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.”

”What Holds Everything Together?”

Everywhere there are traces of, and a yearning for,

a unique support, a unique and absolute soul,

a unique reality in which other realities are brought together in synthesis,

as stable and universal as matter, as simple as spirit.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Writings in Time of War (translated by Rene Hague, New York, Harper and Row, 1968)

Teilhard’s Life Journey spiralled through five circles. We have glimpsed his discoveries in the Circle of Presence where the loveliness of earth lured and enchanted him. Guided by Kathleen Duffy in her book Teilhard’s Mysticism (Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY 2014) we now explore Teilhard’s search in the Circle of Consistence where “he focused not only on the beauty of nature but also on the properties and structure of the cosmos as a whole “(39).

Pierre is four years old, living in a family deeply grieving the loss of a child, his sibling. His mother is cutting his hair, tossing the shorn locks into the fire. Before his eyes, the boy sees part of himself vanish.

In such moments a life’s work may begin. For Teilhard, it began with a search for what can last… He began to collect bits of iron, until rust betrayed his trust in metal. Walking with his father over the hills of the Auvergne near his home, he found something that would last. He fell in love with rocks.

Duffy reflects that “his choice to abandon his collection of iron scraps for rock was fortunate since it led him from mere rock collection to the study of the Earth’s crust and eventually expanded his thinking to the planetary scale.” (40).

Later in life, Teilhard would reflect:

It was precisely through the gateway that the substitution of Quartz for Iron opened for my groping mind into the vast structures of the Planet and of Nature, that I began, without realizing it, truly to make my way into the World—until nothing could satisfy me that was not on the scale of the universal”. (The Heart of Matter)

Teilhard Working as a Paleontologist in China

Teilhard was seeking “an ultimate Element in which all things find their definitive consistence. ” (Teilhard’s Mysticism, 40). Though field work in geology and paleontology in China, Africa and North America allowed him to enter Earth’s body, his brief time studying physics opened his wondering eyes to the cosmos. Still asking What holds everything together? Teilhard for a time wondered if the answer was gravity.

Duffy notes that “throughout his journey along the Circle of Consistence, Teilhard focused his attention on matter in all of its intricacy without much consideration of spirit….The Divine Presence in which he felt himself bathed seemed to be not some vague spiritual entity, but rather, a supreme tangible reality.”(41).

Observing unity and interconnectedness within matter, Teilhard wrote: “The further and deeper we penetrate into matter with our increasingly powerful methods, the more dumbfounded we are by the interconnection of its parts.”(The Human Phenomenon)

Over time Teilhard would reconcile his childhood abhorrence for what perishes with his love for the strength and beauty that he found in what cannot last:

This crumbling away, which is the mark of the corruptible and the precarious, is to be seen everywhere. And yet everywhere there are traces of, and a yearning for…a unique and absolute soul. (Writings in Time of War)

Teilhard came to “distinguish in the Universe a profound, essential Unity, a unity burdened with imperfections…but a real unity within which every ‘chosen’ substance gains increasing solidity”. (Teilhard’s Mysticism, 53)

Spiralling through the Circle of Consistence, experiencing the cosmic structure as “intimate, intricate and profound”, seeing himself as “part of an interdependent and interconnected reality, sharing the one life that is in everything”, Teilhard realized that a search for consistency in what is visible would ever disappoint him.

Now at last he began to see:

the very consistency of the World …welling up …like sap, through every fibre… leaping up like a flame. (The Heart of Matter)

Duffy’s conclusion to her chapter on the Circle of Consistence pulses with life and beauty, drawn in part from Teilhard’s Writings in Time of War (W):

Divine Presence, so powerfully real to him as he travelled along the first circle, had acquired a new power for him. At the very heart of matter, Divine Consistence was, by its very presence, holding all things together. Once he became aware of “the unifying influence of the universal Presence” (W, 124), he was no longer distressed by the mutability of things: “Beneath what is temporal and plural, the mystic can see only the unique Reality which is the support common to all substances, and which clothes and dyes itself in all the universe’s countless shades without sharing their impermanence.”(W, 125) He knew that Divine Consistence is trustworthy. (W, 123): “Having come face to face with a universal and enduring reality to which one can attach those fragmentary moments of happiness that…excite the heart without satisfying it” (W, 124) ”a glorious, unsuspected feeling of joy invaded my soul” (W,126). He longed to surrender, to drive his roots into matter so that he could become united with Ultimate Reality. (Teilhard’s Mysticism, 54)

“(Teilhard) longed to drive his roots into matter so that he could become united with Ultimate Reality.”

