References are to the kindle version.
Wholeness and wholemaking that emerges from the nexus of catholicity, cosmology, and consciousness. The early Greeks coined the word catholic to describe attunement to the physical order, so that catholicity meant living in harmony with the stars. To live in catholicity was to have a sense of the cosmos or the whole order of things, including physical and spiritual things.130
Catholicity began as a consciousness of the whole order of things (cosmos), over time it became detached from cosmology and conflated with the pope, Rome, and the institutional Church. Catholic universalism became equivalent to power, authority, and moral order. But as Maalouf writes: “The truth is that Catholicity is not an abstract concept, and it does not mean the universalization of one culture, but the universalization of the human being.”2 Catholicity does not mean that everyone is to become Catholic; rather, to be catholic is to be aware of belonging to a whole and to act according to the whole, including the galaxies and stars, earth, animals, plants, and human life. To paraphrase Saint Augustine: “You have made us for wholeness, O Lord, and our hearts are restless151
Sister Catherine R. O’Connor, CSJ, writes: The sense of the sacredness of the earth and of man’s rootedness in it could be, in conjunction with ritual and sacrament, a rich source of nourishment for the human spirit. Teilhard’s particular thrust in the area of the importance of human action and passion in making ‘contact’ with God through the earth would add a new dimension to an approach to Christianity that still tends to be merely legal and moral.4163
Teilhard had a sense of “deep catholicity,” an intrinsic wholeness at the heart of life yearning to become more whole in and through the human person. He described this wholeness as “Omega,” a oneness already within and yet ahead of us, drawing us onward toward greater unity in love. For Teilhard, modern science awakens us to a new sense of catholicity and empowers us to participate in evolution as co-creators of the emerging whole.169
Catholicity reflects divine incarnational energy at the heart of cosmic evolution.175
cosmos. My explorations in this book begin with certain premises: First, Catholicity is first and foremost linked with cosmology. It arises with the introduction of space into the physical order creating a “cosmos,” an orderly connectedness of reality. Catholicity, therefore, is based on the Greek understanding of cosmos as a three-dimensional sphere rather than a two-dimensional flat earth. Second, Catholicity is a function of consciousness. The rise of catholicity and cosmology takes place in the axial period in which the human person emerges as individual subject. Catholicity is awareness of the one amid the many through the human person whose consciousness “catholicizes” or unifies the many parts. Third, Catholicity is consciousness of the whole, an orientation toward universality or turning together as one.177
John Haughey, SJ, whose book, Where Is Knowing Going, awakened me to catholicity in a wider narrative. However, the work of French philosopher Rémi Brague enabled me to understand catholicity in its relation to cosmology, as the Greeks first conceived this idea. To this end I examine catholicity on four different levels: (1) catholicity in nature, including Big Bang cosmology and quantum consciousness; (2) catholicity and the human person; (3) catholicity and Jesus; and (4) the institutionalization of catholicity or the Catholic Church. Chapter 1 examines Brague’s principal187
There is an intrinsic relationship between catholicity and consciousness. The rise of consciousness and complex wholeness simultaneously in nature undergirds the profound role consciousness plays in realizing wholeness on the human level. If nature bears within it what we might call an intrinsic catholicity, why is wholeness so difficult on the human level?209
The human person is one of desire and decision. How we think, what we think, what enters or leaves our minds, where we focus our minds—all shape our actions and, in turn, our world. On the human level where there is free will and intellect, the whole is not a given; it is a choice in relation to God, neighbor, and earth community. For the Christian the choice for wholeness is embedded in the gospel life, following the words of Jesus: “I have come so that you may have life and have it to the full” (Jn 10:10). We are to focus our minds on the whole and choose the whole for the sake of abundant life.214
Discuss the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist as new forms of relatedness with Christ in an expanding field of compassionate love.225
The diminishment of catholicity by institutionalization and alienation from worldly affairs relates to the development of Catholicism’s teaching on the four last things: heaven, hell, death, and final judgment.226
Chapter 8 takes up Saint Paul’s injunction to “put on the mind of Christ” and considers what this means in terms of quantum consciousness and spirituality. Here I focus more specifically on training the mind for unified consciousness.242
Centuries before Etty, Francis of Assisi came to similar insights through a deep, christic mindfulness, and I briefly explore his path to a “uni-verse” through the centrality of love and the poverty of letting go into a wider embrace of life.247
What are we called to today, as citizens of the universe, as followers of Jesus Christ and as members of the institutional Church?251
Pope Francis (Jose Maria Bergoglio), in his late seventies, brings a new spirit to the Church that reflects a consciousness of catholicity that we explore here. His is an inner spirit of freedom grounded in the love of God, guided by the gospel message of the new kingdom at hand, and open to a world of change. He desires a Church on the margins, where the poor and the forgotten can be brought into a new unity; a Church that advocates life at all costs and promotes peaceful life in a war-torn and violent world; a Church that models justice in an age of greed, consumerism, and power; a Church centered on the risen Christ, empowering a consciousness of the whole. This is a church leader who desperately wants to breathe a new spirit of catholicity into a world dying for wholeness and unity.255
No longer self-identify as Catholic.” This is equivalent to more than 900,000 people each year and is slightly larger than the number the Church added in baptisms and receptions into full communion in 2012.6 Gray’s statistics on all levels of Catholic life show downward trends and no signs of improvement. So while Pope Francis is seeking to expand the Church’s presence in the world, catholicity seems to be diminishing due, in part, to a growing irrelevance of institutional religion. There is an urgency today to reconnect cosmology and catholicity, not as abstract concepts, but as the reconciliation of modern science and religion.262
