Making All Things New: Catholicity, Cosmology, Consciousness (Catholicity in an Evolving Universe Series)

by Ilia Delio

Teilhard used the term Christogenesis to describe evolution as the genesis of the total Christ, “the triumph of the personal at the summit of the mind.”5 He envisioned the evolutionary process as one moving toward evolution of consciousness and ultimately toward evolution of spirit, from the birth of mind to the birth of the whole Christ.6 He urged Christians to participate in the process of Christogenesis, to risk, get involved, aim toward union with others, for the entire creation is waiting to give birth to God. He opposed a static Christianity that isolates its followers instead of merging them with the masses, imposing on them a burden of observances and obligations, and causing them to lose interest in the common task. “Do we realize that if we are to influence the world it is essential that we share in its drive, in its anxieties and its hopes?”7 We are not only to recognize evolution but to make it continue in ourselves.8 We are to “christify” the world by immersing ourselves in it, plunging our hands into the soil of the earth and touching the roots of life. Union with God is not withdrawal or separation from the activity of the world but a dedicated, integrated, and sublimated absorption into it.9 Before, he said, the Christian thought that he or she could attain God only by abandoning everything. Now he writes, “We must make our way to heaven through earth.10