Teilhard de Chardin (Jesuit priest, paleontologist, France 1881-1955)

Sophiawakens for August 21, 2023

In the summer of 2019, just months before COVID would make such an event impossible, I travelled to Jericho House in Ontario’s Niagara Region for a Retreat on “Teilhard’s Mysticism”. Facilitator Kathleen Duffy, SSJ, brought her own love for Teilhard, her years of deep pondering on his life and writings, to our gathering. For five sun-soaked days and star-speckled nights, companioned by others who shared a vision of spirituality centred on a sacred earth, I walked, listened, spoke, learned and dreamed, inspired by the writings of Teilhard de Chardin. I came home, my writer’s quiver filled with fresh insights into the mystic path for our time.

Wondering how I might share this experience on my website, I was drawn back to the words of theologian Margaret Brennan, IHM:

Mystics are people who come in touch with the sacred source of who they really are and are able to realize and experience that in their lives.

Teilhard’s life path led him to the sacred source not only of himself but of the entire Universe. Beginning with his childhood enchantment with rocks, through his work delving into the depths of the earth as a paleontologist in China, and, while he volunteered as a stretcher bearer in the First World War, through watching the light that briefly illumined the eyes of a dying soldier, Teilhard grew into knowing a divine presence at the heart of all that exists. He wrote:

During my life, as a result of my entire life, the world gradually caught fire for me and burst into flames until it formed a great luminous mass lit from within.

The Diaphany of the Divine at the heart of a glowing Universe, as I have experienced it through contact with Earth – the Divine radiating from blazing Matter: this it is that I shall try to disclose and communicate. (The Divine Milieu, translated by Bernard Wall, New York, Harper and Row, Publishers, 1960)

Thinking back to Kathleen Duffy’s unfolding of Teilhard’s story, I see in that quote the significance of the word: “gradually”. Mystics are not born that way! For Teilhard the path was truly a “long and winding road”. I was touched by his struggles as a young Jesuit novice reading The Imitation of Christ by the fifteenth-century writer Thomas a Kempis. That spiritual handbook counselled that one must love ONLY Christ. Teilhard feared that his great love for the natural world would draw him away from his love for the Christ. His life experiences would gradually bring those two loves into a deep harmony so that he could finally write with deep joy:

Now Earth can certainly clasp me in her giant arms. She can swell me with her life or take me back into her dust. She can deck herself out for me with every charm, with every horror, with every mystery. She can intoxicate me with her perfume of tangibility and unity. She can cast me to my knees in expectation of what is maturing in her breast. But her enchantments can no longer do me harm, since she has become for me, over and above herself, the body of him who is and of him who is coming. (The Divine Milieu)

Of all that I learned of Teilhard during Kathleen Duffy’s Retreat, this sharing of his personal struggle and its resolution is what stirred me most. It reveals Teilhard as a mystic not only OF our time but FOR our time. He recognized the allurement of the Universe for us:

The great temptation of this century is (and will increasingly be) that we find the World of nature, of life, and of humankind greater, closer, more mysterious, more alive than the God of Scripture. (The Heart of Matter, translated by Rene Hague, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1978)

Yet that allurement was what he saw as most needed for spiritual healing:

Our age seems primarily to need a rejuvenation of supernatural forces, to be effected by driving roots deep into the nutritious energies of the Earth. Because it is not sufficiently moved by a truly human compassion, because it is not exalted by a sufficiently passionate admiration of the Universe, our religion is becoming enfeebled…(Writings in Time of War translated by Rene Hague, New York, Harper and Rowe, Publishers, 1968)

Teilhard looked at the earth 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.

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. In co-creative partnership with the Love at its heart, everything that we do contributes towards that great commingled work of the evolution of the Universe, the evolution of ourselves.

