We’ve come to the Stillpoint House of Prayer to honour the early November Feast of Samhain: the Celtic New Year. Eight women friends who’ve been gathering since the Summer Solstice of 2023 to celebrate the Earth Festivals, our gatherings follow a pattern, weaving poetry, music, dance, and ancient story. We share experiences of joy, growing edges, challenges leading to a ritual which allows us to ground the focus of each festival in our bodies, our hearts, our souls.

On the second day of our gathering, November 6^th, we waken to a pall of darkness as news of US Election results creeps into our awareness. We continue with our plans for the day, reflecting on inner light, on the wisdom of our crone years, on our preparations for the ritual when we shall place in the Cauldron of the Cailleach whatever in our lives is raw and unpalatable, requiring transformation through water and fire.

As we await the coming of darkness, our mood is shifting. Perhaps the day’s late autumn warmth, the way the river shines silver in the waning light, or maybe the glowing crescent of the rising moon…. Reminders of the beauty on the planet restore calmness. One of the women offers to read something called “Storm on the Lake” from the writings of Teilhard de Chardin:

At every moment the vast and horrible Thing breaks in upon us through the crevices and invades our precarious dwelling-place, that Thing we try so hard to forget but which is always there, separated from us only by thin dividing walls: fire, pestilence, earthquake, storm, the unleashing of dark moral forces, all these sweep away ruthlessly, in an instant, what we had laboured with mind and heart to build up and make beautiful..…

Lord God… lest I succumb to the temptation to curse the universe, and the Maker of the universe, teach me to adore it by seeing you hidden within it….If only we will it to be so, the immense and sombre Thing, the spectre, the tempest—is you.

“It is I, fear not.”(Mark 6:50; Luke 24:36). All things in life that fill us with dread, all that filled your own heart with dismay in the garden of agony: all, in the last resort, are… appearances, the matter, of one and the same sacrament.

Returning home from our Samhain Retreat, I search among Teilhard’s teachings for further light. In my library, I find the book I seek: Teilhard to Omega Ilia Delio, ed. (Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY, 2014) In an essay by John Haught, “Teilhard de Chardin: Theology for an Unfinished Universe”, words leap out at me: “For Teilhard, autumn rather than spring was the happiest time of year.” Intrigued, I read on: “It is almost as though the shedding of leaves opened his soul to the limitless space of the up-ahead and the not-yet, liberating him from the siren charms of terrestrial spring and summer.”

A scientist, a mystic, rather than a theologian, Teilhard deplored the way that theology continued to reflect on God as though the scientific fact of a still –emerging universe was either unknown or irrelevant. Almost seventy years after Teilhard’s death, theologians are still engaged in the work of re-imagining a God who calls us forward into an as-yet-unknown reality. And yet, even a limited grasp, a glimpse, of what Teilhard saw of the “up- ahead and the not-yet” is enough to inspire hope.

Neither scientist nor theologian, I am a storyteller. I know how a change in the story has power to alter and illuminate our lives. Changing the story that once shaped our lives changes everything. If we live in a story of a completed universe where once upon a perfect time our first parents, ecstatically happy in a garden of unimaginable beauty, destroyed everything by sin, what have we to hope for? The best is already irretrievably lost. Under sentence of their guilt we can only struggle through our lives, seeking forgiveness, trusting in redemption, saved only at a terrible cost to the One who came to suffer and die for us. The suffering around us still speaks to us of punishment for that first sin, burdening us with the effort of continuing to pay for it with our lives. Despair and guilt are constant companions. Hope in that story rests in release from the suffering through death.

Yet, if we live the story as Teilhard saw it, seeing ourselves in an unfinished universe that is still coming into being, everything changes. In a cosmos that is still a work in progress, we are called to be co-creators, moving with the universe into a future filled with hope. Our human hearts long for joy. The possibility that there could be peace, reconciliation, compassion, mercy and justice to an increasing degree on our planet is a profound incentive for us to work with all our energy for the growth of these values. The call to co-create in an unfinished universe broadens and deepens our responsibility:

The Love that rules the stars will now have to be seen as embracing two hundred billion galaxies, a cosmic epic of fourteen billion years’ duration, and perhaps even a multiverse. Our thoughts about Christ and redemption will have to extend over the full breadth of cosmic time and space. (Haught, 13)

Haught believes that “if hope is to have wings and life to have zest,” we need a new theological vision that “opens up a new future for the world.” For Teilhard that future was convergence into God. His hope was founded in the future for he grasped the evolutionary truth that the past has been an increasing complexity of life endowed with “spirit”.

