The Great Turning

What does it mean to be truly human and fully alive in the twenty-first century?

by Tom Hook
August 20, 2023

We shall be known by the company we keep

by the ones who circle round to tend these fires.

It is time now, and what a time to be alive.

In this Great Turning we shall learn to lead in love.

These words from MaMuse might seem conflicting to the times we are living in. With the immense knowledge humankind possesses at present, and the myriad of crises the global community faces today we must ask ourselves:

What does it mean to be truly human and fully alive in the twenty-first century?

As I begin, I would like to say as a Catholic that I am a follower of Jesus and the Cosmic or Universal Christ which means to say that I believe Love will eventually “win the day”, both on our planet and the entire Universe. That is my hope and that is my prayer.

I would like to examine the question of being truly human and fully alive with the following voices:

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – Catholic Jesuit Priest and Geologist (1881 – 1955)
Thomas Berry – Cultural Historian and Geologian (1914 – 2009)
Diana Butler Bass – Biblical Historian, Theologian, and Author (1959 – )
Craig Schindler J.D., Ph.D. – Dr. Schindler received his B.A. magna cum laude from Stanford University and holds a law degree from Stanford Law School and a Ph.D. in psychology and religion from the University of California at Berkeley and Graduate Theological Union. Author of The Great Turning.

You may recall I have mentioned Teilhard in some of my earlier talks.

One of the great visionaries of our planet, the Jesuit priest and scientist Teilhard, (1881 to 1955), was an exacting geologist and an inspired religious visionary. Teilhard’s life and ministry were dedicated to “those who loved the world” (Divine Milieu, 11). He ordered a way to bridge the difficult divide between the still emerging science of evolution and his Christian faith.

Teilhard’s studies were interrupted by World War I, during which he volunteered to be a stretcher bearer, an experience that would change and guide the course of his life. It was from the battlefield that his visionary sense of humankind’s role in God’s evolutionary design for the cosmos took shape. Teilhard was particularly sensitive to how his work would affect:

The questions of human origins
The questions of human destiny
The nature of the universe and divinity itself.
Drawn into these controversies as both a scientist and mystic, Teilhard fashioned the question to which he would direct his life, “Who will at last give evolution its own God?”

Wrestling with these questions, Teilhard began to lecture and write toward new horizons of understanding, to offer a way for people of faith to comprehend and integrate the new science into a sacred worldview.

Teilhard found himself under Interdict and summarily exiled to a Jesuit sponsored Science Museum in China, to focus exclusively on paleontology. Ironically, it was during his Asian exile that Teilhard helped to find fossil evidence for the theory of evolution.

He bequeathed his writings to his secretary, who saw to it that they were published after his death in 1955. After their publication, the Holy Office still issued an official warning on June 30th, 1962, regarding the ambiguities and errors against doctrine in Teilhard’s writings. Even so, from the first publication of his extraordinary works, it became broadly accepted and embraced across the religious and secular worlds.

From Mary Evelyn Tucker’s Foreword in Teilhard’s Book of Hours:

Spirit and Matter

One of Teilhard ‘s greatest contributions to modern religious thought is his conception of reality as composed of both spirit and matter. This is what he calls the psychic and the physical components of all reality – The within and the without of things. His writings pose an interior and luminous dimension of matter that has been present from the beginning of creation.

This radically alters our perspective of matter itself. For him matter is not dead or inert, but dynamic and evolving. The divine may no longer to be sought only in a transcendent union with a merciful God. The Divine may also be sought by bringing to Consciousness Maner and Spirit.

In his, Hymn to Matter (Hymn of the Universe, pp. 66-67) he acclaims:

Blessed be you, universal matter –
immeasurable time, boundless ether,
triple abyss of stars and atoms and generations:
you who by overflowing and dissolving
our narrow standards for measurement
reveal to us the dimension of God.

He notes repeatedly:

Unless there were an interior aspect to matter, consciousness could not emerge in the human.
The human, then, should not be seen as something not part of, or added to, the evolutionary process, but an emergent expression of what went before.

The Cosmic Perspective

The implications of this cosmic perspective for spirituality can help to achieve a reciprocity with both the particular and the whole of the universe and the natural world in a way scarcely imagined until now. Traditionally, Christian hope rested in a transcendent union with the divine outside of the earth or cosmos. Now that is balanced by a new understanding of immanence in the depths of matter.

The interiority of matter ?nds its expression in the dynamic emergence of the cosmos over immense expanses of evolutionary time.
Teilhard believed this dynamic evolutionary perspective would permit humans to appreciate anew the fundamental unity of life.
Our capacity for communication with nature is greatly enlarged and revitalized when we recognize its essential connectedness with ourselves.

