How do we use Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to search for God in our lives?

 Today’s Post

Lst week we moved from a working definition of God to seeing how this God is manifest in the roots of our personal development, Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ shows clearly how these roots are extensions of the same upwelling of complexity that underpins cosmic evolution.  While awareness of this agency in our lives is a first step toward connecting to it, how is the second step, that of connecting to it, possible?

This week we will move on to explore how the concept of a ‘personal relationship with God’ emerges naturally from this use of Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.

The History of ‘Looking For God’

Thus far, we have come to a ‘concept of God’ without recourse to scripture, dogma, or miracles.  While this may well be consistent with Professor Dawkins’ recognition that such a natural force is indeed at work in the ”raising of the world as we know it into its present complex existence”, it does not address what’s involved in a personal relationship with such a force.

We can start with Teilhard’s assertion from last week that

  “It is through that which is most incommunicably personal in us that we make contact with the universal. “

   If Teilhard’s assertion is correct, it seems clear that the very act of being a person is the starting point for experiencing such a God.  If the God that we have defined is indeed the essential center of our existence, and this essential center lies along the axis of the unfolding of the universe, it would seem that finding such a transcendent source of ourselves would be very straightforward.  The myriad, oft- confusing and frequently contradictory methods offered by the many world religions are evidence that this isn’t necessarily the case.

A case in point can be seen in the many instances of ‘dualism’ which can be found in our own Western expressions of Christianity.  As Jonathan Sacks sees it:

“Much more so than Judaism, Christianity divides: body/soul, physical/spiritual, heaven/earth, this life/next life, evil/good, with the emphasis on the second of each.”

   He sees the entire set of contrasts as massively Greek, with much debt to Plato.  Further, these ‘either/or’ dichotomies can be seen as a departure from the typically Jewish perspective of “both/and.”

As Sacks points out, this duality tends to move God from the intimacy found in Judaism (and in the teachings of Jesus) to a distance that can only be overcome through the bewildering matrix of rituals of atonement, forgiveness and salvation which have come to characterize expressions of Christianity.  This point of view, captured in Blondel’s fear that as we regard our relationship with God from the standpoint of ‘we are here and God is there’, our search for God is sabotaged at the very outset.

Not that Christianity only expresses such distance.  If one takes John at his word,

 “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”

   Then Blondel’s statement that

 “It is impossible to say, “I am here, and God is there”

   makes much more sense.  It acknowledges that the act of God’s creative energy in me is necessary for me to make such a statement.

Blondel, Teilhard, Sacks and the contemporary theologian Richard Rohr all decry how this message of John, a logical conclusion from the teachings of Jesus and the theology of Paul, is frequently lost in the subsequent evolution of the Greek-influenced Church.  Thomas Jefferson, an early practitioner of Dawkins’ goal of “stripping the baggage” from traditional Christianity, sought to extract the essential morality of Jesus from the webs of duality which grew as Christianity was increasingly influenced by Greek philosophy.

This duality undermines the search for God within.  If we start with the assumption that “We are here and God is there”, the search is, as Blondel asserts, hobbled at the start.

All such searches begin with the facades and scaffolding that we inherit from our beginnings, which become frameworks which make it safe for us to act in a world saturated with unknown and potentially dangerous consequences of those actions.  They may keep us safe in such a world, but like all walls, they can keep us enclosed at the same time.   To discover our inner reality requires awareness of, negotiation with, and selective filtering of these artifacts.

This requires an open mind, and as universally acknowledged, a mind is a difficult thing to open.

This is not a new problem.  The subject of searching for our inner core has been the subject of religious thought for many centuries.  While the approaches found in the many religious expressions might be bewildering and often contradictory, there are nonetheless many common aspects.

The Next Post

This week we focused Teilhard’s ‘lens’ on the history of ‘looking for God’, and how the focus of the Christian church slowly shifted from the intimacy expressed in Jewish tradition to the Greek-influenced ‘over against’ decried by Blondel.

But this does not answer the second part of our question: what’s involved in a ‘relationship’ with such a God?   Having seen how we are connected to God by participating in this cosmic upwelling of complexity, next week we will continue to address how such a relationship can be achieved.