Teilhard came to know Sophia as the cosmic Love that is holding
all things together. ( Kathleen Duffy)

Born in 1881, Teilhard lived, studied, worked and wrote mainly in the
first half of the twentieth century. As a scientist, he knew Darwin’s
work in Evolution; as a paleontologist, he spent time excavating the
story of evolution inscribed within the earth; as a mystic he was
captivated with the wonder of an unfinished universe being drawn from
within into a radiant future by a sacred presence of love.

Image from the James Webb Telescope shows the early Universe with its uncombined elements in a swath that stretches across seven light years.

Teilhard was convinced that until theology fully embraced the concept
of an evolving universe, it would remain inadequate, crippled by its
outdated worldview. He wrote: “Who will at last give evolution its own
God?”

In the nearly seventy years since Teilhard’s death, science has taken
massive leaps of understanding, and theology is only beginning to catch
up. In From Teilhard to Omega (edited by Ilia Delio, Orbis Books,
Maryknoll, New York 2014), thirteen scholars take up Teilhard’s
challenge. This week, we look at “Sophia: Catalyst for Creative Union and Divine Love” by Kathleen Duffy, SSJ.

Though a dedicated scientist, Teilhard calls on his mystic and poetic
gifts to describe divine love at work in the cosmos. In his book
Writings in Time of War (translated by Rene Hague, London: Collins,
and New York: Harper & Row, 1968), Teilhard writes of a feminine
presence drawn from the wisdom literature of the Bible, particularly
the Book of Proverbs, (8: 22-31).

Teilhard’s poem opens at the beginning of time, at the moment when
Sophia is embedded into the primordial energy that is already
expanding into the space-time of the early universe. Only half formed
and still elusive, she emerges as from the mist, destined to grow in
beauty and grace (WTW, 192). As soon as the first traces of her
presence become apparent, she assumes her mandate to nurture
creation, to challenge it, to unify it, to beautify it, and ultimately to
lead the universe back to God. With this mission as her guide, she
attends to her work of transforming the world, a world alive with
potential. (Duffy p. 27)

Duffy reweaves Teilhard’s poem, working through its shining threads
new insights from science, wisdom literature and the work of many
“who have contemplated the divine creativity at work at the heart of
matter”. Duffy names the feminine presence in Teilhard’s poem
“Sophia”, from the Greek word for Wisdom.

“Who then is Sophia?” Duffy asks. Her magnificent response to this
question is worth the price of the whole book. Here are segments:
She is the presence of God poured out in self-giving love, closer to us
than we are to ourselves, ever arousing the soul to passion for the
Divine. From the very depths of matter, she reveals herself to us as
the … very nature of God residing within the core of the cosmic
landscape.
Attempting always to capture our attention, Sophia peers out at us
from behind the stars, overwhelms us with the radiance of a glorious
sunset, and caresses us with a gentle breeze…

Sunset at Stella Maris

Shining through the eyes of the ones we love, she sets our world ablaze.
Sophia is the mercy of God in us….She sits at the crossroads of our
lives, ever imploring us to work for peace, to engage in fruitful
dialogue, and to find new ways of connecting with the other. She longs
to open our eyes to the presence of pain and suffering in the world, to
transform our hearts and to move us to action. (pp. 31-32)

Duffy says that Teilhard experienced this presence “with nature, with
other persons, and with the Divine”:
He began gradually to recognize her everywhere — in the rocks that
he chiseled, in the seascapes and landscapes that he contemplated, and
in the faces of the dying soldiers to whom he ministered during the
war….Teilhard came to know Sophia as the cosmic Love that is holding
all things together. (p. 33)

Teilhard came to understand that Sophia can be known “only in
embodied human actions”.

Duffy concludes her illuminative essay with these words:
Sophia was the source of Teilhard’s life…. Her constant care for
creation during so many billions of years gave him confidence she would
continue to be faithful… Teilhard vowed to steep himself in the sea of
matter, to bathe in its fiery water, to plunge into Earth where it is
deepest and most violent, to struggle in its currents, and to drink of its
waters. Filled with impassioned love for Sophia, he dedicated himself
body and soul to the ongoing work needed to transform the cosmos to a
new level of consciousness and to transformative love. (p. 34)

That final sentence might serve as a calling to each of us.

