Rob Field, CSW Director
Years ago, a young man walked into a monastery chapel, witnessed the monks in prayer, and had a flash of deep insight: the reason the world had not blown up yet was because there were people and places like these, devoted to contemplation and peace. That young man was Thomas Merton, on his way to becoming a preeminent spiritual teacher of the 20th century. In different circumstances, the same insight could have come in a synagogue, mosque, sangha, or in nature. The “so what” is the same: our world needs people and places devoted to higher consciousness.
During Merton’s life, another Catholic mystic named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was working with similar insights. Teilhard intuited that all humans have the potential to contribute positively to our planet’s spiritual consciousness. Like the above image, he envisioned the Earth encircled by radiant spiritual energy that all of us can influence, in a healthy or unhealthy way.
This is a spiritual corollary to what physics already tells us: when a butterfly flaps its wings, it will affect the weather patterns on the other side of the world, however subtly. Likewise, when you cultivate a level of spirituality that supports qualities such as justice, peace, and compassion, your individual consciousness will affect that general consciousness of our planet. A “heavy thought” you say? Yes, and a necessary one in this time of momentous change, upheaval, and unrest.
Teilhard’s profound insight about a kind of planet-encircling spiritual energy is what convinced me. He even helped coin and popularize a name for it: the noosphere. Here’s how one writer describes it:
Teilhard de Chardin depicted the cosmos as a series of unions. From very simple beginnings the path leads to ever greater and more complex unities, in which multiplicity is not abolished but merged into a growing synthesis, leading to the “noosphere”, in which spirit and its understanding embrace the whole, and are blended into a kind of living organism. [C.J. Ratzinger]
If you’re still with me, I will add one more thought before offering a final “so what.” Teilhard believed the noosphere functions as an unseen, organic and dynamic presence that helps the geosphere (inorganic matter) and the biosphere (all living things) create what we call “the world.” Teilhard said conscious energy, as represented by the noosphere, governs the unfolding of evolution, including human evolution.
What, then, am I saying about our part in saving the world? I’m saying the sacred work of cultivating spiritual consciousness has now become essential. French theologian and ethicist Jacques Ellul once said that prayer “is much more important for the very direction of the world than all actions of all” people. He meant this literally, going so far as to claim the Holocaust and World War II were evidence that people of prayer had failed in their duty to help create the kind of consciousness that would have made both outcomes unthinkable. (Ellul said the same thing about poverty, that if Christians acted in accordance with their beliefs, poverty would not exist.)
Although Ellul was a Christian calling fellow Christians to task, his caution can be applied to all of us, religious or not. Here’s the critical question: what kind of consciousness are we trying to shape for ourselves and the people we are in relationship with? Is it one that would make another world war and/or mass genocide unthinkable?
I know very few people who can pull this off alone. Let’s work on it together.
photo illustration: Getty Images via Unsplash