Ilia Delio Quotes

The resurrection happens in the present moment, but it is a present moment bathed in future, a new relationship with God, a new union, a new wholeness—a new catholicity—by which life is wholly unified.

Spiritual desire is the experience of God’s presence in us or it may be the absence of God as well, since a feeling of absence may stimulate a yearning for God. It is the experience of delightful love and fearful emptiness.

To follow Jesus is to be a wholemaker, essentially to love the world into new being and life.

Christ is not only the name of an historical personage but a reality in our own lives.”32  He uses the term “christophany” to indicate that each person bears the mystery of Christ within.

God is the newness of everything that is and is coming to be. God is ever newness in love. Transcendence, therefore, is the future beyond that draws us in the present movement toward greater wholeness and unity.

From within the heart of matter, I hold together the foundations of the universe.

The foundation of existence is not mere being itself (what is) but relationality (what is becoming): union is always toward more being.

We humans are evolution made conscious; hence, our choices for and in the world shape the future of the world.

As Rahner puts it in another place, the resurrection is “the beginning of the transformation of the world as an ontologically interconnected occurrence.”34 The final destiny of the world is not only promised, but already begun. The risen Christ is the “pledge and beginning of the perfect fulfillment of the world.” He is the “representative of the new cosmos.”35

Thomas Merton expresses the need for this mystical imperative: The Christian’s vision of the world ought, by its very nature, to have in it something of poetic inspiration. Our faith ought to be capable of filling our hearts with a wonder and a wisdom which see beyond the surface of things and events, and grasp something of the inner and “sacred” meaning of the cosmos which, in all its movements and all its aspects, sings the praises of its Creator and Redeemer.2

Describing Francis as the truly humble person, Bonaventure writes: “As Christ’s disciple he strove to regard himself as worthless in his own eyes and those of others. He used to make this statement frequently: ‘What a person is before God, that he is and no more.’”34

God is the newest thing there is, the youngest thing there is. God is the beginning and if we are united to God we become new again.

Go, my dear brothers two by two through different parts of the word, announcing peace to the people and penance for the remission of sins.”5

For the Franciscans, there is no such thing as “brute matter.

When we fail to appreciate Sophia’s presence at work in nature, we are also more likely to fail to appreciate the sacred

The idea of a spiritually potent creation means that Jesus Christ is not an intrusion into an otherwise evolutionary universe but its reason and goal.

God is Trinity because God is relationship in love. This God loves us totally and unconditionally to the extent that God shares with us the suffering of our lives.

In Bonaventure’s view only one who is on a journey to God can really know God; faith seeks understanding through the path of love.

As Francis deepened his relationship with Christ, the other became less outside Francis as object and more related to him as brother.

Contemplative vision is the vision that says “you are good as you are because you are the sacrament of God’s love.

Francis became a man of peace because he was transformed in love and came to recognize that he was intimately related (pietas) to every person and creature.8

The future universal cannot be anything else but the hyperpersonal.

Thus, the direction of evolution is toward the maximization of goodness, especially if we maintain that the incarnation is the goal of evolution. If Jesus Christ is truly creator (as divine Word) and redeemer (as Word Incarnate) then what is created out of love is ultimately redeemed by love. The meaning of Christ is summed up in creation’s potential for self transcendent love.

But as urban life accelerated and expanded, it disrupted the old sense of order. This new way of living generated unprecedented social and political conflict and an increase in violence and aggression.

As far as theology is concerned, Christian understanding of the meaning of God, Christ, redemption, morality, and human existence is still weighed down by both prescientific and early modern cosmological assumptions.

The cross and resurrection won the victory over evil, but it is the task of the Spirit, and those led by the Spirit, to implement that victory in and for the whole world. The victory is found not in the life of Jesus alone but in his death and resurrection. It is in the resurrection that the power of Jesus as the Christ is experienced.

The new atheism has attracted considerable attention today, but apart from the public hype, it offers no substantial change or direction to modernity's problems. Religion may be the opium of the masses but atheism offers no new yeast as leaven for the masses.

With this new sense of moving forward, from simple to complex life forms, from bacteria to humans, science shows that evolution is more than a method of collecting and classifying the facts of life; rather it is the means by which humanity can move forward into the future.