“For Teilhard, autumn rather than spring was the happiest time of year,” writes John Haught in his essay, “Teilhard de Chardin: Theology for an Unfinished Universe.”(From Teilhard to Omega: Co-creating an Unfinished Universe Ilia Delio, ed. Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York, 2014) “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. 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. For the next several weeks, I’ll offer that glimpse with Reflections on Teilhard’s thoughts about our “unfinished universe” drawn from Ilia Delio’s collection of essays.

Neither scientist nor theologian, I am a storyteller. I know that 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 unimagined 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, and the burden 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 of life into 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, and we love to hear stories where suffering and struggle lead to happiness, to fulfillment, to love. 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 Christian vocation:

Our sense of the creator, the work of the Holy Spirit, and the redemptive significance of Christ can grow by immense orders of magnitude. 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. (p.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”. Haught writes:

At the extreme term of the convergent movement of the universe from past multiplicity toward unity up ahead, Teilhard locates “God-Omega”. Only by being synthesized into the unifying creativity and love of God does the world become fully intelligible. (p.18)

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. (p.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. (p.19)

Teilhard’s embrace of an emerging universe is one of the reasons why his writings “often lift the hearts of his scientifically educated readers and make room for a kind of hope…that they had never experienced before when reading and meditating on other theological and spiritual works.” (p. 20)

A certain day became a presence to me;

there it was, confronting me—a sky, air, light:

a being. And before it started to descend

from the height of noon, it leaned over

and struck my shoulder as if with

the flat of a sword, granting me

honor and a task. The day’s blow

rang out, metallic—or it was I, a bell awakened,

and what I heard was my whole self

saying and singing what it knew: I can.

Denise Levertov: “Variation on a Theme by Rilke”

It’s morning. More to the point, it’s Monday morning, the day I‘d set aside to write my weekly Reflection on the Sophia blog.

My mind is empty of inspiration, crowded out by feelings that hover dangerously near helplessness and despair as we continue a planetary rush towards destruction. This past week brought record breaking heat into the 40’s Celsius across the US and Europe. The Acropolis in Greece was closed to tourists, people were urged to avoid the burning hot sands of Spain’s beaches, while in Rome, visitors were dousing their heads in the famous fountains…. In South Korea floods from unprecedented rainfalls were washing out bridges, cars were caught in tunnels, their passengers drowning in the sweep of water. Nearly every report included someone commenting that these events are our new reality on Planet Earth.

As I sat in prayer this morning, wordlessly pleading to Sophia, Mother Wisdom, for inspiration, a few lines from a long-forgotten poem rose in me. “A certain day became a presence…” With no other guidance on offer, I set about locating that poem, written by the British poet Denise Levertov. I lifted the heavy 1063-page volume from my bookshelf, turned to the index of first lines… and there it was, just as you see it at the top of this page…

However, as is often the case with such gifts from Sophia, the work had just begun…

I invite you, as i did, to revisit the poem, to enter into it imaginally, feeling yourself breathing the air as Levertov describes it, air that is a sky of light, (not a curtain of smoke!).

A being is descending towards you from the height of noon… this being bends towards you, strikes you on the shoulder with the flat hilt of a sword, making you a knight like one of Arthur’s noble company….

granting you both “honor and a task”.

And you become the “bell awakened”

… you hear your “whole self saying and singing what it knew,”

what it now knows…”I can”

What follows for you now?

What do you already know about your role?

What does “I can” open in your imagination?

What would a “Change of Consciousness” mean for you?

Last week, I wrote of Thomas Berry, the brilliant, inspired, ecotheologian who, in the last decades of his long life, wrote of the causes of the looming planetary disasters, adding that our current efforts at curbing fossil fuels along with recycling, re-purposing, and simplifying our material lives…are inadequate to stem the tide of destruction. Berry insisted that what we needed most was “a change of consciousness”.

Today I begin my task with Berry’s advice, searching my memory for people I’ve heard about, read about, or known, who, while pursuing a “change of consciousness” for themselves are opening a new path for others. The first memory that arises is of the Japanese scientist-researcher who explores the effect of thoughts and words on water. His photographs of the water crystals show stunning beauty as a result of being exposed to loving thoughts and words. Exposure to dark, ugly thoughts and words results in misshapen, ugly crystal formation.

