Today's Thoughts

Following a long and anguished night wherein the thoughts of the chaos in our world and the horrors of the jihadist’s movement robbed me of sleep, midway through this day I felt the need to write in my prayer journal.  Without thought or planning, these words spilled across the pages:

I’ve said “God doesn’t need us, but we need God” . . . what I mean by that is that we NEED God at the most basic level—to exist at all; the breath we need every second in order to continue to live is there, supplied for us and we need do nothing but breath the oxygen our body requires.  Who or what is God?  We can’t know, the Creator of the Universe is so beyond knowing to our limited human intelligence . . . but life IS, we experience it, and all that is needed for life’s continuance is there . . . we did nothing to have it be, yet its reality is undeniable.   I choose to say it is God’s gift to us—being is a gift of God!  Who or what is God?  I don’t, I can’t know—but I can know I have life and it is sustained minute by minute by all that surrounds me; and that IS God because no human action gave nor gives it being . . . the Mystery that is, is my God that gives life and all that is needed for its continuation.  Mystery God choses to share that with me and invites me to be part of it and even to contribute to it if I so choose.  What I choose is what I have the opportunity to offer . . . God doesn’t NEED my offering, but I can add to God’s being by giving of myself in the effort to further the good—for the good IS God.

Part of a Greater Whole

I want to expand on a comment made to the 7^th of my Teilhard series (10-1-15).  It reads:  “Yes, we are co-creators with God.  Not many people grasp that.  We create our own reality, which gives us the opportunity to create something different if we don’t like what we did the first time.”

As stated, that seems to be addressing our individuality, but beyond that Teilhard is asking us to realize we are also creating as part of a greater whole.  Our world is one interdependent, interacting system which functions for better or worse by the choices we collectively make.  Here too we can choose something different if we don’t like what we are faced with.  Human choices determine the direction of the world’s progress.  Our exploration in space has shown us what is hard to grasp from our individual perspectives—we are one whole interacting system and when one part is injured or harmed the whole suffers from the damage.  Until we realize that, we close our eyes to the damage that occurs beyond the circle of our own interests.

During the early part of WWII, history tells us that initially, as Hitler invaded one European country after another, we in America adopted a policy of non-involvement . . . until Pearl Harbor was bombed, then the entire nation rallied to a total involvement as never seen before.  Men women and children were committed to fighting the ‘scourge’ of Nazism—men joined the services, women went to work in defense plants and school children sold defense stamps and war bonds while pulling wagons from house to house to collect useful things for the war effort.  When America united with allied forces that common cause led to victory—the scourge was defeated and annihilated.  That historical event demonstrates what is possible from united effort.

There is another scourge now threatening the very core of civilized society!  The jihad movement has thrown the Middle East into turmoil; millions of people are fleeing the destruction, many drowning at sea trying to escape in unsafe boats after paying their life-savings to human traffickers.  The hordes of refugees that make it to safety are met with anger and resistance because their huge numbers strain the resources of the countries to which they flee.

This is not a local problem, not a nation’s problem, not a regional problem, this is a global problem and the world must address it as such!

Our world is faced with a multi-headed monster . . . a rogue culture that has as its goal, the annihilation of civilization; a culture which delights in sheer destruction and seeks to eliminate freely chosen self-government so as to install its form of enslavement.  The many-headed monster shows itself under different names but its body is jihad—reveling in terrorism and malhuman acts.  TV has shown us their treatment of dissenters: from flying passenger planes into the twin towers, to deaths by stoning, beheading and mass executions.  Girls are forbidden education and hundreds have been abducted and sold as ‘wives’ into sexual slavery.  Boys are narrowly educated by rote memorization of religious treatises.  Jihadists carry out killing of whole villages of noncombatants.  The looting of artistic treasures helps support their activities and they gleefully destroy irreplaceable ancient cultural

artifacts simply to show distain for other cultures and values.  All their actions defy humanitarian values.  Jihad is a cancer on this planet; the civilized world must unite against all forms of its expression.  In this scourge, pure evil is once again threatening civilization.  It is critical that we see our planet as one whole interacting system and give support to the beleaguered parts of this greater whole that is our home.  The sum or our choices will determine the shape of our future.

Hunter or Hunted?

Some years ago I wrote an extensive essay 'In Support of Teilhard de Chardin'.  It was during the time when the Catholic Church officially resisted his work.  I concluded that essay with this poem and now follow up my Teilhard series with it.

Man, the Hunter or the Hunted? 

Man craves the certainty of life’s meaning

            but this instinct of soul knows no satisfaction.

The hunger for Truth, the thirst for Knowledge—

            aspects of our need for certainty of meaning.