Life in God should be a daring adventure of love—a continuous journey of putting aside our securities to enter more profoundly into the uncharted depths of God. Too often, however, we settle for mediocrity. We follow the rules and practices of prayer but we are unwilling or, for various reasons, unable to give ourselves totally to God. To settle on the plain of mediocrity is really to settle for something less than God that leaves the heart restless and unfulfilled. A story from the desert fathers reminds us that giving oneself wholly to God can make a difference: Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, “Abba, as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?” Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, “If you will, you can become all flame.”15

The discoveries of twentieth–century science, especially Big Bang cosmology (“universalism” or cosmic wholeness) and evolution (nature's openness to the future), ushered in two new dimensions of life, wholeness and futurism. Contrary to the ancient Ptolemaic cosmos of order, stasis, and hierarchy, the Big Bang cosmos was now seen in its evolving capacity for greater wholeness and openness to consummation in the future.

People who are reckless usually wind up in trouble because they do crazy things. Imagine being reckless for the kingdom of God. Just think what might happen. Friends of God loving one another around the earth. Heaven breaking open in our midst. We have the power to make this happen.

Evolution means that nature does not operate according to fixed laws but by the dynamic interplay of law, chance, and deep time; that is, one cannot understand natural processes apart from developmental categories. The interaction of forces creates a dynamic process of unfolding life, pointing to the fact that nature is incomplete; there are no fixed essences. Instead, nature is consistently oriented toward new and complex life.

Secularization is not a zero-sum game necessitating the demise of supernaturalism. Nor does the new spirituality reject science. What it rejects is scientism in which the methodology and data of natural science alone are allowed to contribute to our understanding of the world and the human condition in it. The new spirituality also calls on natural science itself as a witness against the inadequacies of a purely secularized worldview.

Christ is both the One and the Many. William Thompson states that Merton’s view of the transcultural Christ means the emergence of “a person of such inner calm and personal and cultural detachment that she is capable of recognizing and perspectivizing the genuine values present in every person and every culture.

It implies also that there was a souring of “the earth’s sweet being in the beginning.” Long ago there occurred a besmirching of primordial innocence that has turned the history of human life and the practice of virtue into a project of restoration rather than one of joining ourselves to a universe that is still becoming more.

Christ is the model for creation so that, “what happened between God and the world in Christ points to the future of the cosmos. It is a future that involves the radical transformation of created reality through the unitive power of God’s love.”28  This universe, therefore, has a destiny; the world will not be destroyed. Rather, “it will be brought to the conclusion which God intends for it from the beginning, which is anticipated in the mystery of the Incarnate Word and glorified Christ.

It is important to point out here that I am distinguishing catholicity (with a lowercase “c”) from Catholicism (with an uppercase “C”) insofar as catholicity or orientation toward wholeness is intrinsic to nature and organic consciousness, whereas I see the institutionalization of catholicity expressed (or thwarted) in Catholicism.

The experience that the God we meet in prayer and in history actually loves us indicates, as we have seen, that we make a difference to the eternal God. The hope, then, is that nothing good is lost. Even though each and every accomplishment we achieve will eventually become space dust, and that dust may itself dissipate into cold cosmic darkness, we hope that God will not let our efforts turn to nothing. We hope and we sense that all is preserved in God

cult of cosmic pessimism. Cosmic pessimism is the belief that nature has no purpose and that whatever meaning exists in the world is our own human creation. This belief is taken for granted by most scientific thinkers today, but with the aid of the new idea of an unfinished universe, theology may point out that cosmic pessimism, which is usually taken as the epitome of hard-nosed realism, is not as self-evidently justifiable as it seems to most contemporary intellectuals. Geology, evolutionary biology, and cosmology now situate Earth, life, and human existence within the framework of an immense cosmic drama of transformation that is still going on.