“Science develops best,” Saint John Paul II wrote, “when its concepts and conclusions can be integrated into the wider human culture and its concerns for ultimate meaning and value.”7 Religion, too, develops best when its doctrines are not abstract and fixed in an ancient past but integrated into the wider stream of life. Albert Einstein once said that “science without religion is lame and religion without science is blind.”8 So too, John Paul II wrote: “Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.”9 Teilhard de Chardin saw that dialogue alone between the disciplines is insufficient; what we need is a new synthesis of science and religion, drawing insights from each discipline into a new unity. In a remarkable letter to the director of the Vatican Observatory, John Paul II wrote: The church does not propose that science should become religion or religion science. On the contrary, unity always presupposes the diversity and integrity of its elements. Each of these members should become not less itself but more itself in a dynamic interchange, for a unity in which one of the elements is reduced to the other is destructive, false in its promises of harmony, and ruinous of the integrity of its components. We are asked to become one. We are not asked to become each other. . . . Unity involves the drive of the human mind towards understanding and the desire of the human spirit for love. When human beings seek to understand the multiplicities that surround them, when they seek to make sense of experience, they do so by bringing many factors into a common vision. Understanding is achieved when many data are unified by a common structure. The one illuminates the many: it makes sense of the whole. . . . We move towards unity as we move towards meaning in our lives. Unity is also the consequence of love. If love is genuine, it moves not towards the assimilation of the other but towards union with the other. Human community begins in desire when that union has not been achieved, and it is completed in joy when those who have been apart are now united.10 The words of the late pope highlight the core of catholicity: consciousness of belonging to a whole and unity as a consequence of love.268
The heart-wrenching divisions of religious wars, economic gaps, racial hatred, fears of terrorism—division upon division—to the extent that our only hope is another world, whether it is the otherworldliness of heaven or the cyber world of virtual reality. Nature reminds us, however, that in our cosmic roots we are already one.289
Can religion inspire an evolution toward unity?292
The world is not a given but a gift to create. Catholicity invites us to wake up, open our eyes, and reach for the stars to create a new world together by becoming a new community of life.292
Sister Catherine R. O’Connor, CSJ, Woman and Cosmos: The Feminine in the Thought of Teilhard de Chardin (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 150.301
It is important to point out here that I am distinguishing catholicity (with a lowercase “c”) from Catholicism (with an uppercase “C”) insofar as catholicity or orientation toward wholeness is intrinsic to nature and organic consciousness, whereas I see the institutionalization of catholicity expressed (or thwarted) in Catholicism.303
“Letter of His Holiness John Paul II to Reverend George Coyne, SJ, Director of the Vatican Observatory,” available on the vatican.va website.314
Albert Einstein, “Science and Religion,” Princeton Theological Seminary, May 19, 1939.316
We are meaning makers and storytellers. The stories we tell one another shape the meaning of our lives.323
Religion is about the deep-rooted energies of the spirit yearning for ultimate meaning and fulfillment. The word religion means literally “to be bound” or “to be bound back” (re-ligare) just as a ligament binds two bones together. Religion undergirds the unyielding longing to be bound to an ultimate source. Catholicity is not about religion per se, but it is complementary to religion because it is about wholemaking. In its Greek origin, the word catholicity is a composite of the preposition kata (according to) and the noun holos (whole), so that kath’ holou can be an adverb meaning “wholly” or katholikos, a substantive that is best rendered in English as “catholicity.”1 My understanding of catholicity, therefore, is a “sense of the whole” or “according to the whole.” The whole, however, is not a given; rather, it flows from my human consciousness and attention. The word attention means “to extend or reach out a hand.” Imagine extending your hand to reach for the stars: you see the stars, you feel connected to them, and you long to touch them. That is the type of attention or consciousness that marks catholicity. Catholicity, like consciousness itself, is not static; it is not a fixed ideal. Rather, it is an outflow of human awareness in relation to the surrounding world; it is like a connecting thread between the human person and the cosmos. Catholicity undergirds these questions: Are we aware of belonging to a whole? What are the wholes we are making through our own self-conscious acts? Walter Ong, SJ, likened catholicity to the parable of the yeast (Lk 13:20–21), that small, invisible power that spreads throughout the whole of the dough and catalyzes movement toward a unified loaf of bread.2 To catalyze (a word borrowed from modern science) means to initiate or accelerate a process of transformation. In physical nature catalytic elements are essential to chemical, biochemical, and environmental processes. The catalyst both accelerates the rate of transformation and lowers the activation energy needed for the transition state so that the process of transformation takes place more efficiently. In a similar way catholicity catalyzes the movement toward wholeness or universality by way of consciousness. Whereas universality undergirds oneness or unified wholeness, catholicity is the dynamic consciousness of the whole that makes oneness possible. In this respect catholicity is not a noun; it does not define anything. Rather, catholicity is an adjective or, better yet, a verb; it is what moves (catalyzes) a person to think, move, and orient his or her life toward making wholes from the partials of experience. Catholicity depends on how we see the world.325
Ancient civilizations tended to look at the physical and human worlds as interdependent. An imbalance in one sphere could result in an imbalance in the other. The dominant form of pre-axial consciousness was cosmic, collective, tribal, mythic, and ritualistic.355
A rich and creative harmony between primal peoples and the world of nature, a harmony which was explored, expressed, and celebrated in myth and ritual. Just as they felt themselves part of nature, so they experienced themselves as part of the tribe. It was precisely the web of interrelationships within the tribe that sustained them psychologically, energizing all aspects of their lives. To be separated from the tribe threatened them with death, not only physical but also psychological. However, their relation to the collectivity usually did not extend beyond their own tribe, for they often looked upon other tribes as hostile. Yet within their tribe they felt organically related to their group as a whole, to the lifecycles of birth and death, and to nature and the cosmos. The order of the natural cosmos followed the order in the social cosmos. That is, human activity in the public sphere had an influence on the cosmic order. Lack of order in the cosmos, for example, in the realm of plants, such as infertility, could only be repaired if one began by reestablishing the human social order. Justice among humans contributed to maintaining the world in movement. People believed that human action was required to maintain the order of the universe, and they conducted rituals and sacrifices to renew and restore it.4357
They had their gods; their beliefs about the nature of the world; and their rituals to help them understand and influence these gods, which they identified with natural and cosmic forces: the god of the sun, the gods of the earth, the moon, and the winds.369
a class of gods called Ahuras, associated with oaths and promise-keeping.372
three main Ahuras: Varuna, the guardian of order; Mithra, the god of storm, thunder, and rain; and Mazda, the lord of justice and wisdom.374
The Indo-Iranians revered life, and like all pre-axial peoples, they felt a strong affinity between themselves and animals. They ate only consecrated animal flesh that had been offered to the gods with prayers to ensure the animal’s safe return to the soul of the bull. They believed the soul of the bull was the life energy of the animal world, whose spirit was energized through their sacrifice of animal blood. This nourished the deity and helped the gods look after the animal world and ensured plenty.6 The “catholicity” of the Noble Ones, like that of many of the pre-axial religions, was a consciousness of connectivity to the plants, the animals, the sky, and to the whole of nature.386
