The Unbearable Wholeness of Being Quotes

“Raimon Panikkar said that when theology is divorced from cosmology, we no longer have a living God but an idea of God. God becomes a thought that can be accepted or rejected rather than the experience of divine ultimacy. Because theology has not developed in tandem with science (or science in tandem with theology) since the Middle Ages, we have an enormous gap between the transcendent dimension of human existence (the religious dimension) and the meaning of physical reality as science understands it (the material dimension).”
― Ilio Delio, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love

“At the center of our being is a point of nothingness that is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our mind or the brutalities of our own will. . . . It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely. —Thomas Merton Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander”
― Ilio Delio, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love

“The greatest obstacle to religion today does not come so much from atheists but from the neo-foundationalists whose fundamental tenets of religion claim ontological certainty. These are the religious fundamentalists whose certainty of divine truths based on the inerrancy of scripture creates division. Their grip on God strips the world of the divine mystery. The only way to overcome this (paradoxical) religious atheism is to let go of God.”
― Ilio Delio, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love

“Evolution tells us that nature is not a closed, causal system of events but a complex series of fluid, dynamic, interlocking, and communicative relationships.”
― Ilio Delio, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love

“quantum physics opened up a new window to the divine mystery that illuminates the role of God and human in evolution. It is not a matter of trying to fit the old God into the new cosmos; rather, it is the birth of a new God.”
― Ilio Delio, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love

“generativity. The human person is not the great”
― Ilia Delio, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love

“It is the attraction of the whole that has set everything in motion in me, has animated and given organic form to everything. It is because I feel the whole and love it passionately that I believe in the primacy of being . . . nothing in the world is intelligible except in and starting from the whole.”
― Ilia Delio, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love

“The former superior general of the Jesuit Order, Pedro Arrupe, illumined the heart of love: Nothing is more practical than finding God, than falling in Love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, whom you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in Love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.”
― Ilia Delio, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love

“Since the rise of the modern university, knowledge has advanced without soul, becoming power without aim. The modern university has become an obstacle to the universe, that is, integral wholeness, insofar as it does not educate us humans to bear the universe in our beings or a consciousness that the universe bears us in its being. Merton writes: “It mass produces uneducated graduates who are unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and complete artificial charade which they call ‘life.’”18 Instead of education for the flourishing of life’s wholeness, we educate to disconnect and die. Our universities have become fragmented silos of specialties where no two people speak the same language on any given day. Students are encouraged to succeed in their studies, not to contemplate truth, as if success is the goal of study. If contemporary education is failing the cosmos, it is because we have lost the integral relationship between living and loving. Unless we change the way we think, we will not change the way we act. Our mechanized world of mechanized systems with mechanized humans can no longer continue. We are fragmenting fast. The beginning of a sustainable future must begin with the integral knowledge of God, self, and cosmos.”
― Ilia Delio, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love