In the quantum view a person is a constellation of relationships, inner and outer: the degree of one’s relationships extends throughout space-time and endures in those who live on. Belief in the resurrection of Jesus undergirds the fact that life creates the universe, not the other way around. Space and time are not absolute; rather, they are “tools” of our mind to help organize our world. Death and immortality exist in a world without spatial or linear boundaries. Every act of physical death is an act of new life in the universe. The resurrection of Jesus reveals to us new cosmic life. Death is not the end; our bodies do not become dust, while the soul goes to heaven. Rather, through the lens of quantum physics, we now realize that death is the collapse of our “particle” aspect of life into the “wave” dimension of our relatedness. While

Totally grasped by the divine eros, 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 (HM, 72). 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

I want to highlight the spirit of Pope Francis. Elected to the papacy following the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Francis (Jose Maria Bergoglio), in his late seventies, brings a new spirit to the Church that reflects a consciousness of catholicity that we explore here. His is an inner spirit of freedom grounded in the love of God, guided by the gospel message of the new kingdom at hand, and open to a world of change. He desires a Church on the margins, where the poor and the forgotten can be brought into a new unity; a Church that advocates life at all costs and promotes peaceful life in a war-torn and violent world; a Church that models justice in an age of greed, consumerism, and power; a Church centered on the risen Christ, empowering a consciousness of the whole. This is a church leader who desperately wants to breathe a new spirit of catholicity into a world dying for wholeness and unity.

The journey of prayer for Franciscans is the discovery of God at the center of our lives. We pray not to acquire a relationship with God as if acquiring something that did not previously exist. Rather, we pray to disclose the image of God in which we are created, the God within us, that is, the one in whom we are created and in whom lies the seed of our identity. We pray so as to discover what we already have—“the incomparable treasure hidden in the field of the world and of the human heart. (St. Clare)

In a remarkable letter to the director of the Vatican Observatory, John Paul II wrote: The church does not propose that science should become religion or religion science. On the contrary, unity always presupposes the diversity and integrity of its elements. Each of these members should become not less itself but more itself in a dynamic interchange, for a unity in which one of the elements is reduced to the other is destructive, false in its promises of harmony, and ruinous of the integrity of its components. We are asked to become one. We are not asked to become each other. . . . Unity involves the drive of the human mind towards understanding and the desire of the human spirit for love. When human beings seek to understand the multiplicities that surround them, when they seek to make sense of experience, they do so by bringing many factors into a common vision. Understanding is achieved when many data are unified by a common structure. The one illuminates the many: it makes sense of the whole. . . . We move towards unity as we move towards meaning in our lives. Unity is also the consequence of love. If love is genuine, it moves not towards the assimilation of the other but towards union with the other. Human community begins in desire when that union has not been achieved, and it is completed in joy when those who have been apart are now united.10

According to their sacred texts, the earth was created in seven stages. First, the sky came into being—this was an inverted bowl of beautiful stone. Second, the water was created at the bottom of the sky shell, and then third, the earth that floated on water. To this the gods added one plant, one animal, and a bull, and then in the sixth stage, man. Fire was added in the seventh stage, pervading the entire world and residing in seen and unseen places. As a final act of creation the gods assembled and performed the first sacrifice. The primordial plant, the bull, and the man were crushed and from them the vegetable, animal, and human realms were created and populated the earth. New life and death were created, and the world was set in motion.

The New Testament calls our attention to the in-breaking reign of God. The message of Jesus was one of seeing, believing, and trusting in the empowering presence of God. God is doing new things, Jesus proclaimed, but only those with new minds and hearts can see a new world breaking through the cracks of the old. Jesus offered a new set of values, teaching us how to live on the edge of a new tomorrow. We must make a choice, however, to embrace these new values and to live in a new way. The spiritual masters called this process of change “conversion”: an unlearning of old habits that block the light of the new reality and a turning of the mind and heart in grace in order to entrust our lives to the living presence of God. Only if we believe in a new power in our midst can we let go of the old reins of control and allow the Spirit to draw us toward a new future.

