A Common Soul
"Already before the middle of the twentieth century the eminent Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) spoke of 'modern man in search of a soul,' whereas Pierre Teilhard de Chardin pointed to the task of finding 'a common soul' for humanity. Both writers emphasized the need for personal and planetary spiritual transformation. Since they first expressed these ideas, humanity has become much more aware of the interconnectedness of all life, of human life with the whole of nature, with the earth itself, with cosmos and planet. Contemporary ecological consciousness relates to profound spiritual insights, to new religious experiences that can enhance and expand human life and its flourishing. But human beings need to listen to the voices of the earth and develop a full earth literacy to respond to this new situation.
"Understood in its widest sense, spirituality can thus relate to several larger perspectives: our sense of the global and the earth; our experience of pluralism, especially religious pluralism; the urgent need to nurture human flourishing for all people at every level of human activity. This in turn is closely linked to the flourishing of all life on earth."
— The Search for Spirituality
Language of the Spirit
"We all need to learn a new language of the spirit to ensure the future flourishing of peopleand planet. New reflections on spirituality, new spiritual explorations, experiments, and practices, are found not only among the young, but across all age groups. They are linked to interreligious dialogue; human development; education, health, and gender debates; as well as to new thinking among scientists and artists. Fresh ideas on spirituality have emerged in all these areas — ideas, themes, and practical experiments that often run in parallel, though independently from each other. Sometimes these parallel streams converge; at other times they diverge or even run against each other, but they all bear witness to the extraordinary creativity and power of the human spirit."
— The Search for Spirituality
A Global Spirituality
"To develop spirituality globally, radically transforming changes have to occur at the level of the individual, but they also have to be worked out at a structural level by changing our educational, economic, political, and financial institutions. In Teilhard de Chardin's view we not only need interfaith dialogue, but also a new mysticism, above all a new mysticism of action that can transform the world. On closer examination this seems also part of the 'universal communal spirituality' which Wayne Teasdale describes in his book The Mystic Heart. It is a spirituality that can emerge when people from different faith traditions discover the mystic heart of the world together, and share their deepest spiritual experiences and visions.
"The spiritual probing of religious pluralism and the drinking from each other's spiritual wells may be today's great spiritual event, full of significance for human well-being, and for the future of humanity on earth. The further evolution of religion and spirituality can occur only if more dialogical thinking is developed in practice. If religious and spiritual leaders were less concerned with positions of power and influence, and more attentive to the spiritual well-being of their members, and if ordinary believers followed the spiritual message at the heart of their tradition, then the world might become a different place where all human beings could truly flourish. Alas, we are still a long way from realizing this vision, and much work remains to be done to develop a genuine interfaith spirituality that can inspire a harmonious personal and social life in our global world."
— The Search for Spirituality
Spiritual Education
"The active awakening of our spiritual potential into a spiritually active approach to life is still very underdeveloped in contemporary society. We need to give far more attention to the education of the human spirit; we must learn to develop a deep inner freedom and consciousness to become spiritually more alert and alive than we are at present most of the time. Our individual development from birth to death may be likened to a progressive unfolding of the potential we carry within ourselves, but much of this we never fully actualize, and therefore our spiritual awakening and progress remain partial.
"The capacity for spirituality is present in every human being, but it needs to be activated and realized. That means it has to be taught in some way, and this requires new approaches to spiritual education. We teach our children to learn to walk, to talk, to dance — to acquire all the immensely subtle and complex aspects of human culture and to master a wide variety of skills. But often enough our children are not taught how to develop spiritual awareness unless they are given the right kind of spiritual and religious education. At present this does not happen in large parts of secular society, nor does it necessarily always occur in a traditional religious environment. The spiritual potential of each human being has to be awakened, trained, and practiced, just as training is needed to develop the potential to do well in sports, make music, sing, or dance. But even then not all people make good singers or dancers. Similarly, not everybody is equally spiritually gifted."
— The Search for Spirituality
Global Resources of Wisdom
"If the global resources of wisdom are to be shared across the earth community for the enhancement of all life on earth, a global network of spiritual education is needed if it is to have an impact on our ways of life. This task goes beyond the teaching of any single religious tradition or that of secular spirituality alone, but has to be taken up by contemporary culture as a whole. We need spirituality for the old and young, spirituality in homes, schools, and colleges, at work and in the marketplace, in economics and politics, and not just in education or in places of worship. We need to related spirituality to the whole of life, so that we can foster a tangible sense of the spiritual and a sense of the moral solidarity within one single earth community."