Teilhard saw God as creating the world by drawing it from up ahead, so that the really real is to be sought in the not yet. And this means that:

The question of suffering, while still intractable, opens up a new horizon of hope when viewed in terms of an unfinished and hence still unperfected universe. (19)

Haught believes that the concept of an unfinished universe can strengthen hope and love:

…the fullest release of human love is realistically possible only if the created world still has possibilities that have never before been realized….Only if the beloved still has a future can there be an unreserved commitment to the practice of charity, justice and compassion. (19)

We live today on the edge of planet-wide climate disaster. In the midst of recent ravages by hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and droughts, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said that Earth is crying out to us, “but we are not listening.”

Working together communally, nationally, and internationally we can face this moment with courage. The path has been set before us by scientists, by leaders in the ecological movement, by writers and thinkers who have known what is coming. If we are appalled by the failures of international organizations and governments, we can still do our part, creating sanity within our own circles.

The sacred season that follows Samhain, the feminine womb-time of darkness, is the time of the Cailleach, the Ancient Crone, the dark mother who calls on us to change our ways, to turn away from destructive behaviours that harm our planet and all that lives within and upon her. It is the season of the great cauldron of the Cailleach where the unpalatable attitudes and activities that are endangering life are to be transformed. Teilhard teaches us to see with clarity that even in this crisis we are being drawn forward by the Love that is up ahead in a future that awaits us. Partnered and empowered for this work, we place in the Cauldron of the Cailleach our despair, embracing the hope we need to do what we must.

We live in a universe where everything that exists shines “like a crystal lamp illumined from within”, as we saw in our earlier reflections on “Teilhard and the New Spirituality” (From Teilhard to Omega edited by Ilia Delio, Orbis Books, Maryknoll NY 2014 Chapter Ten). This reality calls us to respond with wonder, awe, gratitude.

Yet Teilhard believed that much more is required from us. The same essay goes on to describe the way Teilhard saw our involvement in the evolutionary process:

(Teilhard) envisioned the evolutionary process as one moving toward evolution of consciousness and ultimately toward evolution of spirit, from the birth of mind to the birth of the whole Christ. He urged Christians…to risk, get involved, aim toward union with others, for the entire creation is longing for its fulfillment in God. (Delio and Dinges p. 174)

Beyond recognizing evolution, we are called to work towards it in ourselves. This is a spirituality that calls for immersion in the world:

… plunging our hands into the soil of the earth and touching the roots of life….a “mysticism of action,” involvement in the world compenetrated by God. (Teilhard) held that union with God is not withdrawal or separation from the activity of the world but a dedicated, integrated, and sublimated absorption into it. (p.174)

Teilhard understood the Gospel call to “leave all and follow me” meant seeing the Christic presence in the heart of matter, then working to bring that presence into greater fullness.

The world is still being created and it is Christ who is reaching his fulfillment through it….We are to harness the energies of love for the forward movement of evolution toward the fullness of Christ. This means to live from the center of the heart where love grows and to reach out to the world with faith, hope and trust in God’s incarnate presence. (p. 175)

In this new incarnational vision of the relationship between God and the universe, a relationship that spans the whole evolutionary journey leading towards the future, Teilhard offers three fresh perspectives. These are described by Delio and Dinges:

First, his love of matter and spirit is a dual commitment to God and to the world; second, his inclusion of suffering and evil in the forward movement of evolution offers a realistic approach to evil as part of unfolding life; and third, the participation of humans is essential to the process of Christogenesis, that is, the evolution of Christ in the world and the world in Christ. “If we are to remain faithful to the gospel,” he says “we have to adjust its spiritual code to the new shape of the universe….It has become the great work in process of completion which we have to save by saving ourselves”. (p. 175)

Teilhard looked at the earth/ the universe with the eyes of a mystic, with the heart of a lover.

In love with Holy Presence at the deep heart of all that exists, he could echo Rumi’s wonder-filled exclamation: “Is the one I love everywhere?” Through Teilhard’s eyes, we can learn to see what mystic-poet Catherine de Vinck calls “the fire within the fire of all things”. Once we see that fire, we know the call that Teilhard knew to put our hearts at the service of the evolution towards love that is the call of the universe, as well as our personal call within the universal call, for the two are inseparable.