Saint John Paul II wrote, “when its concepts and conclusions can be integrated into the wider human culture and its concerns for ultimate meaning and value.”7 Religion, too, develops best when its doctrines are not abstract and fixed in an ancient past but integrated into the wider stream of life. Albert Einstein once said that “science without religion is lame and religion without science is blind.”8 So too, John Paul II wrote: “Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.”9 Teilhard de Chardin saw that dialogue alone between the disciplines is insufficient; what we need is a new synthesis of science and religion, drawing insights from each discipline into a new unity. In a remarkable letter to the director of the Vatican Observatory, John Paul II wrote: The church does not propose that science should become religion or religion science. On the contrary, unity always presupposes the diversity and integrity of its elements. Each of these members should become not less itself but more itself in a dynamic interchange, for a unity in which one of the elements is reduced to the other is destructive, false in its promises of harmony, and ruinous of the integrity of its components. We are asked to become one. We are not asked to become each other. . . . Unity involves the drive of the human mind towards understanding and the desire of the human spirit for love. When human beings seek to understand the multiplicities that surround them, when they seek to make sense of experience, they do so by bringing many factors into a common vision. Understanding is achieved when many data are unified by a common structure. The one illuminates the many: it makes sense of the whole. . . . We move towards unity as we move towards meaning in our lives. Unity is also the consequence of love. If love is genuine, it moves not towards the assimilation of the other but towards union with the other. Human community begins in desire when that union has not been achieved, and it is completed in joy when those who have been apart are now united.10 The words of the late pope highlight the core of catholicity: consciousness of belonging to a whole and unity as a consequence of love.

inter-thinking humanity as a new type of organism

to be human is to have “a ceaseless drive toward meaning and truth…there is a dynamic thrust to the human intellect that constantly presses toward the fullness of meaning and truth in the Absolute.”18

To think is to unify,

What you hold, may you [always] hold, What you do, may you [always] do and never abandon. But with swift pace, light step, Unswerving feet, So that even your steps stir up no dust, May you go forward Securely, joyfully, and swiftly, On the path of prudent happiness, Not believing anything, Not agreeing with anything That would dissuade you from this resolution Or that would place a stumbling block for you on the way, So that you may offer your vows to the Most High In the pursuit of that perfection To which the Spirit of the Lord has called you. —Clare of Assisi “The Second Letter to Agnes of Prague” Prayer

we are to progress or evolve, we must release ourselves from religious individualism and confront the general religious experience, which is cosmic and evolutionary, and involve ourselves in it.

Technology is a new evolutionary means of convergence; it is accelerating evolution by causing humankind to concentrate upon itself through complex levels of information.

In Bonaventure’s view, one’s relationship with God influences the destiny of creation and the consummation of history. Our lives not only make a difference but a cosmic difference.

The new universe story is the intercommunion of life itself, of each part with the whole. Everything is in communion in the vast web of the universe. The intense communion within the material world enables life to emerge into being. Living forms are

There is no thought, prayer, or action that is not radically cosmic in its foundations, expressions, and effects. Hence, there is no sacredness apart from the secularity of the world. The mistake of Western thought, Panikkar says, was to begin with identifying God as the Supreme Being, which resulted in God being turned into a human projection. But the divine dimension of reality is not an object of human knowledge; it is, rather, the depth-dimension to everything that exists. Panikkar called this complex reality a cosmotheandric whole, in which divinity, humanity, and cosmos form a trinitarian reality. By insisting on Scholastic theology as the basis of religious thinking, religion has cut itself off from the related disciplines of science and philosophy. Today we have three loosely related disciplines—theology, philosophy, and science—each with its own methods, language, and concepts. Instead of having a cosmo-religious myth to provide meaning and purpose to human life, we have independent myths of science, religion, and philosophy. We can study each area and get a degree in one particular area without ever having to think about the other two areas. God remains locked up in Scholastic categories rather than being encountered as the immanent ground of dynamic being and cosmic life. To separate theology from science and philosophy is to destroy the cosmic genetic code.

Teilhard believed that each person is a universe wherein the dust of experience is gathered into a unity.

Each individual is “the incommunicable expression of a conscious point of view upon the universe. Thus the task for every person is to build her or his soul; that is, each must assemble the widely scattered elements of one’s experience into a unified whole.

What we think and how we act in the universe influence how the goal of the universe will be attained.

European theology, for all its brilliance and evident insight, is too much a Western historical product. What we have today, he states, “is a tribal Christology of the last two thousand years which is centered almost exclusively on its own concerns, with almost total neglect of other human religious experiences, a Christology for the internal purposes of Christians, perhaps even to conquer the world.