Their sense of the whole was a sense of belonging to a web of life guided by supernatural forces or deities. All things shared the same breadth of life—animals, trees, humans. All things were bound together.392
(Axial Age or Axis Age in English) to describe a time between approximately 900 and 200 BCE when the spiritual foundations of modern humanity were established. It was a pivotal time in early human history when human beings began to reflect for the first time about individual existence and the meaning of life and death. Increasing urban civilization, initially brought about under the leadership of a priestly ruling class, encouraged trade and brought different societies closer together. But as urban life accelerated and expanded, it disrupted the old sense of order. This new way of living generated unprecedented social and political conflict and an increase in violence and aggression. Old customs could no longer be taken for granted. People began to question their own beliefs once they came into contact with others whose beliefs were different. They were challenged to look at themselves in different ways and entertain new ideas or cling steadfastly to their old ones. With a rise in population and the mixing of cultures, more people were exposed to the realities of life, such as sickness, greed, suffering, inhumanity, and social injustice. As a result, people began to experience themselves as separate from others for the very first time. In this new age, Jaspers claimed, man became conscious of being as a whole, of himself and his limitations. He experiences the tension of the world and his own powerlessness. He asks radical questions. Face to face with the void, he strives for liberation and redemption. By consciously recognizing his limits, he sets himself the highest goals. He experiences absoluteness in the depths of self-hood and in the lucidity of transcendence.7 William Thompson states that “what makes this period the ‘axis’ of human history, even our own history today, is the fact that humans emerged as ‘individuals’ in the proper sense.”8 Axial consciousness generated a new self-awareness that included awareness of autonomy and a new sense of individuality. The human person as subject emerged. The awareness of the self in the present brought with it awareness of the self after death. People began searching for more comprehensive religious and ethical concepts and to formulate a more enlightened morality where each person was responsible for his or her own destiny. During the Axial Age a new mode of thinking developed almost simultaneously in four major areas of the world: China, India, the Middle East, and Northern Mediterranean Europe. Whereas primal consciousness was tribal, axial consciousness was individual. “Know thyself” became the watchword of Greece; the Upanishads identified the atman, the transcendent center of the self. The Buddha charted the way of individual enlightenment; the Jewish prophets awakened individual moral responsibility.9 This sense of individual identity, as distinct from the tribe and nature, is the most characteristic mark of axial consciousness. This new consciousness was distinguished from pre-axial consciousness of interdependence; axial consciousness was self-reflective, analytic, and could be applied to nature in the form of scientific theories, to society in the form of social critique, to knowledge in the form of philosophy, and to religion in the form of mapping an individual spiritual journey. This self-reflective, analytic, critical consciousness stood in sharp contrast to primal mythic and ritualistic consciousness.395
severed the harmony with nature and the tribe. Axial persons were in possession of their own identity, it is true, but they had lost their organic relation to nature and community. They now ran the risk of being alienated from the matrix of being and life. With their new powers they could criticize the social structure and by analysis discover the abstract laws of science and metaphysics, but they might find themselves mere spectators of a drama of which in reality they were an integral part.10421
The Greeks’ most innovative step was the formulation of a special word for the world. The word they chose was kosmos, first used in Homer’s Iliad to mean “in good order” or the order that gives rise to beauty, such as an ornament (hence, the word cosmos is related to “cosmetics”).11430
It is interesting how a shift in understanding the cosmos gave rise to a sense of world different from the pre-axial period. Prior to the axial period—for example, among the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians—the world was thought to be a flat, two-tiered structure, with the sky above and earth below. The Greeks introduced the concept of space and conceived of the cosmos as a three-dimensional sphere with height, depth, and width. One could suggest that awareness of a spatial, three-dimensional cosmos impelled the ancient Greeks to separate human from world in a way that allowed them to discover a cosmos. In other words the human was no longer part of an interdependent nature; now the human had self-consciousness and consciousness of “other” that was called world. The word catholicity was coined to describe a consciousness of the whole, cosmos, the whole physical order of things to which the human was connected but distinct from; cosmos was the source for guiding human action. It was Plato who gave the word cosmos its meaning as world.436
The plan for human life is an imitation of the cosmos. The wise person knows the cosmos and sees in it the mirror of his or her own wisdom.449
The cosmos was a mirror for human action. The human was not simply in the world; the world was also in the human. It gave rhythm to our history, defined our aspirations, and directed our physical structure. The human (women were not allowed into Plato’s academy!) was to contemplate superior things, intelligible things, whose harmonious disposition reveals profound mysteries to us.13 Plato’s cosmology influenced thinkers of late Antiquity and the Middle Ages; the cosmos influenced what one ought to be and what one was to do. Justice was the result of the agreement between cosmos and humanity, each with its own nature, instilled by God.452
Kath’ holou (according to the whole) is not the same as kata pantos (according to all things); catholicity belongs not to the phenomenal and empirical but to the noumenal and ontological plane; it describes the essential nature of reality, not the external manifestations.462
an orientation of being toward wholeness or leavening the stuff of life to create a greater whole.16 For the Greeks, catholicity was how the human stood in relation to the stars and listened to the wind, aware that the movements of nature guided the movements of human life.465
Jesus used the word church twice in the Gospels, both in Matthew. He said, “I will build my church” (Mt 16:18), not churches but one visible, recognizable church, ecclesia, a new family united as community in God.470
The early Christians were very concerned that the new band of Jesus’s disciples would stay together and hold fast to the teachings they received from the apostles. This desire for coherent unity prompted the earliest use of the word catholic by the bishop-martyr Ignatius of Antioch. It is interesting that a bishop would be the first to use the word catholic for the newly formed Christian church. It would take someone familiar with Greek philosophy to find an appropriate word that could describe the meaning of the Christian church as the gathering of disciples together into a new whole, a new creation, centered in Jesus Christ. If the Greeks understood catholicity as human consciousness of the wider cosmos, Christians appropriated catholicity as a consciousness of the whole centered in Christ. Ignatius was immersed in the living tradition of the local church in Antioch, where the believers in Christ were first called Christian (Acts 11:26). On his way to Rome, under military escort to the Coliseum, where he was martyred for his confession of faith, he wrote, “You must all follow the bishop as Jesus Christ follows the Father, and the presbytery as you would the Apostles. Wherever the bishop appears, let the people be there; just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.”17474
