Throughout my life, by means of my life,

the world has little by little caught fire in my sight until,

aflame all around me, it has become almost luminous from within.

Such has been my experience in contact with the Earth.

The diaphany of the Divine at the heart of the universe on fire.

Teilhard de Chardin in The Divine Milieu

When a visionary scientist, a mystic, a priest, sees luminous fire at the heart of the universe, drawing us into a unity of love, how is his life’s purpose altered? If that man, though forbidden to teach, writes what he has come to understand, to cherish, ensuring that his writings survive after his death, how might his spiritual vision sustain our hope and transform our darkness at this moment in the history of the earth, nearly ninety years after his death? For that is the gift that Teilhard de Chardin left us when he died on Easter Sunday, 1955.

“One of Teilhard’s greatest contributions to modern religious thought is his conception of reality as composed of both spirit and matter.” Mary Evelyn Tucker, in her Foreword to Teilhard de Chardin, A Book of Hours, (edited by Kathleen Deignan, cnd, and Libby Osgood, cnd, Orbis Press, Maryknoll, New York, 2022)

Writing of Teilhard’s insights on the implications of this view of reality, Tucker offers us foundation stones for a 21^st century spirituality. Teilhard saw that this ”interior and numinous dimension of reality” present from the inception of the universe, “radically alters our perspective of matter itself which for (Teilhard) was not dead and inert but dynamic and evolving.” It calls us to shift our religious quest from ”otherworldly goals such as personal salvation after death,” redirecting our vision to ”what is close at hand and yet coextensive with the birth of the universe itself.”

This “numinous reality that infuses matter brings us face-to-face with the immanence of the divine in all things.” This is cosmic spirituality. Its implications are worth considering…

For Teilhard, without this presence in matter of an interior aspect, “consciousness could not emerge in the human” for the human emerges from all that preceded us since the birth of the universe. As Tucker writes: “To understand that all reality from the tiniest atom to the entire Earth community is composed of a within and a without gives us a very different perspective on our universe and our spiritual journey.”

It was Teilhard’s belief that understanding this spiritual immanence in the depth of matter as part of “a dynamic evolutionary perspective” would lead humans to “appreciate the fundamental unity of life.” As the discoveries of science evoke a sense of unity, our collective imagination is awakening to a sense of the cosmos, and of the Earth as alive, even as they have been so for millennia in the imaginations of indigenous peoples.

Teilhard himself writes: “The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as man found himself facing the forest, the sea and the stars. And since then, we find evidence of it in all our experience of the great and unbounded: in art, in poetry, in religion. Through it we react to the world a whole as with our eyes to the light.” (Human Energy, translation J.M. Cohen, New York, Harcourt Bruce Jovanovich, 1971, 82.)

As Tucker points out, “In terms of cosmic perspective…Teilhard offers a vision of unity that resituates the human in the whole evolutionary journey. It provides a means of reciprocity and reverence with the universe and Earth….Our capacity for communication with nature is greatly enlarged and revitalized when we recognize its essential connectedness with ourselves.”

What effect does this have on contemporary spirituality? Tucker responds: “If spirit and matter are the dynamics of evolution, we have a radically new perspective for situating the whole idea of purpose.” Human emergence, far from a random event, is “intrinsically linked to the evolution of spirit and matter in the universe as a whole.”

Moreover, “we are at a moment in history when we are taking responsibility for guiding this evolutionary process in a sympathetic awareness of its profound connection to ourselves.”

Tucker sees that Teilhard invites us “to embody this explicit consciousness of being an atom or a citizen of the universe.”

Now we are called to recognize the divine as “present and acting in the world.” We move “to seeing human lives and destinies intertwined in evolution.” We begin “to discover an ordering principle (LOGOS) at the heart of all matter.”

The effect of this new insight, writes Tucker, is to reorient our spiritual goals “from a quest toward otherworldly perfection and goodness to a quest toward alignment with the dynamic evolutionary processes close at hand. Our spiritual purpose is expanded to embrace and to understand both four and a half billion years of Earth history and the contemporary environmental challenges to the planet and the evolution of its life forms.”