Teilhard redirects our vision to what is close at hand and yet coextensive with the birth of the universe itself. This brings us face to face with the nearness of the divine in all things. He observes that this essential spiritual dimension of the universe is the basis of cosmic spirituality and an Incarnational Worldview.

This incarnational worldview that I and many others believe, is a worldview in which matter and spirit are understood to have never been separate. Matter and spirit reveal and manifest each other. This view relies on:

•        Awakening to the Divine in all creation.
•        More on seeing and being than obeying.
•        More on growth in consciousness and love than on clergy, experts, moral codes, and rituals.

The key here is The Cosmic Christ. The Universal Christ – Another name for everything. A cosmic notion of the Christ who competes with no one and excludes no one. It includes everyone and every Thing.

An avid follower of Teilhard’s work, Thomas Berry, published his now famous essay, “The New Story” in 1978. This far back he was questioning the “old story”. Prior to our unfolding knowledge of the Universe, we woke up in the morning and knew where we were. Everything was taken care of. But, Berry concludes, “Now, it is not working”. Quote, “The Christian redemptive mystique is little concerned with any cosmological order or process, since the essential thing is redemption of the world through a relationship with a personal Savior that transcends all such concerns.” The excessive redemptive emphasis lacks any concept of evolutionary.

Time leaving it isolated from the historical and universal story of the past 13.4 billion years.

On the other hand, the secular scientific community is committed to a developmental universe in the realm of the physical to the exclusion of the spiritual in the creation story.

(again quoting Berry) “Therefore, the need exists to establish a deeper understanding of the spiritual dynamics of the cosmic-Earth process within which the redemption process functions. It has become increasingly clear that from the beginning of creation to its earthly expression in human consciousness the universe carries within itself a psychic as well as a physical dimension.”

The New Story of the Universe is the story of the emergence of a galactic system in which each new level of being emerges through the urgency of self- transcendence. Human persons bear the universe in their being as the universe bears them in its being. The two have total presence to each other. The Divine resides and rests within all Maner and Spirit (me).

He concludes:

1. To harm the earth is to harm the human; to ruin the earth is to destroy humankind.

2. We must discover a functional story of the cosmic-Earth process. The way forward is the way of intimate communion with the larger human community and with the cosmic-Earth process.

3. The basic mood of the future might well be one of con?dence in the continuing revelation that takes place in and through the Earth.

4. By means of this New Story and the new paradigm we can awaken in the morning and know where we are. We can have a context in which life can function in a meaningful way. In other words, The Great Story.

I believe:

We are intrinsically linked to the evolution of spirit and matter in the universe as a whole.
We are at a moment in history when we are taking responsibility for guiding this evolu8onary process in the sympathetic awareness of its profound connection to ourselves!

A New Awakening

We are now confronted with the task of resituating the world’s religions, which embrace some 5000 years of history into a perspective that reveals the universe to be 14 billion years old. The imperative is to shift from human historical horizons to developmental, cosmic, and geological time.

Teilhard stepped back and saw that religion and evolution belong together. That is, there is a religious dimension to cosmic and biological evolution that appears in the rise of human consciousness, first among pre-axial people religions, then in the first axial age and the emergence of world religions. Christianity is a first axial religion marked by the rise of the individual and the rise of the institution.

We are living at the dawn of a new axial age, what theologian Ewert Cousins called “second axial consciousness.” This new level of consciousness differs from the first axial period in that it is no longer a consciousness of the individual but of the collective whole. Second axial consciousness is cosmic, collective, communal, and ecological and (I Hope) it is the consciousness of future genera8ons.

Teilhard’s quote: “Religion should energize and activate human creative potential in the building of the earth, he said, not isolate us from engaging in new ideas and relationships. Religion as a dimension of evolution concerns the development of the human community, an integrated development that respects the earth and our total environment.”

Theologian and Historian Diana Butler Bass addresses this phenomenon is her book, Christianity After Religion.

She defines a new Awakening as:

“Awakenings extend and enlarge the boundaries of faith and culture, often embodying unful?lled aspirations of earlier generations and opening our religious and social imaginations in unexpected ways. Awakenings open eyes and hearts toward greater practices of love and justice — and they fundamentally reshape how we imagine faith, community, and politics. Awakenings widen our horizons.

Revivals happen in churches. Awakenings happen in the public square. Revivals are about “our” group. Awakenings are about all of us.

Craig Schindler J.D., Ph.D. author of “The Great Turning” movement of today explains:

“The evolutionary shift is happening turning away from self-destruction toward a new era of human dignity, social justice, and environmental restoration. A kinship with all creation; a spiritual emergence of treating our earth home and all of life with love and respect.

Hope is a Choice!

This may be the most pivotal time in history.

What does it mean to be truly human and fully alive in the twenty-?rst century?

That is up to each of us and the community we create and sustain. Namaste