Contemplation: Learning to Love the Way God Loves
God expresses God's self by creating a universe that reflects God's love. This self-expression created a universe that could delight in it as it grew and evolved over billions of years. God delighted in the humid race that emerged from the evolving earth so that they could become conscious of how much God loves them.
Imagine yourself surrounded by an omnipresent God holding the human race and loving existence and wanting to be lovingly involved with them, giving countless gifts to people, individually and collectively.
Ask for the grace to discover the thousands of ways that God loves you and all of creation. Ask for the grace to experience in your body and soul what it feels like to be so loved uniquely and unconditionally by God. Ask for the grace to feel tangibly connected to God. Ask for the grace to be immersed in God and God's creation and to feel deep gratitude and wonder at the boundless love God shows in every moment.
The second stage of loving: Presence
Ignatius suggests that we contemplate how God is present to us and is at the side of each element of God's creation, including you. You are both gift and recipient of the gift. God is beside you at all times.
(Feel free to use the seven areas for contemplation that we used last week. Perhaps you focused upon one of the seven and this week another area speaks to you. Also, review this list of Principles of Creativity as a consideration.)
After you spend time reflecting on God's loving presence alongside and in each of God's gifts, formulate a response appropriate to this experience of loving presence. Perhaps a second stage prayer, emphasizing presence, might go something like this:
Just as you, O God, remain present to your gifts and just as you remain at my side, I choose to respect your presence in those gifts by not wasting them or disregarding them or never using them, but by gratefully rejoicing and using them. In my loving of you, I also wish to remain present to you. To do this, I beg the grace to remain conscious that you are always at my side.
Teilhardian Principle 4: Evolution is based primarily on spirit, not on matter.
Teilhard's thought is based on the fundamental theological belief that spirit is what started it all. Our loving creator God, pure spirit, wanted to express the divine self outside the divine self. This divine loving is what we call The Big Bang. Creation came about because God spoke a creative Word. That Word, when spoken, was filled with the Holy Spirit, as the Spirit gave life and meaning to every particle of matter and quantum field of energy. God's Spirit gave existence to creation and continues to keep it in existence.
- Spirit is the origin and term of evolution. Spirit created matter, remains with it, sustains it, and will bring it to fulfillment
- Spirit is the power of unity scattered among the fragments of the universe. Spirit is the unifying force and creation bringing all elements to higher levels of unity or oneness.
- Spirit is the force driving everything towards synthesis and sublimation, towards higher levels of existence. Spirit explains why everything in the physical world is evolving.
- Spirit is continually leading the universe towards some more spiritual state. Jesus invites us to join with him in transforming the world once again with the evolutionary power of love.
- Spirit is personal. The Holy Spirit is a divine person and wants to inspire us individually and collectively to create a world reborn and God-consciousness.
Teilhardian Principle 5: We live and move and have our being in the divine milieu.
How does God fit into my life?
Transcendent means that God is far away from me, elsewhere, remote, in heaven. Transcendence is not the same as remoteness. God is totally other. There is nothing to which to compare God. This is useful when we praise God or pray thee Our Father.
Imminent means that God dwells inside me, as close to me as my own heart. I go to the deepest recesses of myself in prayer and meet God there. This is useful during our reception of the Eucharist and meditation.
Most believers relate to a God who is both transcendent and imminent. There is a third way. From the very first moment of creation, God has been present to everything. This is the omnipresence of God. God creates a divine milieu in which everything that exists lives and moves and has its being.
Fish do not know they are swimming in water. We do not notice the invisible air surrounding us. The same for the spiritual realm. We go through life mostly unaware of the divine milieu. We can begin to see it everywhere. It makes us all one and keeps us all one, yet allowing one’s unique individuality. We are never isolated from each other because we are part of an organically integrated whole.
Tangible items are in the milieu. Intangible things like your thoughts, wishes, and worries are also in the divine milieu. Nothing exists can be outside it. Teilhard takes Ignatius’ “finding God in all things” to the next level.
Teilhardian Principle 6: Everything has a “within” as well as a “without.”
Every physical thing can be measured by scientific tools. Everything that has a without also has a within. Each person has an inner life that cannot be reduced to something that science can look at in a microscope. Your within is different from any or all the roles you play in life. You can be stripped of everything and still there would be a you, namely your within. This might include your knowledge, beliefs, values, loves, appreciation of beauty, creative ideas, memories, longings and fears, songs you know. Every human being has an immense within.
Everything including plants, trees, rocks, lakes, moons, also has a within that is their unique identity. Each plant and flower in your garden has a unique identity and history.
Every atom and molecule of the universe is being held by spirit. That trillions of cells in your body can trace their ancestry back to the very first moment of creation. Each particle's particular story is known and held by God's mind in spirit.
Teilhard wants you to learn to see the within of each thing, especially the inner life of each person.
The Ignatian Adventure
Read pages 23-29 and pages 35-38.
Song: Creation, by Haydn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuIs7R2BpvQ
WhatsApp
I invite you to sign onto this communal sharing app. It allows for group conversations and sharing of resources without having to share your email address. It allows you to share information among yourselves without making me your conduit. It is a closed group.
https://chat.whatsapp.com/JrTudgr3B0p8tWP3KW9JZY?mode=gi_t
Introductions on WhatsApp. It might be helpful to share generally where you are, what your experience with the Ignatian Exercises are, and your connection with the evolutionary thought of Teilhard de Chardin, SJ. Say anything you would like about your family, your church situation, and your prayer routines.