Teilhard shows us that our deepest call is to love, that evolution is advanced by union on every imaginable level of being. And, as another poet, Robert Frost observed: “Earth’s the right place for love: I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”

Teilhard wrote: I merge myself through my heart with the very heart of God….God is, in a sense, at the point of my pen, my pick, my paint-brush, my needle—and my heart and my thought. It is by carrying to its completion the stroke, the line, the stitch I am working on that I shall lay hold on that ultimate end towards which my will at its deepest levels tends. (p. 176)

Nothing that lives on our planet is outside of us. We can no longer accept lines of division between religions, between cultures, between nations, between species. This universe is evolving as one. Our place within it, like Teilhard’s, is to be its eyes of wonder, its heart of love, its allurement toward union. Everything that we do contributes towards that great comingled work of the evolution of the universe, the evolution of ourselves. As we approach the Feast of Christmas, may we choose as our preparation a deeper seeing, a heartfelt listening to the songs of the universe, its joy-filled melodies, its grief-laden cries. This is not a time to look for a new coming of the Holy, but rather a time to seek the “shining of God through creation, the diaphany of God radiating through a world that becomes transparent.” (p.176)

Teilhard invites us to:

… establish ourselves in the divine milieu. There we shall find ourselves where the soul is most deep and where matter is most dense. There we shall discover, where all its beauties flow together, the ultra-vital, the ultra-sensitive, the ultra-active point of the universe. And, at the same time, we shall feel the plenitude of our powers of action and adoration effortlessly ordered within our deepest selves. (Divine Milieu quoted by Delio and Dinges on p.179)

We are each aware that recent decades have brought about a sea change in spirituality. If you are like me, you have been happily swimming through new oceans, enchanted by the brilliantly coloured coral, the exotic fish, the sunlight that filters down into the water, the buoyant feeling of being held in love. For Teilhard, this newness was more than an experience: it was a call birthed out of the discovery that we live within a universe that is, and has been, in a state of continuous evolution. For Teilhard, such a universe reveals a God never glimpsed in a world seen as static, unchanging, complete.

And this God is to be found at the very heart-core of the universe itself. A universe with God at its heart, as its principle of evolution, is holy. Sacred. Entirely so. This was Teilhard’s deepest conviction, the source of his understanding that a new spirituality involved a new way of relating to both God and the universe. Such a God in such a universe requires us as co-creators.

As we continue to explore Teilhard’s thought through reflections on his writings by contemporary theologians in From Teilhard to Omega edited by Ilia DeLio (Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York 2014), we consider this week the essay in Chapter 10 by William D. Dinges and Ilia Delio. In “Teilhard de Chardin and the New Spirituality”, the authors describe the new spirituality that emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century as “diverse, eclectic, multi-cultural, diffused, decentered, and often uncoupled from traditional religious sources, particularly from more hierarchical, orthodox and theistic ones”. Rather than requiring individuals to turn aside from their own development to conform to an authority that is outside themselves, the new spirituality is “more located within the internal control and consciousness of individuals”. Arising from a “complex array of historical, social, and cultural sources”, some of which are outside Western culture, the new spirituality is part of “a contemporary global religious megasynthesis that includes a colonization of the Western mind by Eastern esoteric psychologies, philosophies, and religious traditions.”

This new pluralistic and holistic spirituality, the authors believe, reflects

the subjective turn of modernity and post-modernity; emphasizes feelings, experience and the quest for human authenticity; accentuates human fulfillment in this world; reveres and affirms the cosmos and our belonging to it; finds the sacred in the secular; promotes a recomposed and embodied spirituality; and recognizes the infusion of nature and matter with spirit, consciousness, or life force.

Teilhard, were he to have read these 21^st century words, would, I believe, have nodded his head in agreement. But he would have then added such a depth of passion, beauty and spiritual force that we would, in our turn, have been enchanted, enlivened, empowered by his deep conviction that the discovery of evolution changes everything. Once we accept evolution as the process of unfolding life, the way that new life emerges over deep time, we see that God is at the heart of the universe. To overcome the old divide between earth and heaven, matter and spirit, secular and sacred, Teilhard saw that we must “rid ourselves of the old God of the starry heavens and embrace the God of evolution.”

