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

 Today’s Post

Last 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.

This week we will continue our employment of Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to refocus upon the process of finding God in human life.

The Search for the ‘Cosmic Spark’

As we have seen, Teilhard asserted that any search for God begins with a search within ourselves:

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

   Most of the ancient sages, including Jesus, point to the belief that the most essential core of our being must be uncovered for us to attain our most authentic expression of being.  This isn’t necessarily the ‘happiest’ or ‘most powerful’ state, but rather one in which we are ‘more complete’ and more aware of and able to achieve our full potential as persons.

Karen Armstrong, in her sweeping narrative, “The Great Transformation” identifies several areas of common ground among the six lines of thought (Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, Monotheism in Israel and philosophical rationalism in Greece) in four parts of the world that constituted a new understanding of God and Self in the ‘Axial Age’ (900-200 BCE).  She describes one of the earliest such insights in the Upanishads as:

“There is an immortal spark at the core of the human person, which, when participated in – was of the same nature as – the immortal Brahman that sustained and gave life to the entire cosmos.  This was a discovery of immense importance, and it would become a central insight in every major religious tradition.  The ultimate reality was an immanent presence in every single human being.”

Armstrong saw this emerging realization as

“For the first time, human beings were systematically making themselves aware of the deeper layers of human consciousness.  By disciplined introspection, the sages of the Axial Age were awakening to the vast reaches of selfhood that lay beneath the surface of their minds.  This was one of the clearest expressions of a fundamental principle of the Axial Age.  Enlightened persons would discover within themselves the means of rising above the world; they would experience transcendence by plumbing the mysteries of their own nature, not simply by taking part in magical rituals.”

   Through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’, God can be seen as the upwelling of complexity in evolution, the ‘cosmic spark’, that leads to the ‘person’.  From his perspective, we can begin to see how ‘plumbing the mysteries or our own nature’ is a primary means of connecting to the ‘mystery of all nature’.  It opens the door to an approach to “Finding God”.

Each of the Axial Age’s six lines of thought brought their own practices to this undertaking.  Further, with the seemingly inevitable duality that emerges in each new philosophy, many different and often contradictory practices emerged within each of the lines.  Within Christianity, for example, the influence of Greek thinking led to seeing God as ‘other’, as opposed to a universal agent of being and growth at the core of our person.

So, as it is easy to see, the path toward a connection to this inner source of life recognized by nearly all religions, is not a simple thing.  Finding a way to do so without being bound by the scaffolding and facades which abound in the canons of traditional religion can be a very difficult undertaking.

The Next Post

This week we began to address the search for God as an active, immanent agent of our personal life.  But this does not answer the second part of our question: what does it mean to say that we can have 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 address the undertaking of such a relationship.