Since the rise of the modern university, knowledge has advanced without soul, becoming power without aim. The modern university has become an obstacle to the universe, that is, integral wholeness, insofar as it does not educate us humans to bear the universe in our beings or a consciousness that the universe bears us in its being. Merton writes: “It mass produces uneducated graduates who are unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and complete artificial charade which they call ‘life.’”18 Instead of education for the flourishing of life’s wholeness, we educate to disconnect and die. Our universities have become fragmented silos of specialties where no two people speak the same language on any given day. Students are encouraged to succeed in their studies, not to contemplate truth, as if success is the goal of study. If contemporary education is failing the cosmos, it is because we have lost the integral relationship between living and loving. Unless we change the way we think, we will not change the way we act. Our mechanized world of mechanized systems with mechanized humans can no longer continue. We are fragmenting fast. The beginning of a sustainable future must begin with the integral knowledge of God, self, and cosmos.

The former superior general of the Jesuit Order, Pedro Arrupe, illumined the heart of love: Nothing is more practical than finding God, than falling in Love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, whom you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in Love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.

According to their sacred texts, the earth was created in seven stages. First, the sky came into being—this was an inverted bowl of beautiful stone. Second, the water was created at the bottom of the sky shell, and then third, the earth that floated on water. To this the gods added one plant, one animal, and a bull, and then in the sixth stage, man. Fire was added in the seventh stage, pervading the entire world and residing in seen and unseen places. As a final act of creation the gods assembled and performed the first sacrifice. The primordial plant, the bull, and the man were crushed and from them the vegetable, animal, and human realms were created and populated the earth. New life and death were created, and the world was set in motion.5 The Noble Ones performed rituals that reenacted this primordial sacrifice to maintain cosmic order and ensure the continuation of the lifecycle. Libations were performed in the home, for example, of water or fire to return these vital elements to the gods to support them, and a perpetual fire was kept burning. The Indo-Iranians revered life, and like all pre-axial peoples, they felt a strong affinity between themselves and animals. They ate only consecrated animal flesh that had been offered to the gods with prayers to ensure the animal’s safe return to the soul of the bull. They believed the soul of the bull was the life energy of the animal world, whose spirit was energized through their sacrifice of animal blood. This nourished the deity and helped the gods look after the animal world and ensured plenty.6 The “catholicity” of the Noble Ones, like that of many of the pre-axial religions, was a consciousness of connectivity to the plants, the animals, the sky, and to the whole of nature. They believed gods or spirits in nature influenced human action, and in turn, human action (and ritual) had its effects on nature. Their sense of the whole was a sense of belonging to a web of life guided by supernatural forces or deities. All things shared the same breadth of life—animals, trees, humans. All things were bound together.

It was Plato who gave the word cosmos its meaning as world. His Timaeus provided the first description of reality as forming an ordered whole, being both good and beautiful. The cosmos, according to Plato, was created by a divine craftsman who strove to render his work as similar as possible to the perfect model.12 The Good, the supreme principle, exercises power over physical reality and influences the conduct of the human person who, through the Good, turns his or her soul into a coherent whole (ethics) and gives the public sphere the unity it would otherwise be without. The Timaeus describes cosmology required by a particular anthropology. The plan for human life is an imitation of the cosmos. The wise person knows the cosmos and sees in it the mirror of his or her own wisdom. The individual soul was to imitate the regularity of the movements of the soul of the world. Nature has drawn us upright that we might be inspired by what is “cosmic.” In Plato’s world we stand upright to contemplate the stars.

We have an invitation to go to church in a new way, by praying before the new leaves budding through dormant trees or the wobbly flowers by the side of the road pushing through the solid earth…. [Like Francis of Assisi,] we too can sing with the air we breathe, the sun that shines upon us, the rain that pours down to water the earth ... For we are Easter people, and we are called to celebrate the whole earth as the body of Christ. Every act done in love gives glory to God: a pause of thanksgiving, a laugh, a gaze at the sun, or just raising a toast to your friends at your virtual gathering.