Cells in a Living Organism?
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| Google Image |
“What’s the good news?” asks the pope.
“God’s on the phone and he wants to talk with you.”
“Ah, that’s very good news,” says the pope. “What bad news
could match it?”
“He’s calling from Salt Lake City.”
It’s just a joke, but it brings to mind a couple of truths
about our relationship to God. The first is that from all we know from the
Bible and tradition, God is always a surprise – at least this scenario would be
a surprise for Catholics. The second is that we know God only by analogy, by
anthropomorphism.
Both the Hebrew and Christian bibles are filled with scenes
in which God is very much like a human being, and humans are said to have been
created in God’s “image and likeness.” But the similarity is extremely limited.
God doesn’t show himself/herself in normal human ways, except, of course, in
Jesus of Nazareth. The fact that I have to use “himself/herself” – because God
could not have a gender – is an example of that.
There are many biblical stories and characterizations that
are meant to help us picture God. God as “father,” which Jesus used constantly,
urges us to see God as parent. God is also portrayed in Jesus’ stories as king,
judge, landowner, householder, even slave owner. All are meant to portray some
quality of God, but none of them individually or together can paint an accurate
picture.
So we are left to our imaginations. This is sometimes an
obstacle when we pray. To whom or what are we praying? What, if anything, lies
beyond? What is God’s “world” like? How do we fit in? Many philosophers and
theologians have speculated about these and similar questions, but we always
have to see them for what they are, speculation.
Still, searchers for God should always be open to new
perspectives about God, always remembering that they’re very limited. One of my
heroes from my seminary days, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, offers modern humans
one of the most interesting visions of God and his/her relationship to us.
De Chardin, a French Jesuit priest, philosopher, geologist
and paleontologist, died in 1955. His insights, due to training and practice as
a scientist as well as a philosopher, were at one point not welcomed by the
Vatican, but he seems to have been “rehabilitated.” I mentioned that I was a
fan of de Chardin in the seminary, reading his books, Phenomenon of Man and
Divine Milieu, but both were too complex for me and they probably would be
today. However, a recent article in the National Catholic Reporter by Louis Savary,
the author of several books about de Chardin, helps.
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| de Chardin Google Image |
According to Savary, De Chardin saw humans as cells in a
living organism, a universe saturated by God. He called it the Divine Milieu. Cells
are not aware they’re part of a whole, but he believed that not only is the
biological world still evolving, evolution is occurring on all human levels,
the personal, social, emotional, mental and spiritual. Through increasing
complexity and interconnectedness, it’s all leading toward greater and greater
consciousness. The cells are becoming aware that they’re part of the Milieu,
part of God.
It’s close to what the apostle Paul wrote in the Acts of the
Apostles, that “God is not far from each one of us, for ‘in him we live and
move and have our being.’”
Many scientists and others say there is no need for a divine
designer of the universe, that particles floating around in space provided the
matter for the Big Bang that started the evolutionary ball rolling. But that
doesn’t make the Big Bang the beginning, does it? Where did the particles come
from? And for that matter, what accounts for space? De Chardin speculated that
before matter, there was spirit and that this spirit, whom we call God, made
the Big Bang happen.
You may think this is wishful thinking, more along the lines
of science fiction than science, but de Chardin saw nothing wrong with
synthesizing what he learned from science, philosophy and theology – along with
years of reflection – to answer questions about the nature of the universe, of
humans and of God.
I mentioned above that in trying to answer questions about
God we are mostly left to our imaginations, and even with the help of science, our
imaginations fail us. Going out and gazing into the night sky, as I do on most
nights, you can see the splendor of the “heavens” but you can’t imagine the
vastness, let alone what caused it and what underlies it.
It’s true that religion is not a method by which we answer
questions about how the universe works. We have science for that, and it’s
getter better at answering those questions. But science isn’t good at answering
the “why” questions, to speculate about the meaning of it all, and people who
search for God are looking for meaning. For that, you need religion and
religious people like de Chardin, who aren’t afraid to offer theories that use
what we know from science, but also from the experience of a believer. And, of
course, you still need the anthropomorphisms.
“Hello, Pope. God speaking. Pardon me if I don’t call you
‘Holy Father.’ Yes, I’m calling from Salt Lake City, but I’m also right there in
Rome, as well as in Tel Aviv, Cairo, Managua, Pretoria, Buenos Aires, Moscow, Beijing
and What Cheer, Iowa (I love that name!) And I’m on the moon, Mercury, Venus
and Mars. (Yes, it’s very hot, and very cold!) I’m also over here on Epsilon
Eridani b and c, not far from your solar system, and I’m way out here in the
Ultra Deep Field (though it really isn’t that deep from my perspective).
“Would you and the seven billion other humans there care to
join me? Oh, right. You already have.”
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