January 12, 2012                                         Teilhard de Chardin - links & reflection

Fondation Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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The Foundation Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is located at the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris. It has extensive resources on Teilhard in parallel sites in English and French. More than 50 years after his death this famous Jesuit priest and paleontologist continues to generate controversy within the Catholic Church. The Vatican itself seems to have stood back from the on-going controversy and has had nothing official to say for over two decades now. Will this man, like Cardinal Newman, and many other controversial figures -- even our own Australian "saint", Blessed Mary Mackillop -- be "resurrected" and welcomed back among our most venerated? While he might still be controversial within the Church his influence outside the Church continues to grow. Gaia and other more secular websites today feature his insights and perspectives and the following quote from another website (http://www2.gol.com/users/coynerhm/teilhard.html) by Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg is testimony to an influence today that is possibly light years greater than it was when he was called home to his master. "Teilhard de Chardin finds allies among those searching for grains of spiritual truth in a secular universe. As Mario Cuomo put it, 'Teilhard made negativism a sin. He taught us how the whole universe -- even pain and imperfection -- is sacred'. Marshall McLuhan turned to Teilhard as a source of divine insight in The Gutenberg Galaxy, his classic analysis of Western culture's descent into a profane world. Al Gore, in his book Earth in the Balance, argues that Teilhard helps us understand the importance of faith in the future. 'Armed with such faith,' Gore writes, 'we might find it possible to resanctify the earth, identify it as God's creation, and accept our responsibility to protect and defend it'." 

(Sorry, can't find source of above article. Can anyone help? ....jw)

We are like caterpillars.....there's a higher form of life around the corner......we are on the way to becoming....butterflies:

When the universe began....when life began.....there were molecules and atoms......then there were animals.....then there were human beings.  Only human beings can be aware of their thinking, can "know that they know", can "reflect as they think".  This consciousness is a process that has been developing since the start of the universe ....and has not yet finished.  Evolution, according to Teilhard, demands a Super-Consciousness, a Super-Life,  somewhere in the future.

In the Bible and especially in Greek/Eastern Christianity, there is the theme of human beings sharing in the life of God, sharing the divine life, partially now, fully in Heaven. This is a process of "becoming like God, sharing God's divinity, "divinisation".

Super-Consciousness + divinisation = thinking more and more like Jesus, like God, with an ever greater kind of consciousness,   until we become what we think = becoming more and more aware/conscious of Jesus/God in our daily lives (every conversation, every activity) until it is no longer we who are thinking but Jesus/God thinking in us = we are transformed/transfigured/divinised.  Not that we lose our own identity, but that our identity, our consciousness has been raised to a new/Super level......just as "thinking"/consciousness has been raised to newer levels (plant/animal/human) since the universe began.

We are meant to become....Divine butterflies.....

Teilhard Links: One  

Divinisation Links:  The Glory That Shall Be? The Incredible Divinisation of Humans!  
(not sure if I agree with everything here....but a most interesting historical overview...)

John W