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  • Added August 20th, 2016
  • Filed under 'All Sorts'
  • Viewed 1391 times

Evolutionary Spirituality-A Dream or Reality

By Rod Mitchell in All Sorts

Exploring how evolutionary knowledge affects our experience and understanding of the activity of the spirit.

EVOLUTIONARY SPIRITUALITY A DREAM OR REALITY?
I have been exploring the question of whether the new scientific information about evolution and the origins of the universe have any implications in our understanding of spirituality.
In his book "Teilhard de Chardin -The Divine Milieu Explained - A Spirituality for the 21st Century" Louis M. Savary explores Teilhard's thesis that new knowledge dramatically affects how we experience the spirit today.
Teilhard developed a list of seventeen basic principles to outline his argument for the impact of evolutionary knowledge on spirituality. It is from these seventeen principles that Savary proposes a reworking of traditional Spiritual Exercises for the 21st century.
Teilhard's Basic Principles:
1. The discoveries of modern science must form an important
foundation to any contemporary spirituality if it is to be true,
relevant, and inspiring.
2. Evolution is happening continually on every level of being -and it
has a direction. It is not static, fixed or given. It develops, moving
forward.
3. The Law of Attraction-Connection-Complexity-Consciousness is the law that is giving evolution its direction.
4. Evolution is based primarily on spirit, not on matter.
5. We all live and move and have our being in the divine milieu*.
6. Everything has a "within" as well as a "without."
7. The principle of self-convergence is now operating.
8. At present, evolution is focused in the "noosphere."
9. The success of God's plan for creation depends on your conscious
and creative activity to keep that divine plan evolving and
developing in the direction God wants for creation.
10. Any true spirituality today must be a collective spirituality.
11. Today, even an individual spirituality, that is, a private and exclusive
redemptive relationship between God and me, must include all
other human beings and the rest of creation.
12. To know, love, and serve the universe with a passion.
13. To love the "invisible."
14. To love the "not-yet."
15. An evolutionary spirituality is focused primarily on grace, not on
sin.
16. To recognize that union differentiates.
17. To synthesize all things in the Universal Christ.
Savary describes the "Divine Milieu" in the following way: "One of the richest symbols of the Divine Milieu may be found in the omnipresence of radio waves and other invisible signals actively alive and operating in each square centimetre of space in your home. For example, choose some precise location in any room of your home. Carry a radio to that spot. The signals from every radio station, AM, FM, are present in that spot. And if you assembled all your neighbours from blocks and blocks around your house who had personal cell phones, each cell phone signal would be accessible simultaneously in that exact same spot in your home.
If you then took all these electrical components to another room in your home, all these hundreds - maybe thousands - of signals would be active and alive in that tiny space as well. In fact, no matter where you went in your neighbourhood, no matter in what precise spot you chose to turn on your cell phone, these same hundreds of invisible signals would be there actively ready for you to tune into them.
And all those signals are in every space equally and simultaneously. You know this because you may be driving along the road at 60 km an hour, yet the passenger in the back seat of your car talking on a cell phone experiences the voice of the caller without interruption as the car speeds along.
The divine milieu is like these radio and cell phone signals - omnipresent, always actively operating."
So, if it is true that evolutionary knowledge does affect our experience and understanding of the activity of the spirit then we will need to give serious attention to how we tune our lives to pick up the signals in this Divine Milieu that is active and continues to unfold.
Over the coming year, in worship at Mornington and Glenaven (and in other programmes within the life of the parish) we will turn our hearts and minds towards this question of how we might develop spiritual exercises which take seriously the context of our 21st century knowledge.
Rod Mitchell