J > J's Quotes

“Describing Francis as the truly humble person, Bonaventure writes: “As Christ’s disciple he strove to regard himself as worthless in his own eyes and those of others. He used to make this statement frequently: ‘What a person is before God, that he is and no more.’”34”
― Ilia Delio, Franciscan Prayer

“As Francis deepened his relationship with Christ, the other became less outside Francis as object and more related to him as brother.”
― Ilia Delio, Franciscan Prayer

“Secularization is not a zero-sum game necessitating the demise of supernaturalism. Nor does the new spirituality reject science. What it rejects is scientism in which the methodology and data of natural science alone are allowed to contribute to our understanding of the world and the human condition in it. The new spirituality also calls on natural science itself as a witness against the inadequacies of a purely secularized worldview.”
― Ilia Delio, From Teilhard to Omega: Co-creating an Unfinished Universe

“The experience that the God we meet in prayer and in history actually loves us indicates, as we have seen, that we make a difference to the eternal God. The hope, then, is that nothing good is lost. Even though each and every accomplishment we achieve will eventually become space dust, and that dust may itself dissipate into cold cosmic darkness, we hope that God will not let our efforts turn to nothing. We hope and we sense that all is preserved in God”
― Ilia Delio, From Teilhard to Omega: Co-creating an Unfinished Universe

“God is the newest thing there is, the youngest thing there is. God is the beginning and if we are united to God we become new again.”
― Ilia Delio, The Emergent Christ: Exploring the Meaning of Catholic in an Evolutionary Universe

“cult of cosmic pessimism. Cosmic pessimism is the belief that nature has no purpose and that whatever meaning exists in the world is our own human creation. This belief is taken for granted by most scientific thinkers today, but with the aid of the new idea of an unfinished universe, theology may point out that cosmic pessimism, which is usually taken as the epitome of hard-nosed realism, is not as self-evidently justifiable as it seems to most contemporary intellectuals. Geology, evolutionary biology, and cosmology now situate Earth, life, and human existence within the framework of an immense cosmic drama of transformation that is still going on.”
― Ilia Delio, From Teilhard to Omega: Co-creating an Unfinished Universe

“For the Franciscans, there is no such thing as “brute matter.”
― Ilia Delio, Franciscan Prayer

“In Bonaventure’s view only one who is on a journey to God can really know God; faith seeks understanding through the path of love.”
― Ilia Delio, Christ in Evolution

“The resurrection happens in the present moment, but it is a present moment bathed in future, a new relationship with God, a new union, a new wholeness—a new catholicity—by which life is wholly unified.”
― Ilia Delio, Making All Things New: Catholicity, Cosmology, Consciousness

“In the quantum view a person is a constellation of relationships, inner and outer: the degree of one’s relationships extends throughout space-time and endures in those who live on. Belief in the resurrection of Jesus undergirds the fact that life creates the universe, not the other way around. Space and time are not absolute; rather, they are “tools” of our mind to help organize our world. Death and immortality exist in a world without spatial or linear boundaries. Every act of physical death is an act of new life in the universe. The resurrection of Jesus reveals to us new cosmic life. Death is not the end; our bodies do not become dust, while the soul goes to heaven. Rather, through the lens of quantum physics, we now realize that death is the collapse of our “particle” aspect of life into the “wave” dimension of our relatedness. While”
― Ilia Delio, Making All Things New: Catholicity, Cosmology, Consciousness

“The idea of a spiritually potent creation means that Jesus Christ is not an intrusion into an otherwise evolutionary universe but its reason and goal.”
― Ilia Delio, Christ in Evolution

“The future universal cannot be anything else but the hyperpersonal.”
― Ilia Delio, Making All Things New: Catholicity, Cosmology, Consciousness

“To follow Jesus is to be a wholemaker, essentially to love the world into new being and life.”
― Ilia Delio, Making All Things New: Catholicity, Cosmology, Consciousness

“Francis became a man of peace because he was transformed in love and came to recognize that he was intimately related (pietas) to every person and creature.8”
― Ilia Delio, Franciscan Prayer

