How does Teilhard’s lens help to see both the depth of mystical insight but the scope as well?

Today’s Post

     Last week we explored how Teilhard’s approach to mysticism moves it from the ‘ecstatic experience of a person removed from the pedestrian vagaries of ‘normal’ life’ to that which can be seen as simply the practice of clarifying our vision of ‘life as it is lived’.

This week we will explore this new facet a little further, recognizing that as our mysticism seeks a deeper understanding of life, this depth also offers a ‘wider’ field of view of reality.

Wider Vision

While ‘grounding’ mysticism by way of empirical resonance and balancing emotions is necessary for such clearer vision, the ‘field of view’ of the mystical sight must also increase to take in a more complete grasp of what is being seen.  Once again, the ‘evolutionary hermeneutic’ comes into play.  Whatever is seen is lodged in ‘spectra’.  Examples of such spectra are categories of ‘past and future’, ‘cause and effect’, and ‘precedent and consequence’.

Our human evolution clearly moves forward in a trial-and-error process, as we saw in addressing the risks of human evolution.  Despite its fragility and all the attendant danger, it is full of examples of improvements to our welfare that occur once causes of problems are more clearly understood and consequences more completely anticipated.  The improvements which emerge from these ‘fix-break-fix’ cycles can objectively be seen to emerge, as we saw in looking at how evolution works in the human species.  Norberg’s articulation of nine areas of human evolution not only show progress in human welfare, but they also show examples of how human society has better learned from its past while it is improving its planning for the future.

How does this aspect of mysticism play out at the personal level?  Obviously, most actions that we take are preceded by our memory of the consequences of similar past actions, and anticipation of the consequences that can be expected.  Teilhard recommends that we always attempt the widest possible perspective on any situation which faces us.  His ‘widest’ perspective was ‘evolution’.

“Evolution: a theory, a system, a hypothesis? Not at all, but much more than that, a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems, must henceforth bow and satisfy if they are to be thinkable and true. A light illuminating all facts, a curve all lines must follow.”

   This perspective plays out in our personal level, as he writes,

“..I doubt that whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that the is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him.”

   Such a grand vision, one with no less than a ‘field of view’ of the entire cosmos and its awesome depth of time, must be approached incrementally.  How can this be done?

The Widening of Vision

A very practical first step to understanding reality is to see it as an evolution by which we, and our surroundings, are being carried in a current towards the future.  Seeing it from this perspective is to begin seeing everything in terms of its predecessor and its successor.  Teilhard saw this particular context as essential to understanding anything.  He gives the example of the ‘cell’:

“…the cell, like everything else in the world, cannot be understood (i.e, incorporated in a coherent system of the universe) unless we situate it on an evolutionary line between a past and a future”

 Rohr notes how Bonaventure sees this as a step toward seeing God more clearly in life.

“Unless we are able to view things in terms of how they originate, how they are to return to their end, and how God shines forth in them, we will not be able to understand.”

   Such an insight, in addition to the better ‘seeing’ that it affords, also moves us to Teilhard’s second step of ‘fuller being’.  Rohr goes on to note that

“Bonaventure’s theology is never about trying to placate a distant or angry God, earn forgiveness, or find some abstract theory of justification. He is all cosmic optimism and hope! Once we lost this kind of mysticism, Christianity became preoccupied with fear, unworthiness, and guilt much more than being included in–and delighting in–an all-pervasive plan that is already in place.”

He goes on to say

“If we had listened to Bonaventure, he could have helped us move beyond the negative notion of history being a “fall from grace” and invited us into a positive notion of history as a slow but real transformation and emergence/evolution into ever-greater consciousness of who we eternally are in God. Bonaventure began with original blessing instead of original sin, and he ended where he began.”

   Bonaventure’s essential first step of mysticism also includes an example of what can be seen by applying it.  Bonaventure, as read by Rohr, understands that human evolution, and hence our personal spiritual evolution, is less a ‘fall’ from an initial perfection to a current state of imperfection, but more a ‘rise’ to a ‘fuller’ state.  Seeing it this way leads us to the understanding that we are heirs to a potentiality which is gratuitously granted us by the nature of our evolutionary process (Rohr’s ‘all pervasive plan’).  We are not, as Luther asserted, “piles of excrement” requiring Jesus’ sacrifice (or, as Luther put it, ‘covering by Christ’) but sparks of consciousness requiring an ever more complete understanding of our innate goodness.

Next Week

This week we extended our look at ‘secular mysticism’ to the recognition of how the deepening of mysticism can lead to a broadening of its ‘field of view’

Next week we will look at a few examples of how ‘secular mysticism’ pervades everyday life.