We can run from it, try to ignore it,

            or seek to appease it in filling our minds with facts

But behind all our actions and beneath whatever facade we construct

            is that restless search for certainty of meaning.

We are born to reason.  Freely and without asking for it

            this great gift is given—no, thrust upon us.

Before this reason our task is to assemble evidence—

            evidence which requires deduction and assumption.

Even in the face of certainty, reason refuses acceptance

            until accompanied by evidence with which to evaluate and conclude;

Thus ever with reason, we must try to appease our yearning for certainty

            for reason is born with the human soul.

Yet meaning comes not from man, but outside and beyond.

            All being, from atoms to galaxies, bespeaks order.

The very existence of order demands the attention of reason—

            uninvited and unavoidable, meaning seeks man.

The order—undiscerningly, silently, insistently—simply by being

            pursues and encircles man, until he finds it;

And in the search wherein the hunter is hunted

            it is required that one find his origins and chart his destiny.

But meaning is too vast—it implies a total, One Whole;

            endless, yet around and back upon itself.

Existence draws a horizon so man sees a flat world—

            and seeing he believes; yet something won’t permit him to rest

So he is driven to reach beyond the horizon

            to complete the circle he cannot see, and to know!

All the time thinking that he, man,

            has embarked upon a search of his own choosing.

Such is man’s eternal destiny—to seek meaning.

            Throughout time, men pursue what no one man can find.

Armored with faith and doing battle with reason—

            man seeks the hidden meaning which from the beginning enveloped him.

He must conquer the world and embrace the universe

            to deduct the certainty which is already there.

Life . . . the struggle to expand men and unify man

            that in totality Man and Meaning become One.

Teilhard Series - 7th

In this, the seventh and final of my Teilhard series, I focus on the most central of his themes—Love

            God is Love=Love is God

            Love is the energy of existence

            Love is the affinity of being-to-being

We have yet to understand love.  The contemporary world has misled us with overly sentimentalized, romanticized versions of love or has falsely applied love’s name to self-gratification.  We are closer to love’s reality at the joy of sharing experiences, thoughts and goals with another, of reaching out to give comfort, of working cooperatively toward a ‘good’ that is beyond self-interest and of saying ‘Amen’ to the wonder of creation.

Love is a ‘within’ quality—of the subjective realm—it cannot be weighed and measured, only experienced and so in the world of science it has no place and is as ill-defined as consciousness (of which it is a part).

Teilhard invites us to regard the ‘within’ as having supreme value, only it can awaken us to that new dimension to which the human is being called.  We are not just another species on an equal plane with all others.  We are more than bone and muscle and organs; with fully matured consciousness and the awareness of love, we are participants in the creative process.  We have been charged with shepherding our earth and creating our world. What we create is dependent upon our ability to realize our interconnectedness to this singular whole web of life.

Evolution begins with attraction and union; there follows a process of development.  That development (whether of species or individual) follows the law of complexity-consciousness, unfolding the pre-ordained possibilities of increased abilities and freedom.  Throughout the process, movement is toward greater being.

Looking back to the earliest and simplest level we see only a mysterious attraction propelling atoms to cluster and form molecules, then molecules joining to form cells.  Teilhard has stated that nothing comes to be in final form that had not pre-existed in an obscure and primordial way—there is a striving in coming to be.  Here we consider that attraction and union appears to be the driving force (energy) of the evolutionary process.  Teilhard states “The affinity of being with being . . . is a general property of all of life and as such it embraces . . . all forms successively adopted by organized matter . . .”; a complex concept which means ‘attraction to wholeness is everywhere in everything.’  That attraction that calls subatomic particles of protons, electrons and neutrons to join and form atoms, then atoms to join together to form molecules and molecules to cluster to form cells—that primitive attraction, over millions of years, came to be realized in ‘hominized’ form (human consciousness) as love—and continues to draw us together to realize our interconnectedness as part of our mandate to build a sustainable world.  Teilhard’s understanding of evolution and his vision of its trajectory gives hope to the future.

I conclude with one of Teilhard’s best-known quotes:

“Some day after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness—for God—the energies of love.  And then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”

A Warning ?

I deviate from my series distilling Teilhard’s concepts to inject some impassioned thoughts that interrupted my reading as I searched through his books.  He was a visionary who weaves together the strands of human knowledge that arise from two seemingly disparate ways to understand life and the world—science explores the material aspect of being to understand function, religion searches the spiritual dimension to seek meaning—Teilhard sees they are not disparate, but rather interdependent.  What follows are my thoughts combining with his wisdom.

            God doesn’t need us—

            there is a vast universe God is nurturing—

            if this tiny planet self-destructs

            its disappearance will hardly be disruptive . . .

            its loss can be easily compensated for.