All Notes will be Accessible through this website: To the Frontiers
https://predmoresj.blogspot.com/
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/5993257199134137466/8445800065910273285
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/5993257199134137466/7403998345495488073
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/5993257199134137466/7698742011620844801
Principles of Creativity
1. Creativity is the natural order of life. Life is energy - pure creative energy.
2. An underlying, indwelling creative force infuses all of life - including ourselves.
3. When we open ourselves to creativity, we open ourselves to God's creativity within us and our lives.
4. We are creations, and in turn, we are meant to continue creativity by being creative ourselves.
5. Creativity is God's gift to us. Using our creativity is our gift back to God.
6. The refusal to be creative is self-will and is counter to God's designs for us.
7. When we explore our creativity, we open ourselves to God: we move in a positive orderly direction.
8. As we open our creative channel to God, many gentle, powerful changes are expected.
9. It is safe to open up to greater creativity.
10. Our creative dreams and yearnings come from a divine source. As we move toward our dreams, we move toward our divinity.
The Seven Areas that we can use for Contemplation
If you find your gratitude and wonder naturally flowing in response to one of the divine gifts, stay with that feeling. You may spend the entire time with this single movement. Do not feel as if you have to cover all of the seven areas listed below. The graces from this exercise can never be exhausted.
- Consider the gifts that astronomy has revealed to us. Ignatius may not have been aware of the extent of this revelation as he had no sense of the vast number of galaxies for the age of the universe.
- Observe the gifts God has been giving us that the life sciences had revealed. All of these gifts are active, interactive, and evolving. As life forms kept evolving in complexity over time - From sensation to perception to movement to social life - We observed that consciousness became the primary emergent property of life. Evolution keeps moving forward.
- Recognize evolution at work in all things. Saint Paul tells us that creation is still incomplete and still in process. Through discoveries in science and technology, we recognize the fundamental law driving creation onward and upward.
- God's gifts on the microscopic side reveal by science show the incredible complexity and activity of each living being - the human genome, the trillions of cells that live in our body, each cell itself a living being with the highly complex intra active life.
- Recognize the gifts of the earth itself. All the beauties of mountains, plains, and skies. All the power of tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, deserts.
- Reflect on God's gift that flow from human consciousness and society, such as civilization, music, art, literature, society, communication, transportation, recreation, science, mathematics, architecture, ecology, entertainment, film, radio, Internet.
- Consider all the gifts you have personally received - talent, skills, education, opportunities, friends, family. Remember your five sentences as well as memory, intelligent, willpower, imagination, choice, the ability to love and make commitments, the ability to accomplish things, to create things that never existed before, could build teams, to worship.
What science tells us about creation and the cosmos.
- Our universe is unimaginably large.
- Everything in our universe exists as constantly dynamic motion and change.
- Everything in motion is governed by layers of law and system conditioned by randomness.
- The intrinsic character of life is marked by conflict, predatory violence, suffering, and death.
- Science consistently reveals new dimensions of the universe.
Thoughts about God
- God is personal, but not a big person in the sky. God is not anthropomorphic.
- God can be seen as this-worldly, but God cannot be reduced to anything finite.
- It requires imagination.
- For a Christian, conceptions of God are substantially enhanced by a consideration of JC.
Theological References to God
God is pure act of Being: 13th C., Aquinas: God is subsisting being itself. Borders on mysticism. Being is an infinitive; its opposite: nonbeing or nothingness. Aquinas defines God by contrast with all finite beings in existence. Particular, finite, temporary. Augustine: act and potency. God’s very nature is ‘to be.’ God subsists as pure infinite power of being of all that is.
God is Ground of Being: Aquinas and Eckhart: mystical appropriation. Revelation. The source of meaning and dynamic principle of energy. “the human mind is grasped by mystery, by the ground of being and meaning.” Conceiving God as ground of being proposes a transcendence of God that recognizes the immanence of God to all things; all is rooted in God’s power of being that sustains things from within.
God is Serendipitous Creativity: Gordon Kaufman, God is a transcendent dynamic mystery. Human creativity – to imagine new things and to effect them. Creativity is the idea of the coming into being through time of the previously non-existent, the new, the novel that we have come to witness around us. Creativity happens. God’s love for human beings and God’s creative impulse toward human flourishing.
God is Incomprehensible Mystery: Karl Rahner, SJ, To know ourselves is to know something about being itself. Clarity of self-consciousness, the ability to know the self even as the self entertains contact with the world outside of the self. Holy Mystery that draws people in and makes a claim on them. Radical closeness to God bestows genuine autonomy. An infinite expanse that can and does encompass everything cannot be itself encompassed.
God is Transcendent Presence: Thomas O’Meara, metaphysics of revelation. A real transcendent presence makes itself known within human experience. The ultimate concern of a person cannot be less than a person. Presence implies personal Presence. God/world; grace/nature; grace/free will; God/ human person; theology/science; Christian life/worldly life. Presence satisfies the ultimate as well as immediate/spontaneous character of ordinary experience and language about God.