Dr. Emoto reminds us that as our human bodies are composed mostly of water, we too can be affected by the words and thoughts we allow to influence us.

From water, my thoughts move to plants, to researchers exploring the intelligence of plants. My friend Corinne facilitates workshops on plants, sharing her understanding that plants want to assist us in our task of healing life on the planet. With a sensitive hearing device, Corinne shows me how to listen to the distinctive music created by individual plants.

And this opens another memory. Efforts to purify huge bodies of water like the Thames River in England and other European rivers as well as rivers in watersheds in North America, choked off by dams, have surprised planners and scientists by significantly reducing the time estimated for the task. One person involved in the clean- up of a river that flows from BC to Washington State said it was as though the river itself was assisting in the task.

That reminds me of my friend Mary, who for over two decades spent her summers helping to purify the lake water at our summer place, polluted by the remains of logs once transported through its water system.

” How do you know what to do?” I ask her. It seems to me an impossible task.

“I ask the water,” Mary replies.

I think of Suzanne Simard, a Canadian researcher and Professor of Forest Ecology in the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Forestry. Combining exhaustive research and a lifetime of careful observation of the BC forests, Suzanne uses an intuitive understanding to embrace the living intelligence of trees. In her book Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest (Penguin Publishers, Canada 2022) Suzanne describes “the wood-wide web”, an astonishing underground network linking trees of different species with nurture, medicine and information. A photo in her book shows a Sitka Spruce Mother Tree on Haida Gwaii in BC. The caption reads: “The Hemlock saplings in its understory are regenerating on decomposing nurse logs, which protect the new regeneration from predators, pathogens and drought.” When logging companies destroy old growth trees, they also destroy the information stored in the trees’ roots, which would have been capable of passing on centuries of experience dealing with climate catastrophes.

By the time I complete my day’s work exploring what a new consciousness might involve, I begin to glimpse the magnitude as well as the simplicity of what Thomas Berry is advising. Like his much-admired spiritual forebearer, the Jesuit Priest and Paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Berry understands that a divine presence permeates all that lives.

By means of all created things, without exception,

the divine assails us, penetrates us and molds us.

We imagined it as distant and inaccessible,

whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers.

(Teilhard de Chardin, A Book of Hours, edited by Kathleen Deignan and Libby Osgood, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY, 2022

How would this new consciousness affect the ecological crisis that assails us?

We only save what we love,

and we only love that which we recognize as sacred.

The Month of May, most beautiful of all the year, when flowers abound, trees put forth leaves and the air itself is perfumed, was originally named for the Goddess Maia. Other Goddesses in the Celtic, Greek and Roman traditions were also celebrated in May. In the Catholic Tradition May is known as the month of Mary, Mother of Jesus.

Veiled in Mystery, and yet nearer to us than we are to ourselves, the Presence of Love that we are coming to know as the Sacred Feminine wants to be found. “Wild Woman” leaves a trail for us to follow: Perhaps we found her tracks across fresh snow in a dream. Or psychically, we noticed a bent twig here and there, pebbles overturned so that their wet sides faced upwards …we knew that something blessed had passed our way. We sensed within our psyches the sound of a familiar breath from afar, we felt tremors in the ground…we innately knew that something powerful, someone important, some wild freedom within us was on the move.” (C.P. EstesWomen Who Run with the Wolves, Random House, New York, 1992, p.457)

Pursuing this presence, lured by her tracks, we come upon not thick books, but rather small hints: the story of a brief encounter, the way that someone’s life has been upturned into joy by her, powerful clues put together by the wise about the way She manifests.