For Christians, catholicity was not about human action alone; rather, the whole order of things, including the stars, was directed toward a final end, the fullness of Christ. The gathering of the Church both was and is to share in the first fruits of the new creation in Christ. For Irenaeus this meant an emphasis on the Church not as institution but as active presence of the Spirit: “For where the Church is, there is the Spirit of God; and where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church, and every kind of grace.”18 Irenaeus was a genuinely catholic thinker for whom nothing is left out of the economy of salvation and for whom truth is always found in history. The most distinctive mark of Irenaeus’s theology is its inclusive concern for the whole of creation. He challenged the Gnostics (those who denied the incarnation of God) by saying that God entered history to heal and make whole and thus reconcile humanity to God. We know God not according to his greatness, he indicated, but according to his love. Salvation is not a flight to God from what is human (Gnostics), but the realizing of God’s likeness and the sharing of his life in what is human. Catholicity, for Irenaeus, is attentiveness to the Spirit of God, that is, the Spirit of healing and wholeness. When we are inwardly whole, we can attend to the cosmos in all its beauty.494
The Nicene Creed was composed in the fourth century as a creedal confession of faith that would consolidate the Christian faith in the empire: “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth. . . . I believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.” Surprisingly, the word catholic became equated with universalis (universal). The word universal means “to turn as one” (from the Latin vetere and the prefix uni); however, in light of its Greek origin, catholicity is not universality, although one can see how universality became equated with catholicity, or wholeness with oneness. Rather, catholicity is awareness of the whole that moves one to act toward wholeness or unity.507
The relationship among catholicity, universality (oneness), and cosmology (wholeness) was blurred by politicizing Christian faith; politics trumped cosmology, and universality trumped catholicity.514
Could God truly be united to physical matter, which changes and decays?518
resolution of the Arian controversy from the Catholic point of view—the identification of Jesus Christ as God—it also represents the last point at which Christians with strongly opposed theological views acted civilly towards each other. When the controversy began, Arius and his opponents were inclined to treat each other as fellow Christians with mistaken ideas. Constantine hoped that his Great and Holy Council would bring the opposing sides together on the basis of a mutual recognition and correction of erroneous ideas. When these hopes were shattered and the conflict continued to spread, the adversaries were drawn to attack each other not as colleagues in error but as unrepentant sinners: corrupt, malicious, even satanic individuals.21 The Arian controversy is of importance not only with regard to the divinity of Jesus, but even more so because it distorted the essential meaning of catholicity. Christians forgot how to read the stars or see God amid the stars as attention was focused away from the cosmos toward defending the doctrine of truths. The Arian controversy created such an embattled church at Nicea that consciousness of the whole—catholicity—was broken. After Nicea the Church became defined as Catholic not with a sense of the whole but with a sense of the true. Catholicity was no longer a function of cosmology but orthodoxy.539
What we find in the first five centuries of the Church is a mutation of catholicity from a sense of cosmos as order and harmony to a fixation on orthodoxy. Even pre-axial people had an implicit catholicity that was lost in the post-Constantinian church, as bishops fought over the formulation of doctrine. We see something of a renewal of catholicity in the Middle Ages, as the Church moved beyond the Arian controversy, but the scars of Nicea remain with us even today.575
Catholicity came undone after the Middle Ages and maybe even before then. Once heliocentrism became the accepted cosmological model, catholicity was reduced from a consciousness of the whole to a level of individual concern and personal salvation.837
Emergence is produced by a combination of causes or events but cannot be regarded as the sum of their individual effects. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary stresses the factor of newness in one of its definitions: “appearing as or involving the appearance of something novel in a process of evolution.” Philip Clayton defines emergence as “genuinely new properties which are not reducible to what came before, although they are continuous with it.”35 He writes: “Emergent properties are those that arise out of some subsystem but are not reducible to that system. Emergence is about more than but not altogether other than. . . . Emergence means that the world exhibits a recurrent pattern of novelty and irreducibility.”36 Something is constituted from components in such a way that it has new properties which are not reducible to the properties of the components.371191
cosmic evolution repeatedly includes unpredictable, irreducible, and novel appearances.42 Clayton states that emergence is everywhere, beginning with the Big Bang. He writes: “Once there was no universe and then, after the Big Bang, there was an exploding world of stars and galaxies. Once the earth was unpopulated and later it was teeming with primitive life forms. Once there were apes living in trees and then there were Mozart, Einstein and Gandhi.”43 Emergence is a combination of holism with novelty in a way that contrasts with both physical reductionism and dualism. It is irreducible novelty of increasing complexity in nature and underscores the fact that time is irreversible; in nature, there is no turning back.1226
Survival depends on sharing, which explains why both humans and animals are exquisitely sensitive to fair divisions. Experiments show that monkeys, dogs and some social birds reject rewards inferior to those of a companion performing the same task; chimpanzees and humans go even further by moderating their share of joint rewards to prevent frustration in others. We owe our sense of fairness to a long history of mutualistic cooperation.46 We are relational beings through and through, and our primal relation is to the whole, including family, community, nation, globe, and planet earth.1246
We emerge from the whole; we belong to the whole; and we are endowed with the capacity to evolve to higher levels of complexity and consciousness. Nature reveals intrinsic wholeness, but the whole is not constrained by biological life; rather, on the level of the human person the whole is open to becoming more whole, oriented to transcend itself, as life stretches toward absolute unity.1253
