Evolving Providence

This is  the fourteenth Liturgical Sunday in Ordinary time. My reflection on the Gospel kept reminding me of an interesting conference I attended recently. The reading from the Gospel of Mark 6: 1 - 6 explained the exchange between Jesus and his townspeople. Jesus came to his hometown ready to cure, heal and restore people back to God. The towns people listened as he preached, taught and explain the scriptures. They observed his zeal, enthusiasm and passion for proclaiming the coming of the reign of God. They even acknowledged that Jesus had extraordinary powers, and were astounded with the miracles they witnessed. But they were not convinced that there was more to Jesus than the village carpenter who lived down the street. They closed their minds to the truth which they witnessed and which their hearts affirmed and instead questioned how a mere carpenter could possess the type of power that Jesus had.

Unlike Jesus' townspeople, my eyes were significantly opened by the insights from Sr. Ilia Delio’s presented during the Conference of Women of Providence in Collaboration conference I attended with some of our CDP sisters in June 2015.

With Ilia Delio

CDP Sisters and Associates

Liturgical Dance

With other Liturgical Dancers

Delio gave an expansive understanding of evolution and elaborately explained why we need to reimage our traditional notions of God and creation. Delio  explained that evolution has come to be understood not as some narrow theory explaining biological phenomena, but a cosmic process that challenges the plausibility of a static and unchanging notion of God and God’s relationship to all of reality. She claims that evolution, the meta-narrative of our age, implies that all being is whole and is advancing in complexity and unity through time. This cosmic process she said, is and has always been at work, is accelerating, and has implications for religious systems and for theology

In the Conference, Delio began by detailing the medieval Ptolemaic worldview with its theological and cosmological implications and then explores Copernicus’ heliocentrism, which challenged existing notions of the hierarchy of being. With God no longer the source of unity, a disconnect emerged between God, the human and the cosmos. By the 18th century, said Delio  the divide between science, especially cosmology, and theology widened further, relegating theology to fixed speculation and allying science with dynamic change. Delio said that evolution, at first interpreted narrowly, came to be understood as the dynamic process that generated novelty, change, complexity and convergence, a process that impelled and attracted all toward the future.

But for her, the preoccupation of science with objectivity gave only a partial understanding of this process. What was needed according to Delio, is some way to capture its wholeness and explore its force of attraction, its energy.  Delio then borrows heavily from the mystical Teilhard, who suggested that the evolutionary process, with its orientation toward unity, complexity and consciousness, is driven by the fundamental energy of love. Delio proffers that love is the means by which global wholeness will emerge.

What are the implications for Christian life?
Delio described how the medieval understanding of the unity of being unraveled and the devastating consequences for intellectual life and human well-being. She explored the synthesis of evolution and its ramifications for many aspects of inquiry, and then using the insights of Teilhard she attempts to show through contemplative understanding the meta-narrative of evolution how the Christian might re-imagine how to live. Delio said that religion must grow and redefine itself. She is also convinced that the kind of religion that humanity lacks cannot be found in the religious traditions of the past which are linked to static categories. What is needed she said, is a new religion full of dynamics and conquests. One that can use all the free energy of the earth to build humankind into greater unity. Delio believes that today people are looking for a religion of mankind and of earth, because faith in God in this world are a source of great spiritual energy in human being. Quoting Teihard, Delio explained that Christianity is a religion of evolution, why is why Christ cannot be limited to any one religion.  So the “stasis of religion, is the stifling of religion” convergence of all religion is possible said Delio when we harness the energies of love for the forward movement of evolution. So as humans, Delio believes that we are a process and unfolding, we evolve to never stop evolving. We experience inner evolution by letting go in other to let flow, by leaning into suffering, by recognizing our deep relatedness to all of creation and by openness, kenosis. Since now is all we have, Delio advised that we should learn to live in the now, mind body, heart and create structures to fit the moment, structure that change as needs change. She also said that we should remain open to new ideas, new patterns and not to allow ourselves to be fixated because we are still been created. As dynamic becoming, we also need to recognize that we live in an unfinished universe where everything is connected. We have to accept the truth of our nature which is incompleteness. This enables us to live in the primacy of love as well as recover the capacity of wonder and awe. For Delio, we evolve to never stop evolving, to be alive is to ceaselessly beginning, every end is a new beginning and every arrival, a new departure. We can change the world only when we change the way we think. Unless we change the way we think we cannot change the way we act said Delio.  God is the power of the future who is within us and up ahead. So we must advance all together in a direction in which all together we join and find completion of the earth – that all may be one.

I learned a lot from all that I heard, and the passion with which Ilia Delio talked about her prophetic message for the world. I defiantly agree that we need to change a lot of how we have been oriented to think and act. I hope that as you read this, you will take this message to heart and act as God’s spirit moves you.

Link to Ilia Delio’s books http://www.amazon.com/Ilia-Delio/e/B001JS2T2E

YouTube Videos:  https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ilia+delio