December 2006 Christian Spirituality By George A Lane SJ

. Spirituality for our time Continue from ...... Teilhard finds the presence of God in the world and throughout the world. He develops this aspect of his vision in his book The Divine Milieu. Here is a profoundly faith-oriented vision of the world and of God the Alpha and Omega of all creation. God created the world, or better, creates the world; for Teilhard's notion of creation is not the making of a static world, but that of continuous creation in which God works constantly through complexification and convergence to bring the world ever closer to perfection and to Himself. The creation of the cosmos, an ongoing process, is for Teilhard a progressive cosmogenesis, biogenesis, noogenesis, and ultimately Christogenesis, in which each process prepared for and leads to and supports the next one. And because God supports and works throughout the whole series, He is everywhere, omnipresent, a divine milieu. Teilhard finds God at the very source of human life and the source of all that happens to people in the world. God is present in all that influences a person both from within and without. Teilhard even finds God working in the diminishments of suffering and of death: "..when I feel I am losing hold of myself and am absolutely passive within the hands of the great unknown forces that have formed me, in all these dark moments, O God, grant that I may understand that it is You, provided only my faith is strong enough, who are painfully parting the fibres of my being in order to penetrate to the very marrow of my substance and bear me away witnin yourself." But the crowning instance of the presence of God in the world is the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. In him God enters the world in a special, historical way and assumes dynamic leadership of all of cosmic evolution. Teilhard's notion of redemption is one which follows to a great extent the principles of biological evolution and development. At the divine inbreak of Christ, God immerses Himself and identifies Himself with the whole process of evolution. He ultimately redeems people and the world by uniting them to Himself organically in Christ Jesus. In the Pauline sense people are redeemed by a physical incorporation into the Body of Christ. It is then through Him and with Him and in Him that all are returned to the Father. The process of redemption in Christ Jesus is also a process of unification of people, the ultimate instance of convergence of people in love. It is Christ who by His life and by His grace energizes this same dynamic of convergence and guarantees its ultimate success and perfection.

- To Be Continued - © Copyright Shalom 2006. All rights reserved.