Teilhard saw the universe as permeated with love in the person of the Risen Christ, towards whom he saw all of life evolving. “Through his penetrating view of the universe, he found Christ present within the entire cosmos, from the least particle of matter to the convergent human community. The whole cosmos is incarnational.”

Teilhard’s is “an embodied perspective that sees human flourishing as embedded in the flourishing of the Earth community in which both are manifestations of the emergent universe story”. In The Divine Milieu, Teilhard wrote: “there is nothing profane here below for those who know how to see.” (DM, 66)

For those who know how to see, all of life is sacred.

Of Paul’s words in his letter to the Colossians, “Before anything was created, (Christ) existed, and he holds all things in unity”, Teilhard writes: “it is impossible for me to read St. Paul without seeing the universal and cosmic domination of the Incarnate Word emerging from his words with dazzling clarity.”

For Teilhard Christ is the evolver in the universe.

The one who is coming to be in evolution through the process of creative union… As Omega, Christ is the one who fills all things and who animates and gathers up all the biological and spiritual energies developed by the universe. Since Christ is Omega, the universe is physically impregnated to the very core of its matter by the influence of his superhuman nature. The material world is holy and sacred. Through grace, the presence of the incarnate Word penetrates everything as a universal element. Everything — every leaf, flower, tree, rabbit, fish, star– is physically “christified”, gathered up by the incarnate Word as nourishment that assimilates, transforms, and divinizes. The world is like a crystal lamp illumined from within by the light of Christ. For those who can see, Christ shines in this diaphanous universe, through the cosmos and in matter.

We immerse ourselves in this glorious sea, seeking the diaphany of God in dolphin, in coral, in squid and shark, each held, like us, in love.

The “piece of iron” of my first days has long been forgotten.

In its place it is the Consistence of the Universe, in the form of Omega Point,

that I now hold, concentrated …into one single indestructible centre,

WHICH I CAN LOVE. (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Heart of Matter, 39)

Teilhard describes his mystical journey as a spiral through which he moves into a deepening reality, visiting, revisiting, five circles that map his journey into the heart of matter and the heart of God (“The Mystical Milieu”, Writings in Time of War, 115-49). We have already explored, with Kathleen Duffy as our travel guide (Teilhard’s Mysticism, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York, 2014), Teilhard’s Circles of Presence, Consistence, Energy and Spirit. Now at the deepest swirl of the spiral we come to his Circle of Person.

Seeking the elusive force that animates the cosmos, Teilhard stepped into the fifth circle, searching for its source. What image might assist? Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus had once allured him but now, as he sought a more universal image, “the figure of Christ and the world began to melt before his eyes into a single vibrant surface (Hymn of the Universe, 42-43). Surrounded by a cosmic tapestry of intricately woven thread, Christ’s face shone with exquisite beauty. Trails of phosphorescence gushed forth and radiated outward toward infinity. The entire universe was vibrant (HU, 43); the cosmos had acquired a nervous system, a circulatory system, a heart. Teilhard was consumed by the fire streaming from this universal center and resolved to go deeper” (Teilhard’s Mysticism, 110).

Stepping into the fifth circle, Teilhard encountered a shadowy figure, a feminine presence:

The figure of Sophia emerged from the mists. She was radiant; her facial expression comforting. Teilhard recognized her as “the beauty running through the world….” (Writings in Time of War, 192)…. It is through her power, the power of love, that all things come together. Hidden within the very heart of matter, she ”bestirred the original mass, almost without form…and instilled even into the atoms… a vague but obstinate yearning to emerge from the solitude of their nothingness.” She is “the bond that thus held together the foundations of the universe“(W, 192-3), and she continually draws Earth into “passionate union” with the Divine. (W, 200)….She is the raiment who is forming as she is being formed, continually creating the mystical milieu in which the forces of love encourage all things to become one….The radiance from her countenance becomes brighter still when it shines out from the eyes of each human face….

The tenderness of her compassion and her holy charm aroused Teilhard’s passion for the Divine and sensitized his heart. He was enthralled with “the beauty of spirit as it rises up adorned with all the riches of the earth,” as it flows into the heart of the cosmos, toward its very center. He yearned to take hold of her, yet whenever he tried, he found that she eluded his grasp. With great alacrity, he followed her lead as she guided him through the “luminous mist hanging over the abyss” and propelled him toward the heights into freedom. (Teilhard’s Mysticism, 110-111)

Teilhard brought the heart of a mystic, the eyes and sensibilities of a poet, the rigorous training of a scientist to his observations, his intuitions, his deep knowing so that his “vague intuition of universal unity became over time a rational and well-defined awareness of a presence…the presence of a radiant center that has all along been alluring the cosmos into deeper and deeper union…”(TM, 112)

Lured by the passionate love that this presence awakened within him, Teilhard experienced the universe “ablaze with the fire of divine love, suffused with the elements of a presence which beckons, summons and embraces” all of humanity, so that he was himself living “steeped in its burning layers”(Divine Milieu, 112).

