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Thank you for following and supporting the OMEGA CENTER!
You'll find the following in this newsletter:
- Ilia Delio shares the vision and hopes for the OMEGA CENTER
- Your encouraging comments and feedback
- Most recent posts
- Following our PRAXIS page
- e-Course: TEILHARD FOR OUR TIMES with CYNTHIA BOURGEAULT
- Connecting with us. We'd love to hear from you!
- Supporting the OMEGA CENTER
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OMEGA CENTER NEWS FROM ILIA DELIO:
In August 2016, the Omega Center was launched. The name itself is rooted in the thought and writings of the late Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) who spoke of an absolute center at the heart of all life which he identified with God. The Book of Revelation speaks of God as Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end (Rev 22:13). Teilhard interpreted revelation in light of evolution and suggested that multiplicity is dependent on unity and on some final unity which does not need any principle beyond itself to unify it since it is the “already One.” This ultimate unity is God Omega. God is deeply present in creation from the beginning of spacetime which means the “end”—the goal of ultimate unity—is already present in the beginning. This insight takes people by surprise because we often live and act as if God is waiting for us up ahead, but evolution involves awakening to God who is deeply present within.
Evolution is the word that best describes the biological and cosmological processes of life. Teilhard spoke of evolution as the rise of consciousness insofar as life “awakens” from unconscious matter to self-conscious matter. There is a fundamental energy at the heart of evolution, he said, that has two dimensions: the energy within associated with radial energy or consciousness and the energy without which he associated with tangential energy or love. Evolution is a process of deepening love and consciousness; that is, as love deepens, consciousness rises. We can relate to this idea on the human level where we use the phrase “falling in love.” To “fall in love” is to be decentered from one’s ego, to become destabilized so as to become recentered in the heart of another. Falling in love causes a shift in consciousness because we are no longer seeing the world through our individual eyes but through the eyes of another. Or as one writer said, love is not looking at one another but looking in the same direction.
These insights may seem like intellectual musings but Teilhard thought deeply about life in the universe amidst the horrors of human war and suffering. He lived through two world wars and realized we need a new understanding of ourselves and our world based on love-energy and consciousness. if we are to evolve collectively up ahead. This is no small matter as we have built an understanding of ourselves and our world over the centuries based on ancient Greek philosophy and medieval theology. We no longer know how to reflect on our lives in a world of change, and therefore we have no real sense of where we are going or how to evolve.
The Omega Center is meant to be an electronic forum for gathering persons into small communities and to deepen within us a new understanding of all aspects of life, including spirit and mind. Thought and self-reflection are essential to cosmic evolution, according to Teilhard. To think is to unify, to create new horizons of insight, to build the soul and to become artisans of the future up ahead. This is contrary to our fast-pace, electronic age of information where bits of data speed past us from all directions. We find ourselves exhausted, brain fatigued, disconnected and lonelier than ever before. We are living in a paradoxical age of deconstruction; the internet gives the illusion of belonging to a global village but in fact we are more polarized and fragmented than in previous ages. We are not thinking toward a deepening of what we are; we are reacting to what we have become. We are in a serious worldwide state of decline.
Although Teilhard is criticized for being a naïve optimist he was, in fact, a profound realist. He looked at the world disorder as part of the underlying evolutionary impulse; however, he indicated we must be attentive to the flow of evolution and its spiritual yearning for convergence. Without this deeper realization the future is not bright. Our ecological footprint is about 23% larger than what the earth can regenerate; the gap between rich and poor is widening; global warming is increasing, and we have become blind and deaf to the powerful enslavement of consumerism. Unless we make a radical and concerted effort to renew ourselves from the “bottom up”, that is, from understanding existence itself, to what it means to be human and the human longing for ultimate meaning, we can anticipate a great suffering up ahead. In Teilhard’s words, we can suffer the asphyxiation of compression or wake up to our reality and evolve. God is the ultimate constant of evolution and love is its inherent power. Teilhard spoke of love as the very definition of existence. To be is to be with in such a way that what I am is what I love and what I love shapes what I do—and what I do is what I become. The Omega Center has as its mission to explore love at the heart of the cosmos because we no longer know what love really means; the depths of love, the wages of love, and the power of love to “move the sun and the other stars,” as Dante wrote.
The website blog posts are invitations to slow down, read, reflect, share your thoughts, inspirations, hopes, fears, and desires with other humans. Shared being is the first step toward shared life; this is how nature works. The Omega Center looks to reclaim nature as science now describes it because nature is the first book of revelation and this is the book we must learn to read again if we are to renew our “God center.”
I hope you enjoy this first newsletter which conveys some of the impact the Omega Center has made in the first few months of its growth. With your continued support, we hope to expand the Omega Center down the road to include more videos, interviews (and the staff to do so), and eventually to hold a gathering of “Omegans” in a place where we can gather from a renewed energy of love.
We have the capacity to change this world, to evolve it to a new level of shared humanity; to wrap the earth in a new spirit of love energy and to reclaim the world soul as our core binding energy. Or we can continue our privatized paths of individual wealth, greed and corruption which will continue to devolve into us into tiny fragments of thwarted lives. God cannot save us from our own self-destruction because God is the absolute power of love and can do no other than to love us ad infinitum. But God’s love is the very breath of our lives so that every moment is an invitation to love anew. The Omega Center believes that NOW is the moment to love in a new way; to think so as to love; to pray for the grace of freedom in love.
The fourth century theologian Gregory of Nyssa, a mystic and a married Bishop, said that change is woven into the fabric of God’s creation. Life thrives on change. Every end, he said, is a new beginning, and every arrival, a new departure. It is time to change in the direction of life; to realize that our minds create the world and not the other way around. “Where your treasure is, there your heart lies,” Jesus said. The Omega Center aims to reclaim the treasure within and ahead—Omega—God of love, God of the future, who invites us to a new beginning for a new world.
- Ilia Delio, OSF
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