previously thought that matter is composed of atoms. Now we know that atoms are composed of electrons, and electrons are simultaneously waves and particles. As a consequence of the wave-like aspects of reality, atoms do not have any shape, that is, a solid outline in space, but the things they form do have shape; the constituents of matter, the elementary particles, are not in the same sense real as the real things that they constitute. Rather, left to themselves they exist in a world of possibilities, “between the idea of a thing and a real thing,”as Heisenberg wrote.7 Instead of imagining a set of billiard balls in a box, imagine a group of electrons bouncing around in a box. Because electrons are waves and particles, their wave aspects will interfere with one another; they will overlap and merge, drawing the electrons into an existential relationship whereby their actual inner qualities such as mass, charge, and spin, as well as their position and momentum, become indistinguishable from the relationship among them. All properties of the electrons are affected by the relationship; in fact, they cease to be separate things and become parts of a whole. The whole will, as a whole, possess definite properties of mass, charge, and spin, but it is completely indeterminate as to which constituent electrons are contributing to this whole. Indeed, it is no longer meaningful to talk of the constituent electrons’ individual properties, as these continually change to meet the requirements of the whole. This kind of internal relationship exists only in quantum systems and has been called relational holism.81420
Quantum mechanics means that quantum-level “matter” is not very “material.” In place of billiard balls we have patterns of active relationships, electrons and photons, mesons and nucleons, that tease us with their elusive double lives as their position, momentum, particle, wave, mass, and energy all change in response to one another and to the environment. The paradigm of quantum physics is wave-particle duality, but this description of matter as wave-particle duality is metaphorical or, better, analogical for mathematical formulas in science. The formulas do not describe the behavior of a single particle-wave in isolation, but rather the way the system operates as a whole; the parts cannot be separated from the whole. The terms particle and wave are expressions of different types of measurement and are not properties that the underlying quantum reality possesses independent of the measurements. A particle is understood as the location in a specific position, and thus the actualization of one of the possible positions given by the wave function. The wave is a wave of probability of places (energy states) in which the electron might be found. The wave-particle duality of matter can be described as relationship-existence. Quantum relationships create something new by drawing together things that were initially separate and individual. Consciousness is the pattern of active relationship, the “wave side” of the wave-particle duality. Consciousness is relationality that includes communication and the flow of information. The flow of information is the creative relationship made possible by overlapping waves or perhaps, we can say, overlapping energy states. The relationality of these energy states would account for a flow of information or information processing.10 As more electron waves overlap, consciousness increases. Two electrons whose wave functions are overlapping cannot be reduced to the individual characteristics of the two electrons; the two have become one new whole so that the relationship between the waves cannot be reduced to the activity of the vibrating molecules. An analogy that might be helpful here is the experience of love. The bond between two persons is so deeply personal, like a third person, that it cannot be reduced to the two uniting persons. Similarly, the bond between two electron waves is a third that cannot be reduced to the electrons. What we need to keep in mind is that overlapping waves are not exactly neighbor electrons, as if two electrons live next door to each other and share space. Rather, in the quantum world, elementary particles can act without delay on each other, no matter how far apart they are. The quantum world is a continuous dance of energy in which relationships form reality. At the foundation of physical reality, the nature of material things reveals itself as nonmaterial, that is, quantum virtual states. At the level of elementary particles, idea-like states become matter-like. Non-locality refers to the non-separability of reality. Two quantum particles that at one time interact and then move away from each other are forever bonded and act as though they were one thing regardless of the distance between them.11 The material world is non-local. If reality is non-local, that is, if things can affect one another despite distance or space-time coordinates, then nature is not composed of material substances but deeply entangled fields of energy; the nature of the universe is undivided wholeness. Because our consciousness has emerged from this wholeness and continues to be part of it, then what accounts for the human mind is active in the universe. Quantum relationships create something new by drawing together things that were initially separate and individual. Such relationship is both the origin and meaning of the mental side of life.12 Whereas consciousness is the wave side, physicality originates in the particle side of that duality. The information that flows from wave-overlapping organizes particles into matter and, in turn, into form, resulting in physical…1440
Catholicity, as the Greeks first conceived it, may be the best word to describe our universe today, since from the beginning it is a web of consciousness and undivided wholeness.1480
Zohar writes: “What is interesting is that the many parts that go to make up an ordered system not only behave as a whole, they become whole; their identities merge or overlap in such a way that they lose their individuality entirely.”14 One body, one whole, one unified field of energy. Doesn’t this sound like the “body of Christ”?1483
For Teilhard, life is “a specific effect of matter turned complex; a property that is present in the entire cosmic stuff.”16 Teilhard considered matter and consciousness not as “two substances” or “two different modes of existence, but as two aspects of the same cosmic stuff.” From the Big Bang onward there is a “withinness” and “withoutness,” or what he called radial energy and tangential energy.17 The universe orients itself toward intelligent, conscious, self-reflective life. Teilhard indicated that life cannot be considered in the universe any longer as a superficial accident but, rather, must be considered to be under pressure everywhere—ready to burst from the smallest crack no matter where in the universe—and, once actualized, is incapable of not using every opportunity and means to arrive at the extreme of its potentiality, externally of complexity, and internally of consciousness.18 Ken Wilbur states that every level of interior consciousness is accompanied by a level of exterior physical complexity; as physical complexity rises, so too does consciousness.1496
As evolution proceeds to even more complex structures such as the human brain with its neocortex, consciousness expands to a world-centric awareness of “all of us” and a transcendent awareness of a divine Other.19 Thus, the greater the exterior levels of physical complexity, the greater the interior levels of consciousness.1507