— The Search for Spirituality
Ecological Consciousness
"Nature and art have always been closely connected for human beings; in many instances this link has also forged deeply spiritual bonds in people's minds and souls. Today this has been heightened in a very special way through a newly evolved, highly sensitive ecological consciousness born out of the recognition of both the preciousness and precariousness of our natural environment."
— The Search for Spirituality
Spiritual Life
"When taking the pulse of contemporary culture it becomes clear that the prophetic vision of inner and outer transformation for greater good, for a more peaceful and loving world, reverberates in a thousand ways in the multiform experiences and expressions of religious andsecular spiritualties. In the end, spiritual life is a life that cultivates wisdom, compassion, and love for the sake of other people's lives and one's own."
— The Search for Spirituality
Action-Oriented Spirituality
"Spirituality cannot remain the privilege of a few, of the religious and educated elite. It needs to permeate social life at all levels. This requires a broader development of spiritual awareness and sensibility among all people and all groups of society. The call for the transformative work of the spirit in contemporary culture — what is sometimes described as the 'spiritual imperative' — requires a creative, dynamic response.
"We need to feed people's zest for life, a zest for the full growth and development of life, for the further unfolding of life's possibilities, its exploration of new ways. Only a transformative, life-affirming, action-oriented spirituality can respond to the hopes and agonies of our suffering world. Only a spirituality that is fully alive can celebrate the flourishing of all life, of the entire Earth community, and of human-Earth relations. This calls for an end of human exploitation of the nonhuman and of nature and, in Thomas Berry's words, the renewal of the Earth as a biospiritual planet."
— The Search for Spirituality
Spirituality: The Crucible of Life
"The exuberantly rich and diverse forms of spirituality that now exist and are still emerging prove beyond doubt that spirituality is not the exclusive exploration of personal interiority and inwardness, but is closely interwoven with all dimensions of human experience, including social, political, and economic life. Spirituality is not a permanent retreat from the world into the monastery, desert, or cave, not even into the silence of one's own heart, or the depth of one's mind. Rather, arising out of the midst of lived experience, spirituality implies the very point of entry into the fullness of life by giving meaning, value, and direction to all that humans do and are.
"It is in the crucible of life that spirituality is born, emerges, and unfolds, so that human life, and life on Earth, can fully blossom and flourish."
— The Search for Spirituality
Interfaith Dialogue and God's Love
"Many know the English hymn 'There's a Wideness in God's Mercy like the Wideness of the Sea.' It contains insights that are appropriate to the theme of religious pluralism and interfaith dialogue. The sea, the ocean, is an image often found in religious and mystical literature, where it can refer to the ocean of God's being and love. But the image of the ocean is also used in connection with religious diversity, in the sense that different religions are seen as different rivers, each following a different course, but all ending up in one and same ocean, which is their common goal and ultimate home, however understood.
"As the hymn so clearly states: 'The love of God is broader than the measure of man's mind . . . But we make his love too narrow by false limits of our own; and we magnify his strictness with a zeal he will not own.' Apart from the exclusively male reference to God's ultimate being and love, this verse might well serve as a motto, if not a warning, for much of current interreligious encounter and dialogue, where our ways of thinking are often far too narrow and exclusive. We have to think in larger, more imaginative terms in order to develop the necessary intellectual, spiritual and existential resources for transforming ourselves and the social and political world around us. Only then will we be able to acknowledge religious diversity as a source of growth and strength rather than of division and strife.
"I want to reflect on interfaith dialogue in today's world and link our contemporary situation to Teilhard de Chardin's earlier experience of religious diversity, and to his reflections on the religiously plural context of the modern world. I also want to ask how spirituality and interfaith dialogue relate to each other."
— Christ in All Things
Being the First
"Teilhard's passionate commitment to God and the earth was expressed in one of his early prayers:
O god, I wish from now on
to be the first to become conscious
of all that the world loves, pursues, and suffers;
I want to be the first to seek,
to sympathize and suffer;
the first to unfold and sacrifice myself
to become more widely human
and more nobly of the earth
than any of the world's servants."
— Christ in All Things
Creative Union
"No sooner had he [Teilhard] set down his powerful mystical vision than he proceeded to work out a 'philosophical synthesis' of his thought, which he called 'creative union.' It was his own personal answer to the philosophical problem of the One and the many. Creative union was understood as a deeply coherent vision of a union between God and the world, God and the universe, and of all spiritual and material realities within it.
