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Page 11 of 11 For Teilhard the world was a miracle of wonder, revealing a beauty barely glimpsed by the rest of us. For Teilhard it revealed the interconnectedness of all things, it revealed the face of God; it revealed the power and the energy, the incomprehensible love of our Creator God.
Even Einstein recognized the power of wonder: “There are only two ways to live your life,” He said. “One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is.”
Teilhard knew, as we are beginning to discover, that earth is spiritual, that o it knew all along that life, conscious beings, consciousness was coming. Many years after Teilhard’s death, Freeman Dyson, a professor of physics at Princeton University, said, “The more I study the structure of the universe, the clearer it is that the universe must have known from the beginning that we were coming.”
One of the amazing things is that Teilhard came to this understanding before the physicists saw it, before the scientific facts that are available to us today. For Teilhard lived as he told us:
To understand the world knowledge is not enough.
You must see it, touch it, live in its presence
And drink the vital heat of existence
In the very heart of reality.
The very heart of reality, of that which happens, of that which is going on, of the very movement of the earth, of the universe from the beginning. Such a mystery this all is! There are forces moving in the universe that have moved for 14 billion years, that have conspired, in a way, to bring you, me, into being.
Nevertheless, scientists say that were the process to be repeated it is HIGHLY UNLIKELY that anything resembling a human being would emerge. For the chance of life emerging as it did is zero probability. The chance of consciousness emerging is the same. Scientists like Sir Bernard Lovell tell us that
If the universe had emerged a fraction of a second faster or slower it would have exploded in such a way that it could never coalesce into galaxies at a later stage or it would have collapsed back on itself. So in its initial moment, a sacred moment in the epics of most peoples, the universe came into existence at a slim – almost zero- margin of possibility. This fact, and the many other extremely important transformations, like that from non-life to life, which again took place at almost zero possibility, tell us something about the fragility of the universe.
And we might add: something about the mystery of God, of creation, of our place in this creation.
Teilhard thought that to come up to full measure, the human being must become conscious of an infinite capacity for carrying himself/herself still further; . . .must realize the duties it involves, and. . .must feel its intoxicating wonder. The human must abandon all illusions of narrow individuals and extend self, intellectually and emotionally, to the dimensions of the universe; and this even though the mind reeling at the prospect of this greatness, the person should think that he/she is already in possession of the Divine, is God’s Very Self, or in oneself the artisan of Godhead.
(Writings in Time of War, 1968)
Amen.
Justine Lyons rscj
Province of the United States
Talk given at the
Gathering of RSCJ and Associates on the Spirituality of the Society
Kenwood, Albany, New York, July 2005
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