the whole of life, from the Big Bang onward, is the emergence of mind or consciousness. A system is conscious if it can communicate or process information that, in turn, serves as its organizational function. Anything capable of self-organizing possesses a level of consciousness. But, of course, this raises a question of whether there is a distinction between the consciousness of living and nonliving things? Can we speak of a stone as being conscious? Ilya Prigogine, whose work on complex, dynamical systems won him the Nobel Prize, said that communication or consciousness exists even in chemical reactions where molecules know, in some way, what the other molecules will do even over macroscopic distances. Throughout all of life there is creative dialogue between matter and consciousness; neither is reducible to the other and, yet, neither can function without the other. Teilhard writes: There is no doubt: the so-called brute matter is certainly animated in its own way. . . . Atoms, electrons, elementary particles, whatever they may be if they be anything at all outside of us, must have a rudiment of immanence; i.e., a spark of consciousness. Before on this planet the physic-chemical conditions allowed the birth of organic life, the universe was either not yet anything in itself, or it had already formed a nebula of consciousness.211513
Ultimately, we can trace our consciousness back to a special kind of relationship that exists wherever two bosons meet, to their propensity to bind together, to overlap, to bunch together, and to share an identity; to super-socialize. According to scientist Fritz Popp, the difference between a living and nonliving system is the radical increase in the occupation number of the electronic levels.22 In living systems photons are exponentially more bunched together or squashed into a coherent Bose-Einstein condensate; in nonliving systems they are less tightly packed. The difference of consciousness between living and nonliving is one of degree not principle.231524
Joseph Bracken suggests that mind is the place where synthesizing activity occurs. Mind is itself an instance of an activity that is going on everywhere in the universe at the same time. To reflect upon the mind as an instance of pure activity is to gain an insight into the nature or deeper reality of the universe as a whole. In Bracken’s view, “Creativity is at work in atoms and molecules unconsciously, even as it is at work both consciously and unconsciously in the workings of the human mind.”24 Life evolves in the biosphere, not from nothing but from the actualization of virtual states whose order exists long before it is actualized.1533
acknowledge the presence of Mind in the universe as an intrinsic aspect of all things in space and time. The Mind or consciousness that permeates nature is the same flow of activity that each of us inherits in a unique way. In and through our minds we are part of an undivided whole that is our home, the cosmos.1548
Human consciousness depends not only on a particular region in the brain, however, but also on its complexity. Brain complexity is a function of the degree of interconnectedness, which is increased exponentially through feedback and feed-forward loops. Of the brain’s 1014 neurons, some 107 are sensitive enough to register quantum-level phenomena at any one time.28 The human brain is a collection of nerve cells that operates like a multilayered frequency receptor. Due to initial conditionings early in life, each receptor becomes wired to perceive a particular wave frequency. As the brain’s receptors tune in to a particular pattern of frequency waves, a pattern-recognition response is received by the brain and interpreted according to the perceptions allotted to the frequency. In other words, the act of tuning in involves picking up familiar frequency patterns out of the ocean of frequencies that surround us constantly.1555
By tuning in to the same patterns again and again, we reinforce a particular reality set. We are thus tuning in to a consensus reality pattern unconsciously and forming our perceptions continually from this. Unfamiliar patterns often get ignored, because they do not fall within our receptor limit. Perceptions are thus formed moment by moment as the brain constantly scans the bands of frequencies that surround us; yet, we are often unaware that we are filtering from a limited set of perceptual patterns. However, if this pattern-recognition behavior does not evolve over time, our perceptual development is in danger of becoming stalled. The result is that we become fixed—or trapped—within a particular reality.1563
To overcome our Cartesian anxiety of dualistic thinking, we need to shift our focus from objects to relationships. Only then can we realize that identity, individuality, and autonomy do not imply separateness and independence but rather interdependence. The discovery of the quantum phenomena has established a new covenant between the human mind and the mindlike background of the universe. It is now possible to see that the human mind recapitulates Mind or consciousness in the universe. We are part of a creative whole of unlimited potential whereby our self and our world are constantly drawn into new existence together. In the words of Albert Einstein: A human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe’; a part limited in time and space. One experiences oneself . . . as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of one’s consciousness [emphasis added]. . . . Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.361598
If we are part of a whole, then religion tells us about the whole; it gives meaning and direction to the whole. It is on the level of mind or consciousness that religion is awakened in us. We reach a level of consciousness where we are not alone; divinity is at the heart of life itself. How we respond to this divine lure is how we live in the dynamic energy of catholicity.1608
5 Scientists now speculate that the universe began when a star in a four-dimensional universe collapsed to form a black hole; that is, our universe may have emerged from a parent universe that collapsed into a black hole. See Niayesh Afshhordi, Robert B. Mann, and Razieh Pourhasen, “The Black Hole at the Beginning of Time,” Scientific American (August 2014): 38–43.1618
Jesus emerged by way of evolution, just as you and I did. The carbon in his body came from the stars, and the elements in his blood were first in the explosion of the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. His distant ancestors, like ours, were the ancient primitive cyanobacteria that blanketed earthly life about 3.8 billion years ago. Jesus was born as a particular baby and given a particular name. He learned to walk and talk and “grew in wisdom” (Lk 2:40). Gerhard Lohrfink describes Jesus as a faithful Jew who strove to restore the Tribe of Israel—not to start a new religion.1 Jesus was a “strange attractor,” a new pattern of religious life amid an established pattern of Jewish customs and laws. The term strange attractor comes from chaos theory. It describes a basin of attraction that is both within a system and yet different from the system. Jesus was a Jewish prophet and teacher whose radical teaching on the immanent presence of God gave rise to a new, strange pattern of life that was shocking to the Jews and puzzling to those who knew his family: “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son?” (Mt 13:55), they asked. Something about Jesus was outrageous and unique, a new way of living the Torah unlike anything ever seen before. The strange attraction of Jesus’s life lured those around him into new patterns of relationship centered in the in-dwelling presence of God. A Jewish carpenter hardly seems likely to be the prophet of the messianic kingdom, but indeed, the life of Jesus is the paradox of God’s wisdom. He emerged on the scene from the small town of Nazareth, boldly walked in the Temple on the Sabbath, and took the elder rabbis by surprise, announcing that the prophecy of Isaiah was being fulfilled in their midst (Lk 4:21). Jesus embodied a radical spirit of newness and creativity, a new direction of religious energy centered in God. He was radically caught up in an all-embracing relationship with the living God and addressed God as “Abba,” a title expressing intimacy, boundless trust, and commitment. As a practicing Jew, he likely recited the Shema twice a day: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One. . . . You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength.” His