"For Teilhard, union always implies a simultaneous process of unification as well as differentiation. Coming together in closer union always means that differences are enhanced and heightened through being combined in a new synthesis. This is where the creative moment lies, a moment he perceived in all realities, in personal relationships, in everything that is in process, everything that is truly alive."
— Spirit of Fire
Divine Milieu
"The idea of a milieu as both a center and anenvironment of transformation had always fascinated Teilhard. He chose the expression 'the divine milieu' to describe the diffuse presence and influence of God at all levels of created reality, in all areas of human experience. In essence this is really a spiritual and mystical idea, conveying an all-pervasive sense of the divine. One can think of it as a field of divine energy that has one central focus — God — from which everything flows, is animated, and is direct.
"In a biological and social context a 'milieu' can refer to an environment of growth, of influence, a web of relationships, something can be at once organic personal, and collective. For Teilhard the idea of the 'divine milieu' was particularly important in capturing the universal influence of Christ through God's incarnation in the world, in its matter, life, and energy — an extended, cosmic understanding of the incarnation that far transcended the historical limitations of time and place associated with the person of Jesus."
— Spirit of Fire
A New Christianity
"Well aware of the great spiritual needs of the contemporary world, the deep hunger for a greater vision and zest for life, Teilhard, more than most, was keenly concerned with giving meaning, direction and purpose to human endeavor. He was looking for a dynamic 'neo-Christianity,' a 're-born' Christianity, 'a Christianity re-incarnated for the second time (Christianity, we might say, squared) in the spiritual energies of Matter,' an 'ultra-Christianity,' the sort of faith the world urgently needs, but has not yet formulated anywhere at all. And yet he believed that a Christianity 'resolutely connected' with the world in movement was the only form of worship 'that can display the astonishing power of energizing to the full, by "amortizing" them, both the powers of growth and life and the powers of diminishment and death, at the heart of, and in the process of, the Noogenesis in which we are involved."
— Spirit of Firen
Women's Spirituality
"Until the recent revival of interest caused by the women's movement, the work of medieval women mystics had for a long time remained a neglected part of the Christian mystical heritage. Yet between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries we can observe a significant increase of women's participation in the religious life, with a strong emphasis on mystical and paramystical phenomena. The different life patterns of medieval men and women also led to a noticeable contrast lay female saints and clerical male saints.
"Women's spirituality reflects the importance of affectivity — of body and feeling — and many spiritual themes are gender specific. Female saints have been called 'models of suffering' in contrast to male 'models of action. ' Women's writing was less grounded in theological training than men's: it was more affective, experiential and devotional, with an emphasis on Christ's suffering humanity and the Eucharist — God was both mother and father, 'judge' and 'nurse' to human souls."
— Spirit of Fire
Prayer: A Sense of the Presence of God
"What is outstanding and deeply touching in Brother Lawrence's legacy is the utter simplicity and directness with which he approaches God. To go to God we need neither art not science, but only a heart that loves him alone and does for God's sake what we commonly do for our own sake. For Lawrence, prayer is a sense of the presence of God; we can establish this presence within ourselves through continually talking to God. No special knowledge or technique is needed to find God's presence, only a heart resolutely determined to love God alone, throughout all one's duties. . .
"Brother Lawrence turned everything into prayer by simply talking to God when doing his tasks, even those he found disagreeable. His apprehension of the presence of God, and the resulting detachment and liberty with regard to all mundane things, helped him in the most unlikely situations, as for example when he had to buy wine for his monastery."
— Spirit of Fire
Wisdom from Other Faiths
"Today we live in a global world, not only in a material, but also spiritual sense. We live in a largely secular world seeking meaning and direction, but we also have an extraordinarily rich, religiously plural world where the treasures of all religions are being opened like a nut, so that their precious kernel can be discovered and shared by all. Traditional wisdom speaks to us not only across the ages, but also across different religions, so that during our new experience of interfaith encounter the unending mystical quest of men and women from different faiths can inspire us in a more enriching way than ever before. The freat heritage of the Christian mystics is part of the global heritage of humanity — a living well from which all who thirst can drink and find new life."
— Spirit of Fire
The Phenomenon of Mysticism
"Teilhard's mysticism was one of union and communion, of adoration and celebration. His deepest desire was to adore the Divine in all its expressions, forms and faces: 'To adore . . . That means to lose oneself in the unfathomable, to plunge into the inexhaustible, to find peace in the incorruptible, to be absorbed in defined immensity, to offer oneself to the fire . . . and to give of one's deepest to that whose depth has no end. Whom, then, can we adore?' "
— Christ in All Things