One such small clue has been a beacon in my own search for years. Jean Shinoda Bolen, Jungian analyst, author of Goddesses in Every Woman, wrote of a moment in her own life. One of her patients had unexpectedly died. She was filled with grief that had to be kept under wraps while she attended to the needs of another patient:

No one supposed that I needed any comforting, including me, until this woman who was my analysand sensed something and reached out with compassion to ask if I was all right. And when my eyes moistened with sudden tears, she broke out of role, got out of the patient’s chair to come over to mine, and held me. At that moment, I felt a much larger presence was there with the two of us. When this woman put her arms around me, I felt as if we were both being cradled in the arms of an invisible, divine presence. I was profoundly comforted and felt a deep ache in the center of my chest. This was before I had ever heard of a heart chakra, which I know now opened widely then. I now also know that this is a way that the Goddess (of whom I had no inkling) may manifest. It differed from the mystical experience I had had of God. Then, no other human presence was necessary… Here, in contrast, the compassion and arms of a woman were the means through which a numinous maternal presence was felt….

I now think of this profound moment as a Grail experience in which the Goddess was the Grail that held us. This, and what others have told me about their experiences of the Goddess in their lives, has made me think of the Goddess as a nurturer and comforter whose presence is evoked through human touch.

After recounting experiences of other women with whom she had been leading rituals and meditation, Bolen concludes: In these moments, when each of us felt held in the arms of the Mother Goddess, a compassionate woman mediated the experience, leading me to understand that this feminine divinity comes through the body and heart of a human woman, created in Her image. (Jean Shinoda Bolen, Crossing to Avalon, Harper Collins, New York1994(73-74, 77)

Almost 20 years after Women Who Run with the Wolves was published, Clarissa Pinkola Estes brought forth a new book: Untie the Strong Woman, SoundsTrue, BoulderColorado, 2011. The powerful mysterious feminine presence is seen by Estes as aligned with titles and qualities given in the Christian story to Mary, yet part of a much longer heritage.

In her opening paragraphs, Estes traces the lineage of THE GREAT MOTHER:

She is known by many names and many images and has appeared in different epochs of time to people across the world, in exactly the shapes and images the soul would most readily understand her, apprehend her, be able to embrace her and be embraced by her.She wears a thousand names, thousands of skin tones, thousands of costumes to represent her being patroness of deserts, mountains, stars, streams and oceans. If there are more than six billion people on earth, then thereby she comes to us in literally billions of images. Yet at her center is only one great Immaculate Heart.

Since we staggered out of the Mist eons ago, we have had irrevocable claim to Great Mother. Since time out of mind, nowhere is there a feminine force of more compassion and understanding about the oddities and lovability of the wild and wondrous variations to be found in human beings.

Nowhere is there found a greater exemplar, teacher, mentor than she who is called amongst many other true names, Seat of Wisdom.(C.P. Estes, Untie the Strong Woman, 2)

The Memorare, an ancient prayer calling on Mary in time of need, was learnt by many of us as children. It takes on richness and depth in this adaptation by Estes:

“Have you forgotten? I am Your Mother. You are under my protection.” There is a promise Holy Mother makes to us, that any soul needing comfort, vision, guidance, or strength can cry out to her, flee to her protection, and Blessed Mother will immediately arrive with veils flying. She will place us under her mantle for refuge, and give us the warmth of her most compassionate touch, and strong guidance about how to go by the soul’s lights. (Untie the Strong Woman, inside cover)

How might our lives be different if we remembered,

if we then trusted in this promise?

Sophia for Earth Week April 16-22, 2023

Once we take our first turning towards a Sacred Feminine Presence, welcoming her into our lives, change begins. In Rebirth of the Goddess (1997), Carol P. Christ writes of how turning towards the presence she names the Goddess altered her life. Her book reflects her new view of religion, politics, ecology, life, death, relationships, morality, the meaning of existence….

Reading Christ’s book has led me to reflect on how my own life has been altered since coming to know Sophia. I realize that the change began when I first recognized that there is a feminine path to the Holy that differs in important ways from the masculine path. The masculine path was shown to me as I grew up in a Church where the teachers, priests, writers, theologians were mostly men and some women who had embraced the masculine way to holiness.

What a revelation it was for me to encounter, through their writings and at times through hearing them speak, the feminist theologians who rose to prominence in the last third of the twentieth century. These women used their powerful intellects, their theological training, and their own experience to show that the “objective” masculine teachings, thought to apply to all humankind, actually reflected the masculine way to God. The feminist theologians found the heart of the difference between the masculine and feminine ways to be within the perceived dualities found in Greek thought: spirit/matter, sky/earth, thought/ feeling, supernatural/natural, mind/body, spirituality/sexuality, man/woman. More than a separation, there is a perceived hierarchy. Spirit, sky, thought, the supernatural, mind, spirituality, man viewed as separate from, superior to, matter, earth, feeling, nature, body, sexuality and woman. This is a worldview where God is separate from creation, from humanity. To find this God, we must soar above the human.