Re- reading the letters of Saint Paul, Teilhard saw more clearly Christ’s evolutionary role: In “an explosion of dazzling flashes” (The Heart of Matter,50), Cosmic Convergence coupled with Christic Emergence and became two phases of a single evolutionary movement. The implosion caused by the coincidence of Christ with the Omega of the Universe releases “a light so intense that it transfigured… the very depths of the World” (HM, 82-3). All of the knowledge and love that Teilhard had for the universe was suddenly transformed into knowledge and love for the God who is embedded within every fragment of matter. (TM, 113).

Teilhard’s mysticism, grounded in the Circle of Person, completed his synthesis. He was convinced that the universe would both continue to complexify and become more centered in the Body of Christ until all would be one in Christ. He now yearned to adore, which meant to “lose oneself in the unfathomable… to give of one’s deepest to that whose depth has no end.” ( D, 127-8).

His desire grew that all humanity might open their arms “to call down and welcome the Fire” as…”a single body and a single soul in charity.” (Divine Milieu, 144).

“Drawn to follow the road of fire” (The Heart of Matter, 74) Teilhard “dedicated himself body and soul to the ongoing work needed to transform the cosmos to a new level of consciousness and of love.” (TM, 116).

Kathleen Duffy’s exploration of Teilhard’s Circle of Energy (Teilhard’s Mysticism, Orbis Books Maryknoll, NY 2014) shows the uniqueness of his mystic path. Neither a hermit in a cave nor a desert father escaping reality, Teilhard seeks the sacred in the deep heart of life on Earth in all its wonder and terror, and in the fiery depths of the cosmos, as it cycles through destruction and rebirth.

Touched by the intricate and beautiful structure of the cosmos and yearning to be possessed by the Sacred Presence that fills it…Teilhard continued his mystical journey, ever searching for the supreme tangible reality. As he stepped into the third circle, he found the cosmos ablaze with activity. The Divine Presence that had been alluring him had suddenly acquired a new aspect—Energy. (TM 55)

Teilhard was stirred by the evolutionary story, a story whose creativity and energy were shown to him in the layers of rock, in the depths of the earth, as he worked as a geologist and paleontologist. Enthralled by the emergence of living organic matter from inorganic, Teilhard writes:

See how (Earth’s) shades are changing. From age to age its colors intensify. Something is going to burst out on the juvenile Earth. Life! See it is life!”(The Human Phenomenon, 38, translation Sara Appleton-Weber, Portland OR: Sussex Academic Press, 1999)

Teilhard imagined evolution as a tapestry whose threads revealed “the amazing energy at work at the heart of the cosmos” (TM 59). He describes this tapestry as endless and untearable, so closely woven in one piece that there is not one single knot in it that does not depend upon the whole fabric (Science and Christ, 79, trans. Rene Hague New York, Harper and Row, 1968).

Teilhard saw that since the beginning of time complex structures have been emerging from the union of simpler ones: “a thrust towards union seems to be coded into the very fabric of the cosmos” (TM 60).

As his awareness of the complexity and interconnectedness of the Universe deepened, Teilhard could see how these qualities lead to understanding important aspects of our global life: We have gradually come to understand that no elemental thread in the universe is wholly independent…of its neighboring threads (The Future of Man, 87 trans. Norman Denny, New York: Harper and Row, 1964). For “just as the simplest vibration of a single cosmic tapestry thread affects the whole fabric, so local interactions can be felt on a global scale” (TM, 70). Teilhard came to know the importance of considering the whole in order to grasp the order that lies under the appearance of disorder. He intuitively understood that “deep down there is in the substance of the cosmos a primordial disposition …for self-arrangement and self-involution” (Heart of Matter, 33).

Yet Teilhard knew in his life what today’s scientists continue to explore: the “transition region between the two extremes of ordered stability and chaotic instability called the edge of chaos” (TM 73). In the trenches of World War 1, the horror in which he was immersed still allowed for “feelings of freedom, unanimity, and exhilaration” (TM 75).