deep, God-centeredness was the source and secret of his being, message and manner of life. He had “an immediate awareness of God as a power cherishing people and making them free,” a God of personal love and liberation.2 Jesus expressed the liberating engagement of God with the world using the ancient Hebrew idea of the kingdom of God or the reign of God, which, in the time of Jesus, could mean liberation from Roman occupation or, for the Pharisee, faithfulness to the law of God. However, Jesus took religion out of the abstract and dogmatic and placed it in the concrete flesh and blood of human persons. His message was one of vision, reflected in his frequent use of words such as behold, look, see—“the kingdom of heaven is among you” (Lk 17:21). To see is an act of consciousness; it brings what is seen into conscious reality. Jesus’s desire to see required an open heart. It was not simply to “take a look”; rather, he called his disciples to gaze, to have an inner spaciousness of the heart to receive another into it. Denis Edwards writes that “the kingdom is God’s future, but it is a future anticipated in the healing, liberating ministry of Jesus . . . a future already present in all the good that ordinary women and men do, in every act of genuine love and in every work of peace and justice.”3 To see with new eyes and to realize a new wholeness emerging through God’s in-breaking love is to be part of God’s creative Spirit through prayer, community, and prophetic action.1690
Jesus’s Catholicity At the beginning of his public ministry Jesus underwent baptism by John the Baptist, placing him in the charismatic and prophetic stream of Judaism. His baptism symbolized his mission and was a sign of his deep God-centeredness. Shortly afterward he was led into the wilderness where he was tempted to forgo his mission. His temptations in the desert showed his deep humanity, as he struggled between fear and trust, reliance on self and reliance on God. The themes of trust and surrender weave throughout the stories of Jesus, interspersed with the social and political crises of his day. The Torah gave meaning and direction to Jewish life, but to be faithful to the Torah was difficult because of the Roman occupation, with its pagan practices, political corruption, and exploitative taxation. Many people were displaced from their land and unemployed because of Roman taxation; further, the Roman officials were often insensitive to Jewish religious duties, including tithing, and could be extraordinarily brutal in punishment. Edwards writes: In response to the Roman occupation it seemed important to close ranks and resist assimilation. A high value was placed upon keeping oneself separate from all that was unclean. In first century Palestine it seemed the way of survival as well as the way of fidelity. Each of the major renewal groups in Palestine, the Essenes, the Pharisees and the revolutionary movement, intensified, in its own way, the idea of separation from all that was unclean. The main sanction against those who did not conform to the code of separation from all that was unclean was to ostracize the offenders, and deny them table fellowship.4 Jesus began his mission by announcing the dawn of a new age, a new humanity unified in the love of God and committed to the reign of God. He challenged the social pattern of exclusivity and sought to replace it with the values of compassion and mercy. His inner oneness with God became manifest on the level of community, where he sought to overcome divisions by giving priority to men and women as coequal in God’s reign and by empowering the poor, lowly, and marginalized. The reign of God is not an abstract ideal, he indicated, but a concrete reality. It begins with a consciousness of God and a desire to live in accord with God’s law of love. Jesus’s deep oneness with God empowered his sense of catholicity, a non-dual consciousness of belonging to the whole and the whole belonging to God. He lived from this wholeness by going “all over Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing people from every kind of disease and sickness” (Mt 4:23). He constantly challenged others to see, to awaken to the presence of God, and to be part of an undivided whole, the kingdom (or “kin-dom”) of God, where Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, male and female are invited as equals to the divine banquet. Jesus internalized the Torah so that obedience to God was not dutifully following the law but the human heart centered in God. He challenged those who claimed to see but were blinded by their own ambitions and addiction to power, leading them to “bind up heavy loads and put them on the shoulders of men and women” (Mt 23:4). He chastised those who substituted legalism for charity, looked down on others, or separated themselves from others as if they were superior (see Lk 18:9–11). Instead, he ate with outcasts and sinners (Mk 2:15) and accepted those declared untouchable as friends, revealing God’s merciful love. The Gospels consistently show Jesus’s outreach to the economically poor and oppressed; to those who were diseased, disabled, or possessed; and to society’s outcasts, including prostitutes, tax collectors, and other public sinners. Over and over again in the Gospels we see Jesus criticized by those who burdened the poor and defenseless and who wielded power over others: “Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you” (Mt 21:31). He reached out to…1719
His gospel “be-attitude” of poverty is a way of being inwardly free, liberated from the enslavement of possessions, and therefore alive to the beauty of the goodness of things throughout all reality. Happy are those who are inwardly free, unencumbered by preoccupations, anxieties, and material things. Blessed are those who have inner space to see and receive what they see into their lives, for those who can see the truth of reality already know heaven. Heaven unfolds when we see things for what they are, not what we think they should be, and when we love others for who they are, and not what we expect them to be. The catholicity of Jesus’s message is this: we are to realize the whole we are part of and to love the whole; to find a conscious voice of praise and glory to God in the whole; and to participate creatively in this unfolding reign of God.1762
His Jewish renewal program transcended the Greek cosmos and ushered in a new cosmos, a new order of life centered in the wellspring of divine love; a new cosmic family, a new household of relationships where the members are mothers, sisters, and brothers. Interestingly, Edwards notes, “Fathers are not mentioned and the disciples are instructed: ‘Call no one on earth your father’ (Mt 23:8–12). With a God who was Abba, there was apparently no place in the new community for the role of the patriarchal father.”6 This radically new community under God is like a new Big Bang, a new whole that requires a new level of consciousness and participation. In Jesus we see not only a new direction but a new catholicity.1771
The Book of Nature The problem of wholeness, in Jesus’s view, is a human one. Nonhuman nature shows us what it means to belong to God’s creation, and Jesus asks us to contemplate nature in its holiness: “Consider how the wild flowers grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these” (Lk 12:27). Nature lives according to the law of wholeness; everything participates in the whole. Shared life is natural life. Thomas Merton writes: “The little yellow flowers that nobody notices on the edge of the road are saints looking up into the face of God.”7 We humans are caught up in the drive for mastery and success, addicted to power and control. We are blind and full of ourselves, running after false idols. We treat the world as an object for our use and dispense with everything that is in the way of our agendas. We are good at unraveling relationships by brute force and power. We are a most uncatholic species; we prefer self-interest over the interest of others, the law over the spirit, sowing where we do not reap and condemning without mercy. If nature is an evolving whole, the human person is constantly threatening to destroy the whole. This is sin: consciously to disrupt or sever what is otherwise part of the whole. Jesus saw that all life is shared life. He went out of his way to emphasize the all-inclusiveness of God’s merciful love, and he tried, at every opportunity, to raise the level of consciousness to a higher level, in order to attract a new wholeness.1777