            But we need God—

            the unknown God beyond our understanding

            who gives order and balance to the evolving universe.

            A God who calls forth human reason and compassion

            inviting our creative participation in a sustainable world.

            A God who calls forth love and morality

            thus enabling life to flourish.

            There are uncountable galaxies and planets

            beyond our knowing—

            but what we do know of

            is that which we have been given to shepherd—

            this terra firma upon which we stand;

            it alone provides for our continuation . . .

            its fate depends upon us and our choices.

            Only by our active recognition

            of need for the order and balance

            which is represented by a loving God

            who calls us to acknowledge our interdependence

            can we survive our individual selfishness.

Deuteronomy 30:19—“This day I call the heavens and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses.  Now choose life, so that you and your children may live . . . “     (NIV)

             

Teilhard Series - 5th

What is evolution?  Some say it is the scientific theory that explains how species became what they are through changes over long periods of time.  Some say it is the ‘crazy idea’ that claims our most distant ancestors were apes.  Others say it is an idea expounded by atheists to prove there is no God.  And still others say it is a lie spawned by the devil to lead people astray.  A dictionary describes evolution as the gradual development of something, especially from simple to complex form.

Darwin’s explanation of evolution did not include pattern, direction and goal; that is what Teilhard’s work shows us.  From atoms clustering to form molecules, then cells; to human consciousness continually building to greater awareness, there is movement toward increasing complexity.  The goal is realization of the interconnectedness of all that exists.

Although evolution is implicit in all of Teilhard’s writing, he actually uses the word sparingly.  As a scientist he worked with the data that discloses the pattern that is hidden behind all life-struggles at all stages: the simple moves to the complex and so opens to new and greater possibilities.

            Evolution is the underlying principle of all that is.

Nothing in the known world materializes in a ‘poof’ from nothing; development comes through gradual change programmed in the pre-existing state that holds the blueprint for the final product.  Throughout Teilhard’s life-long study of development in all aspects he came to realize that everything unfolds in a direction from simple to complex that expands possibilities for the organism evolving.  Within the earliest stage of the simplest form there exists the possibilities of the ultimate form . . . within the acorn is the potential oak tree, within the egg is the potential bird, within the DNA is the blueprint of the person, and within the energy leading to the explosion of the ‘big bang’ was the universe that came to be.  There is direction: movement is always forward from simple to complex.  We can search all the way back to the ‘primordial soup’ wherein we see and recognize a pattern emerging: elements with affinity join to form new units.  As pointed out in my last blog, our material world took shape through the building of layer upon layer moving from the inorganic foundation to developing the layers necessary to support the emergence of life, then the layer of teeming life forms, and ultimately life that birthed thought which enables humans to discover, evaluate and create. 

            Evolution is the name for the process by which all comes to be.

Even thinking is an evolving process.  We have discovered so much about how our world works!  How do we discover what we know?  By beginning with the simple and expanding to the complex.  We see and wonder, we ask questions and follow leads; we have new thoughts and ideas and test them against what we understand from previous discoveries . . . and if the new discovery contradicts what we thought we knew we re-define our knowledge.  All that thinking, analyzing and concluding takes place in a realm that is not material.  Our ability to think and reason is a quality of our being—a unique human quality.  In the modern world we’ve come to over-value the material—the ‘things’ of life that can be weighed and measured—but we take for granted and overlook the non-material, yet it is with those non-material qualities we have changed the earth we occupy.

Teilhard de Chardin calls us to consider the non-material realm of our existence that he calls the ‘within’ of things, and he does so by study of the material substances that he calls the ‘without’ of things.  He maintains “the internal aspect of things as well as the external aspect of the world [need] be taken into account.” He was a respected scientist devoted to the study of science but also a Jesuit—a man of faith.  He believed in evolution and believed in God as the author of the process.  He saw no conflict between them.  The world has order and is intelligible, that bespeaks design by an intelligent source.

Not a random happenstance; Teilhard sees meaningful order in life.  We see all of nature as balanced and purposeful.  The earth and sky provides conditions for trees and plants to produce their yield; all living creatures are provided with the means necessary to develop and flourish.  When given the freedom to exist in their environment there is a natural balance between predator and prey and each species instinctively knows how to self-protect and seek appropriate shelter and sustenance.

Only the human, gifted with intelligence, has the ability to alter the course of nature . . . and/or to disrupt it so as to threaten the planet’s very existence.  That quality—intelligence—must have a better purpose!  It will be discovered when humanity comes to truly recognize that all of life is interconnected—with that realization we will ‘learn to think in a new way’.