Because he understood that “the self-organization of the world progresses only by dint of countless attempts to grope its way” (Christianity and Evolution, 187, trans Rene Hague, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), Teilhard saw the mystic must also “test every barrier, try every path, plumb every abyss” (The Divine Milieu,70,New York, Harper and Row, 1960).

Moving through the Circle of Energy, Teilhard became aware of the universe as “alive, vibrant, filled with Divine Energy and solidly enduring……..undergoing a cosmogenesis…slowly moving it toward greater complexity and deeper union” (TM, 75).

This deep knowing led Teilhard to see his own sufferings as part of the larger story:

Putting his personal suffering into a cosmic perspective, he turned his attention to the pain and suffering that pervades the evolutionary story, a story that is rife with misfortune, struggle, disease, and death: natural disasters beset Earth on every side; predators prey on more vulnerable species; changing environmental conditions cause many species to become extinct; within the human community, war and oppression continue to rage. It is not only humans who suffer. Every part of the cosmos bears the scars of the chaos and tragedy that accompany the evolutionary process (TM, 76-7).

Within the cosmic story, Teilhard’s mystic path would become one of uniting with “the Divine Fire at work at the heart of matter” (TM 78) Earth’s story had shown Teilhard that the Divine is continuing to shape the universe and therefore human action may “channel … the whole of the World’s drive towards the Beautiful and the Good” (Heart of Matter, 204). Seeing the “sacred duty” of working with Divine Energy, Teilhard vowed: “I shall work together with your action…. to your deep inspiration…I shall respond by taking great care never to stifle nor distort nor waste my power to love and to do” (The Divine Milieu, 79).

In a letter written to a friend during his work as a geologist, Teilhard describes a moment of mystic knowing:

… this contact with the real does me good. And then, amid the complexity and immobility of the rocks, there rise suddenly toward me “gusts of being,” sudden and brief fits of awareness of the laborious unification of things, and it is no longer myself thinking, but the Earth acting. It is infinitely better (Letters to Two Friends 1926-1952, 73, translated by Helen Weaver, edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen, New York: New American Library, 1967).

Teilhard’s mystic path led him to the heart of the earth: He was convinced that he must steep himself in the sea of matter, bathe in its fiery water, plunge into Earth where it is deepest and most violent, struggle in its currents, and drink of its waters. Earth was the source of his life: through the world Divine Energy enveloped him, penetrated him, and created him. Because Earth had cradled him long ago in his preconscious existence, he knew that the Earth would now raise him up to God. (TM 80-1)

I managed to climb up to the point where the

Universe became apparent to me as a great rising surge,

in which all the work that goes into serious enquiry,

all the will to create, all the acceptance of suffering,

converge ahead into a single dazzling spear-head –

now, at the end of my life,

I can stand on the peak I have scaled and continue

to look ever more closely into the future,

and there, with ever more assurance,

see the ascent of God.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Heart of the Matter, 52

Teilhard’s life journey along the mystic path was not for himself alone. His writings, published only after his death, are a gift to us, a travel guide of such depth and wisdom that even in our own complex, sometimes terrifying, often mystifying reality, his footsteps shed a light that we may follow into a future filled with hope. For this exploration of his climb to the peak where he could “look ever more closely into the future”, I rely on the July 2019 retreat experience led by Kathleen Duffy, SSJ, based on her book, Teilhard’s Mysticism (Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York, 2014).

Teilhard left us a road map, a set of five circles, stages of his mystical growth.

These circles, which are more properly imaged as loops of a spiral that he revisits throughout his life, provided him with steeping stones into an ever-deepening reality, a reality informed as much by the science of his time as by his religious tradition. They plot his growth and development as he sinks ever more deeply into the heart of matter and into the heart of God….Stepping with him through each of these circles…we come to understand ….how we too can be drawn more and more deeply into that privileged point where the depths of our hearts and the heart of the cosmos converge with the heart of God. (Kathleen Duffy, Teilhard’s Mysticism 4, 5)

Of the first of these spiraling loops, the Circle of Presence, Teilhard writes:

There were moments, indeed, when it seemed to me that a sort of universal being was about to take shape suddenly in Nature before my very eyes. (The Heart of the Matter, 26)