to the constant scandal of the morally separatist and righteous, Jesus made a habit of associating with people, such as tax-collectors and even prostitutes, whom his society considered sinners (Matt 9:10).8 His law of love is the law of the whole. His acts of healing expressed God’s compassionate love for the wounded of this world, showing that God desires to liberate us from suffering, if we desire to be made whole. “What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus asked the blind man, Bartimeus. “Rabbi, I want to see,” he said. “Go, your faith has healed you” (Mk 10:49–51). God’s desire for healing must be our desire for healing, just as God’s desire for unity must be our desire for unity. Salvation is not a spiritual grace alone; it is a physical and bodily healing that “embraces health, sanity, relationships, community and wholeness.”9 God’s healing love embraces the whole of reality, but one must be receptive to God’s love for wholeness to be realized. To follow Jesus is to be a wholemaker, essentially to love the world into new being and life. But the message of Jesus was grossly misunderstood, distorted, and turned against him in an effort to destroy him. His radical message of love and forgiveness was conflictual in the Jewish community and ushered in his untimely and brutal death at the hands of Roman torturers. Jesus wept over those who were hard of heart (see Lk 19:41–44); he wept for those who were blind, self-righteous, full of themselves, judgmental, critical, and addicted to power. He publicly chastised the blindness of the Pharisees: “If you were blind you would have no sin but because you say you see your sin remains” (Jn 9:40). That is, if you lived with a consciousness of Omega and saw the presence of God in others, you would not judge so harshly or condemn others, but since you are unconscious of the humility of God and insist that God judges from above, then you bring judgment upon yourself because you destroy the whole and, by destroying the whole, you destroy yourself. Blindness divides the whole into thousands of little pieces that God cannot repair without our consent and cooperation. Death and Dying into Love Jesus’s catholicity was a new consciousness and a new cosmos, a living banquet of life empowered by God. His program of life was not only to be attentive to the whole, of which each of us is a part, but to create a new whole by receiving the Spirit, the life-giving energy of God, and participate in the emerging “kin-dom” of mutuality and shared life. We might call the way of Jesus not only the gospel life but creative catholicity. For too long we have interpreted the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as the reparation for sin. Medieval theology focused attention on original sin and the fall of Adam and Eve. The need to repair fallen creation and restore humanity to God became the reason for the incarnation.10 The story of Adam and Eve, however, was constructed against the background of the static, fixed Ptolemaic cosmos. It was a way of explaining evil and death in the patristic era. We simply do not live in a static, fixed cosmos. We live in an evolutionary and self-organizing cosmos where each person is co-extensive with the entire universe.11 Ours is not a “fallen” humanity but a “deep” humanity, embedded in nature from the Big Bang onward. While original sin no longer makes sense as an act of disobedience in an otherwise perfect creation, we might interpret the “Adamic” disconnect (the entire Homo sapiens species) as the power to say “no” (I will not obey). The human person is distinguished by self-reflective consciousness and symbolic language; hence, the human is the first in cosmic history consciously to reject God and thus participation in the undivided wholeness of being. The human “no” is the act of symbolic self-assertion and independence that disrupts nature’s catholicity. Fifth-century theologian Maximus the Confessor said that Adam’s “no” was the peak of human freedom.12 Adam thought that only a person who can…1794
The opposites of God and world are so fixed in our dualistic mentality that we cannot fathom that the power of God is shown in the powerlessness of the cross. But this is the incarnational mystery and the power of evolution. Cardinal Walter Kasper writes: The cross is not a de-divinization of God but the revelation of the divine God. . . . God need not strip himself of his omnipotence in order to reveal his love. On the contrary, it requires omnipotence to be able to surrender oneself and give oneself away; and it requires omnipotence to be able to take oneself back in the give and to preserve the independence and freedom of the recipient. Only an almighty love can give itself wholly to the other and be a helpless love. . . . God on the cross shows himself as the one who is free in love and as freedom in love.151859
God is radically involved with the world, empowering the world toward fullness in love, but God is unable to bring about this fullness without the cooperation of humans. Human and divine cannot co-create unto the fullness of life without death as an integral part of life. Isolated, independent existence must be given up in order to enter into broader and potentially deeper levels of existence. Bonaventure speaks of life in God as a “mystical death,” a dying into love: “Let us, then, die and enter into the darkness; let us impose silence upon our cares, our desires and our imaginings. With Christ Crucified let us pass out of this world to the Father.”16 The wisdom of the cross reveals the wisdom of God; it shatters all other forms of knowledge and opens one up to a depth of life that is lasting and true. Jesus’s self-gift, born into freedom on the cross, symbolizes the type of life that contributes to the fullness of life up ahead: “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains a single grain of wheat but if dies it produces an abundant harvest” (Jn 12:24). The paradox of Jesus’s message still eludes us. In the Christian view death is not the end but beginning of the absolute wholeness of life. To refuse death—even the “little deaths” of personal differences, career disappointments, or loss of loved ones—is to die. Every time we grab and grip, holding tightly so as to control completely, we kill the whole by snuffing out the Spirit. The refusal of the many deaths along the way is rejection of the Spirit. We suffocate the life of the Spirit within us by controlling the space around1867
To say “I will not die” is to die. To be willing to die by surrendering to the freedom of the Spirit is to live forever. Jesus knew that every choice is a thousand renunciations. Through his own conscious “yes” to the ultimate costliness of life, he shows us that it takes all that we have and all that we are for a new creative wholeness of life to emerge. God suffers the sufferings of this age out of an abundance of love, and only a consciousness of one’s freedom in love can help transform the sufferings of this world into the peace of God’s “kin-dom.” Only by dying into God can we become one with God, letting go of everything that hinders us from God. Clare of Assisi spoke of the “mirror of the cross” in which she saw in the tragic death of Jesus our ow