“People who are reckless usually wind up in trouble because they do crazy things. Imagine being reckless for the kingdom of God. Just think what might happen. Friends of God loving one another around the earth. Heaven breaking open in our midst. We have the power to make this happen.”
― Ilia Delio, Franciscan Prayer

“Contemplative vision is the vision that says “you are good as you are because you are the sacrament of God’s love.”
― Ilia Delio, Franciscan Prayer

“The foundation of existence is not mere being itself (what is) but relationality (what is becoming): union is always toward more being.”
― Ilia Delio, From Teilhard to Omega: Co-creating an Unfinished Universe

“With this new sense of moving forward, from simple to complex life forms, from bacteria to humans, science shows that evolution is more than a method of collecting and classifying the facts of life; rather it is the means by which humanity can move forward into the future.”
― Ilia Delio, From Teilhard to Omega: Co-creating an Unfinished Universe

“Evolution means that nature does not operate according to fixed laws but by the dynamic interplay of law, chance, and deep time; that is, one cannot understand natural processes apart from developmental categories. The interaction of forces creates a dynamic process of unfolding life, pointing to the fact that nature is incomplete; there are no fixed essences. Instead, nature is consistently oriented toward new and complex life.”
― Ilia Delio, From Teilhard to Omega: Co-creating an Unfinished Universe

“The discoveries of twentieth–century science, especially Big Bang cosmology (“universalism” or cosmic wholeness) and evolution (nature's openness to the future), ushered in two new dimensions of life, wholeness and futurism. Contrary to the ancient Ptolemaic cosmos of order, stasis, and hierarchy, the Big Bang cosmos was now seen in its evolving capacity for greater wholeness and openness to consummation in the future.”
― Ilia Delio, From Teilhard to Omega: Co-creating an Unfinished Universe

“Go, my dear brothers two by two through different parts of the word, announcing peace to the people and penance for the remission of sins.”5”
― Ilia Delio, Franciscan Prayer

“From within the heart of matter, I hold together the foundations of the universe.”
― Ilia Delio, From Teilhard to Omega: Co-creating an Unfinished Universe

“We humans are evolution made conscious; hence, our choices for and in the world shape the future of the world.”
― Ilia Delio, From Teilhard to Omega: Co-creating an Unfinished Universe

“God is Trinity because God is relationship in love. This God loves us totally and unconditionally to the extent that God shares with us the suffering of our lives.”
― Ilia Delio, Franciscan Prayer

“The new atheism has attracted considerable attention today, but apart from the public hype, it offers no substantial change or direction to modernity's problems. Religion may be the opium of the masses but atheism offers no new yeast as leaven for the masses.”
― Ilia Delio, From Teilhard to Omega: Co-creating an Unfinished Universe

“It implies also that there was a souring of “the earth’s sweet being in the beginning.” Long ago there occurred a besmirching of primordial innocence that has turned the history of human life and the practice of virtue into a project of restoration rather than one of joining ourselves to a universe that is still becoming more.”
― Ilia Delio, From Teilhard to Omega: Co-creating an Unfinished Universe

“God is the newness of everything that is and is coming to be. God is ever newness in love. Transcendence, therefore, is the future beyond that draws us in the present movement toward greater wholeness and unity.”
― Ilia Delio, The Emergent Christ: Exploring the Meaning of Catholic in an Evolutionary Universe

“Thomas Merton expresses the need for this mystical imperative: The Christian’s vision of the world ought, by its very nature, to have in it something of poetic inspiration. Our faith ought to be capable of filling our hearts with a wonder and a wisdom which see beyond the surface of things and events, and grasp something of the inner and “sacred” meaning of the cosmos which, in all its movements and all its aspects, sings the praises of its Creator and Redeemer.2”
― Ilia Delio, From Teilhard to Omega: Co-creating an Unfinished Universe

“Christ is not only the name of an historical personage but a reality in our own lives.”32  He uses the term “christophany” to indicate that each person bears the mystery of Christ within.”
― Ilia Delio, Christ in Evolution

“As far as theology is concerned, Christian understanding of the meaning of God, Christ, redemption, morality, and human existence is still weighed down by both prescientific and early modern cosmological assumptions.”
― Ilia Delio, From Teilhard to Omega: Co-creating an Unfinished Universe