Embracing this worldview, I had embraced an ideal of spiritual life that led me to distrust love, to be cautious with emotion, to value thought over feeling. I had learned to distrust my desires, my body, my sexuality, all of which, I’d been warned, would lead me astray, away from God. I learned to embrace an ideal of perfection, though I never succeeded in living it out.

Through the writings of the feminist theologians, I learned that recovering a sense of the sacredness of the feminine would assist me to recover a sense of the sacredness of the earth, of the body, of my feelings, of my sexuality.

artwork by Josephine Wall

At this time in the story of our planet Earth, this recovery is vital. The sacred presence of love lives within all of life, within the earth herself, within the creatures that walk, swim, fly, crawl upon and within her. Only this knowing can give us the courage and the strength we need for the work we are called to do with the earth as she heals from the ravages of our despoiling her.

In the sixth chapter of her book, “The Web of Life”, Carol Christ writes compellingly of this call:

To know ourselves as of this earth is to know our deep connection to all people and beings. All beings are interdependent in the web of life….We feel deeply within ourselves that we are part of all that is, but we must learn to speak of what we know. We know, too, that we participate fully in the earth’s cycles of birth, death, and regeneration….

The fundamental insight of connection to all beings in the web of life is experienced by children, poets, mystics, and indeed, I suspect, by all of us, though we may lack the language to express what we feel….(p. 113)

Acknowledging the difficulty of speaking of this deep connection “in the face of criticism rooted in dualistic thinking”, Christ quotes Jewish theologian Martin Buber who wrote of his “I-Thou” relation to a tree:

I contemplate a tree.

I can accept it as a picture: as rigid pillar in a flood of light, or splashes of green traversed by the gentleness of the blue silver ground.

I can feel it as movement: the flowing veins around the sturdy, striving core, the sucking of the roots, the breathing of the leaves, the infinite commerce with earth and air – and the growing itself in its darkness…

But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It. The power of exclusiveness has seized me. (Martin Buber, I and Thou trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970 pp. 58-59)

The writings of Susan Griffin recognize our Earth as intelligent and aware:

I taste, I know, and I know why she goes on, under great weight, with this great thirst, in drought, in starvation, with intelligence in every act, does she survive disaster. (Susan Griffin inWoman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her New York, Harper and Row, 1978 p. 219)

A beautiful reweaving of dualities into wholeness flows from our embrace of Sophia/Sacred Feminine/Goddess. Here is Carol Christ’s celebration of the insight into oneness intuited by children, mystics and poets:

If Goddess is an intelligent power that is fully embodied in the world, then the notion that divinity, nature and humanity are three totally distinct categories collapses. If Goddess as fully embodied intelligent love is the ground of all being, then it makes sense to speak of intelligence and love as rising out of the very nature of being and of all beings as intelligent and infused with love. Human intelligence and our capacity to love do not separate us from nature. Instead, everything we are arises from the nature of being, from our grounding in the earth. (p. 123)

As we celebrate Earth Week in 2023, may the eyes of our mind, the intelligence of our heart recognize, perhaps for the first time, that Planet Earth is truly Our Mother, the source, sustainer and unifier of all that lives upon and within her.

Sunday Morning. Just a few hours until the dance session begins on ZOOM. I haven’t registered yet, nor have I attended these classes in recent months, not since Banafsheh, our Persian born teacher of Sacred Dance, invited us to dance in support of the young people of Iran engaged in a revolution to set their country free of oppression. Young people being sentenced to death for their involvement in peaceful protests. I tell myself I can’t take on another nation’s suffering. Not with the war in Ukraine, not with the devastation of the planet. There’s too much darkness already. I stop attending dance class….

Yet somehow I am feeling drawn to today’s class.

I reread the invitation from Banafsheh:

Join us to celebrate Spring and renewal, and dance to put a transformative poem by Rumi into motion, so you can balance the joy and the sorrow in a wide-open heart with self-authority…grounded in the security of our Mother.