Duffy tells us that “something as simple as a song, a sunbeam, a fragrance, or a glance would pierce his heart and heighten his awareness of an unexplained presence.” (23)

These encounters with beauty in sensations elicited by encounters with nature, with music, with persons, drew from Teilhard a wonder and a joy that illumined his life. At times they occurred in settings that hardly seem the stuff of poetry. In the midst of a long, arduous voyage to China, he wrote to his beloved cousin Marguerite:

Yesterday I could never tire of looking to the east where the sea was uniformly milky and green, with an opalescence that was still not transparent, lighter than the background of the sky. Suddenly on the horizon a thin diffuse cloud became tinged with pink; and then with the little oily ripples of the ocean still open on one side and turning to lilac on the other, the whole sea looked for a few seconds like watered silk. Then the light was gone and the stars began to be reflected around us as peacefully as in the water of a quiet pool. (quoted in Duffy, 25-6)

While serving as a stretcher bearer in the First World War, Teilhard

…had occasion to look into the eyes of many a dying soldier. Just before the moment of death, a strange light would often appear in a soldier’s eyes. Teilhard was never sure whether the eyes were filled with “unspeakable agony or…with an excess of triumphant joy” (The Heart of Matter, p.65, trans. Rene Hague, 1978). Each time the light went out and the wounded soldier died, Teilhard was overcome with a deep sense of sadness. (Teilhard’s Mysticism 34-35)

Teilhard discovered light in other eyes when he came to know his cousin Marguerite as a kindred spirit with whom he could share the depths of his own soul. “A light glows for a moment in the depths of the eyes I love….And, under the glance that fell upon me, the shell in which my heart slumbered, burst open”. (Writings in Time of War, 117-8)

Of Teilhard’s relationship with Marguerite, Duffy writes: A new energy emerged from within, causing him to feel as vast and as rich as the universe. Marguerite had awakened the feminine aspect of his being. His love for her drew him out of himself, sensitized him, and stimulated his capacity for deeper and more intimate relationships. (Teilhard’s Mysticism 34)

Teilhard tells us that his encounters with beauty in the Circle of Presence, “drew me out of myself, into a wider harmony than that which delights the senses, into an ever richer and more spiritual rhythm (Writings in Time of War, 117).

Duffy comments: Having invaded his being and penetrated to its core, having pierced through to his depths, Beauty drew him into that single privileged point where Divine Presence exists equally everywhere, and where all diversities and all impurities yearn to melt away.(36)

In the Circle of Presence, Teilhard came to know that

underlying Earth’s surface charms a vivid Presence lies hidden within and penetrates all things, This was the only source that could give him light and the only air that he could ever breathe. He yearned to sharpen his sensibilities so that he could see ever more deeply into the heart of matter. Along the first circle, the palpable world had truly become for him a holy place, a divine milieu, permeated with a vast, formidable, and charming presence. (Teilhard’s Mysticism 38)

Teilhard understood that the duty of a mystic is to be aware of the inner rhythm of the world, and to listen with care for the heartbeat of a higher reality…. At this privileged place, he tells us, “the least of our desires and efforts…can…cause the marrow of the universe to vibrate.” (The Divine Milieu, p.115, 1960, in Teilhard’s Mysticism 32)

As Teilhard wrote in Human Energy: Indeed we are called by the music of the universe to reply, each with his own pure and incommunicable harmonic. (HE, p.150, in Teilhard’s Mysticism 32-33)

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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu

Two weeks ago, the climate crisis within Canada, as well as across the planet, urged me to seek the deep roots of our present peril, to share what wisdom I could find to guide us in this new reality. I turned to the writings of ecotheologian Thomas Berry who saw clearly the heartbreaking losses of biodiversity in planetary life and yet called us to hope. Berry, who died in 2009, believed that “we are supported by the ultimate powers of the universe as they make themselves present to us…. Also the planet Earth and the life communities of the earth are speaking to us through the deepest elements of our nature.” (Thomas
Berry The Dream of the Earth (Sierra Club, 1988)

Last week, I sought out light-bearers of our time whose discoveries and patient explorations, related to water, forests and plants, are awakening hope, helping us to understand what “the life communities of the earth” are teaching us.

Yet by the end of last week, with planetary temperatures still soaring, with fires still burning out of control in BC, with Nova Scotia awash in a torrential rainfall that destroyed bridges and inundated roads, with the tragedy of human lives lost in BC’s fires and Nova Scotia’s floods, holding hope was becoming difficult.

