“Deliberately Diverse” represents the individual thoughts and opinions of a group of Taylor friends who almost never completely agree about anything but are gratified by the opportunity to stimulate deliberately diverse discussions in our beloved community. Today’s column represents the thoughts and opinions of the group of friends NOT the Taylor Press.
“Love makes the world go ‘round” even at 8 a.m. Sunday mornings when a group variously known as Deliberate Diversity or the Holy Heretics meets to discuss important, thought-provoking books.
The latest author takes seriously the sentence “Love makes the world go ‘round,” interpreting Love as the energy of the universe which does indeed spin our planet. For her, love is “a powerful, transforming energy that heals, reconciles, unites, and makes whole.”
The book under discussion has an awesome title, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love, suggesting that the divine love energy is so powerful that at times it seems like we can hardly bear it. The name of the author is also extraordinary, Ilio Delio, OSF, PhD . She is a Fransican professor and author of 20 books.
This award-winning book is singularly appropriate for our group because it was inspired by a holy heretic, Teilhard de Chardin, French Jesuit priest, scientist, paleontologist, theologian, philosopher, teacher, who took part in the discovery of Peking Man, and was, according to Wikipedeia, “Darwinian in outlook.”
That outlook resulted in a warning being assigned to his early writings by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
That is enough for our group to consider him a kind of heretic but in fact he was so holy that he was praised by four popes.
More importantly, Chardin inspired Prof.
Delio to update his great synthesis. As she explores what Chardin’s idea of evolution means now from the point of view of quantum physics, chaos theory, systems biology, genetics, and neuroscience, Darwin is almost completely forgotten. What occurred to me was the extraordinary relevance of her focus on oneness and unity to our efforts to save ourselves and all those who come after us from climate change and pandemics. We can only do so if all the ciritzens of this planet can adopt and abide by a unifying global vision.
Delio begins trying to unify Christians around Jesus’ prayer at the end of his life, “That they all may be one” (John 17:21).”
She reminds us that Jesus was a wholemaker, bringing together those who were divided, separated, or left out of the whole. And she integrates other religions, especially in her discussion of mysticism, including Judaism, Hinduism, Sufism, and Islam.
My favorite is the Jewish Kabbalist writer, Nachmanides, “You should remember God and His love always so that your awareness [is] not separate from Him when you walk along the way, when you lie down, and when you wake up.”