Spring, Renewal, Rumi’s Poetry, Balancing Joy and Sorrow…alluring as these references are, I know it’s the last phrase that’s drawing me: grounded in the security of our Mother. It’s what first drew me to Banafsheh’s teaching: her commitment to the Sacred Feminine in her many guises, under her many names.

My life is also committed to this Sacred Presence, whom I name Sophia.

I register for the dance.

Banafsheh begins with photos of young women and men, radiant with youth, with beauty, with intelligence, with nobility. Each picture is surrounded by flowers, adorning a gravesite. The photos remind me of my young adult nieces and nephews. What would I be feeling now if my own beloved ones were put to death for attending a peaceful protest?

Suddenly I know.

I feel my heart breaking within me.

Words are rising silently. I know this voice. The one Banafsheh named Mother, the one I know as Sophia says: “They all belong to me.”

And I get it. This is not the agony of strangers. This is our agony.

In an instant, everything changes. And we begin to dance…

Only later do I realize this is happening on Palm Sunday.

With the rising of the full Paschal Moon on April 6th, we re-enter the Sacred Days of the Passion Play the yearly re-living of the final act in the life of Jesus on earth, his agony and death, his resurrection.

For years, decades, I approached Holy Week with a kind of dread, knowing I must engage once more in the agony of Jesus, his sufferings, his death, followed by the long tomb-time of his absence before I could even remember the truth of Resurrection…. I would get up during the night after the Holy Thursday Eucharist to spend an hour in prayer, remembering Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, his friends asleep around him, as he faced the certitude of his coming death.

It was a Mystery Play, perhaps not unlike the ancient Greek and Roman Mystery Rituals, but the emotions were manufactured. The darkness I experienced through these intense feelings of grief and loss was real, as was the physical discomfort of fasting. Yet some part of me knew it was play-acting: both the terrible loss of Good Friday and the exploding joy of Easter. Jesus IS risen and will never die again; the Christ is with us always.

Nine years ago, something shifted. I wakened in the deep heart of Holy Thursday night. Yet I was drawn in prayer, not to the Garden of Gethsemane, but to the Earth herself, in agony, dying. I sat through that hour with her suffering.

Later I came upon this lovely meditation by Susan Griffin which spoke to my heart:

As I go into the Earth, she pierces my heart. As I penetrate further, she unveils me. When I have reached her center, I am weeping openly. I have known her all my life, yet she reveals stories to me, and these stories are revelations and I am transformed. Each time I go to her, I am born like this. Her renewal washes over me endlessly, her wounds caress me. I become aware of all that has come between us, the blindness, of something sleeping between us. Now my body reaches out to her. They speak effortlessly, and I learn that at no instant does she fail me in her presence. She is as delicate as I am, I know her sentience, I feel her pain and my own pain comes into me, and my own pain grows large and I grasp this pain with my hands, and I open my mouth to this pain, I taste, I know and I know why she goes on, under great weight, with this great thirst, in drought, in starvation, with intelligence in every act does she survive disaster. This earth is my sister, I love her daily grace, her silent daring, and how loved I am, how we admire this strength in each other, all that we have lost, all that we have suffered, all that we know: we are stunned by this beauty, and I do not forget what she is to me, what I am to her. (Susan Griffin in The Body of Earth)

Since that time of awakening, I experience these Sacred Days of the Paschal Mystery, the Mystery of life/death/life that is at the Holy Heart of the Universe, in a new and deeper way. The suffering is now for me a reawakening to the raw suffering, the unaccountable losses, the seeking for light and hope in darkness that is the Mystery Play of our lives in this year of 2023 on Planet Earth.

This is why we need a Sacred Feminine Presence that is more than sweetness and light, One who is also fierce, strong, capable of holding us in the darkness in which our lives are shrouded. The Dark Mother, Who was present in the very chaos in which our Universe was birthed, strong enough to remain through eons of destruction and rebirth, still with us, within us.

May the Dark Mother hold each of us as we stand in this moment of darkness, raising the chalice of kindness to bless our earth and all that lives upon and within her, all that belongs to the Mother.