By Saturday morning, I was dancing very near despair… Though I could not grasp how it could be so, I wanted to trust Thomas Berry’s belief that “we are supported by the ultimate powers of the universe.”

That support arrived on Saturday afternoon in the form of a preview from The Shift Network for a Zoom course: “Science, Spirituality and the Noosphere.” It will be co-taught by Theologian Matthew Fox, (author of The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance and Scientist Brian Swimme (co-author with Thomas Berry of The Universe Story and with Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe).

The Noosphere is the concept of Thomas Berry’s much-admired forbearer, Priest and Paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

In 1923, Teilhard formulated this concept as a way of describing a sphere of human thought spread across the earth. In his lifetime, Teilhard lamented the division, the distrust, the conflict that existed between scientists and theologians. He understood the great need we had for both. His words are a cry of the heart: “Who will at last give evolution its own God?”

Even as I write this, I am in awe at the synchronicity of these happenings: in the 100th anniversary year of Teilhard’s prophetic intuition, a scientist and a theologian are co-teaching a ZOOM course that illumines Teilhard’s thought…

I offer you now a sampling from my notes, written as I listened to
Matthew Fox and Brian Swimme in conversation, introducing themes
from their upcoming course on the Shift Network, Tuesdays, August 8th to September 19th: “Science, Spirituality and the Noosphere.”
May their insights lift your heart and spirit as they lift mine.

Matthew: The 12th Century Renaissance worked because, unlike that of the 16th Century, it came from the grassroots including women and youth; it was animated by a rediscovery of science. The Renaissance we need now will be a rebirth based on spirituality, breaking out of dying institutions, discovering a fair, better balanced life for our time.

Brian: What’s dying is our seeing the universe as a machine; it is a birthing universe, alive, with a form of cosmic intelligence that manifests in the structure of the universe. The great discovery, thanks to the Hubble Telescope, is that “the Universe is expanding in all directions!” Stephen Hawking discovered that the rate of expansion from the moment it burst forth was exactly what it had to be for life to emerge. “From the beginning, the Universe knew where it was going.”

Matthew: The scientific discovery of an intelligent universe was intuited by the mystics. Julian of Norwich affirms that “we’ve been loved from before the beginning”.
We have to combat the doctrine of “Original sin”. The expansion of the Universe is an invitation to humans to grow, to expand in love. This call to expand as humanity changes our behaviour in the context of cosmology.

How amazing that we’ve learned to take photos of the Universe with the Hubble and Webb telescopes. “This is how Renaissance happens.”

Daily there are new discoveries about our origins and our history. We see the failure of our institutions: religious, educational, economic, political…
“We’ve been using our creativity to destroy one another rather than to love one another.”

Brian: One hundred years ago Teilhard described “the Noosphere”. The planetary mind. Humanity is giving birth to a form of mind we still don’t fully understand.
It’s something more wonderful than has ever appeared in history, a “super organism” spread over the surface of the earth, the emergence of “a thinking earth”, determining the shaping of the planet.

Matthew: There’s a spiritual nature to the Noosphere. Teilhard was a scientist and a mystic. It’s what binds us to the ALL that envelops us. Humanity is discovering what’s beyond us through nature, the planet, art and poetry.
The earth is part of our connection to the whole. Now that we can see the earth from outside the earth, we are invited to wake up!

Moving beyond despair and pessimism, we have the passion to remake the structures. “Things are exploding in human consciousness.”
Though there may be life on other planets, they are very far away! We are HERE with intelligence, curiosity, creativity and with the potential for creating Peace as well as War. We can create JOY. Thomas Berry saw that the whole purpose of the Universe was CELEBRATION!

Brian: At the Quantum level, elementary particles are constantly disappearing and rising, moving into and out of existence. This is also true of larger life though the change is too gradual for us to see it. Mountain ranges are dancing incessantly, transported into living things, transforming. Rocks become gazelles and oak trees. We’re part of this movement and AWARE how things can be guided to a different future. It’s who we are. We are the planet aware of itself and can focus our creativity into newness.

Matthew: The great wake-up call (floods, hurricanes, fires) is happening at the same time as we are understanding the greater reality. Human morality has to reflect the reality of the physical universe, the laws that make it work: Interdependence. We need to create systems of compassion, with awareness of the Sacred. Then there is joy and the Sacred awakens Celebration!