the universe toward intensification of complexity and new creation.”

Our individual journeys are not separate from this magnetic divine pull toward wholeness. To the contrary. We are being summoned to the great work. Teilhard wrote: “The only true happiness is… the happiness of growth and movement. Do we want to be happy, as the world is happy, and with the world? Then we must let the tired and the pessimists lag behind. We must let the hedonists take their homely ease, lounging on the grassy slope, while we ourselves boldly join the group of those who are ready to dare to climb to the topmost peak. Press on!”

In his brilliant and potent Mass on the World, he prayed: “Once upon a time men took into your temple the first fruits of their harvests, the flower of their flocks. But the offering you really want, the offering you mysteriously need every day to appease your hunger, to slake your thirst is nothing less than the growth of the world borne ever onward in the stream of universal becoming.”

What would it mean for us to consciously join the journey?

Teilhard and King quotes are from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Writings Selected with and Introduction by Ursula King.

Ilia Delio quotes are from her book Emergent Christ.

Meditation

We enter a meditation on evolution, inspired by Teilhard de Chardin. We invite Christ the Evolver to guide our practice. Take some time to get centered. Let go of the mental churn. Come home to the heart where matter and spirit meet in a centre point within you.

Our spiritual lives should not be boring. We are in an evolving world and Christ is an evolver. He calls us like he did to Peter on the water, to take bold steps with courage and faith. 

When we look at our own evolution in the spiritual context we see that it’s not about chasing after status or possessions; it’s about the ‘spiritualization’ of our being and our world, the awakening of love. Teilhard said “God is at work within life.” We are all moving toward Omega in an ardent adventure of the spirit. We’re being summoned to the great work of creating wholeness.

“Let the tired and the pessimists lag behind,” he said. “Let the hedonists take their homely ease, lounging on the grassy slope, while we ourselves boldly join the group of those who are ready to dare to climb to the topmost peak. Press on!”

We enter silence with a ‘yes’ to our own evolution, a willingness for transformation and for full participation in the transformation of the world. We enter silence now, knowing that silence makes space for deep guidance. Teilhard said: “The deeper I descend into myself, the more I find God at the heart of my being.” We descend into ourselves.

[Silence]

We finish with a poem by David Whyte. We listen to this poem in the context of the spiritual journey:

Just beyond yourself.
It’s where you need to be.
Half a step into self-forgetting
and the rest restored by what you’ll meet.
There is a road always beckoning.

When you see the two sides of it 
closing together at that far horizon
and deep in the foundations
of your own heart 
at exactly the same time,
that’s how you know it’s the road
you have to follow.

That’s how you know 
it’s where you have to go.
That’s how you know
you have to go.
That’s how you know.
Just beyond yourself,
it’s where you need to be.

Amen.