What can it mean to ‘love God?’
Today’s Post
In the past several weeks we have focused Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ on the use of meditation from the finding of God to the use of ‘secular meditation’ (psychology) in finding ourselves. We have followed this thread as it appears in the science of psychology, noting its evolution as ‘assisted secular meditation’, and saw how it can lead us to an understanding of the person that Kierkegaard believed “to be that self that one truly is” and in so doing, move toward ‘fuller being’.
This week we will address how relating to this universal ‘ground of being’ that manifests itself in us can be seen as ‘love’. Now that we have identified how God, the principle of existence, can be understood as the principle of life within us, we can explore what it can mean to say that such a ‘ground of being’ can be ‘loved’.
A Relook at Love
In today’s culture, it seems clear that few things are less tangible but more ubiquitous than ‘love’. Our culture is rife with references to it: it is used to sell things, explain behavior, understood as a prompt to procreation, as fodder for poems and music, as themes to movies and books. Nearly all these perceptions understand love primarily as an emotional, sentimental feeling. Articulated thusly, it seems to offer a poor mechanism for connecting to the ‘ground of being’ that is active as the basis of our lives.
Even our Western religion has problems with it. For many Christians, the emotional aspect of love far outweighs the ontological aspect: Love is more a sentimental ‘feeling good’ about God, Jesus, Mary, and the saints than the facet of the universal energy which effects our growth as it unites us.
Teilhard notes that in the systematic and ever-recursive action of evolution, from the big bang to the human person, the same phenomenon can be seen:
Two entities of like complexity unite, and the product is an entity of higher complexity, and thus greater in its potential for union.
Teilhard’s ontological insight to this evolutionary phenomenon can be summarized as
“Fuller being results from closer union, and closer union emerges from fuller being.”
Science observes this phenomenon as active in the evolution of simple matter from the first bosons which emerge from the initial pool of undifferentiated energy to the very complex molecules which constitute the building blocks of life. In its focus on biological evolution as ‘replication’ the theory of Natural Selection assumes but fails to explain the continuation of this rise of complexity in living things. Not only does complexity continue to rise in living things, it does so at a much higher rate. This can be objectively traced in the evolution from simple cells to the neurons which underpin the human characteristic which we call ‘consciousness’. Without such a fundamental principle of existence, evolution as we know it would not be possible, and the ‘stuff of the universe’ would remain forever at its initial featureless state.
Love As The Energy Of Evolution In The Human
Science documents an example of this upwelling of complexity in the ‘K-T’ event, some 65M years ago. In this event, the fossil record shows the most evolved species on the planet as reptilian with the distinct increase in brain capacity found in the later reptiles. After their extinction, the flow of increased complexity, active in the reptiles for millions of years, began to rise anew in the increasing evolution of mammals. This phenomenon is echoed in the assertion by Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science, that
“If the tape of evolution were rewound, it would result species different from those seen today.”
As we have seen, we can hardly expect such a powerful and inexorable upwelling of complexity, acting and increasing for over fourteen billion years, to stop with the human person. There is every reason to recognize this agency of evolution as just as active in humans today as it has been throughout the history of the universe. If we concur with Teilhard that humans are “evolution become aware of itself”, the question remains: how can we see it as active in our lives?
Teilhard observes that evolution proceeds via the ‘activation of energy’. The unions of evolutionary products that raise the level of complexity do not occur in isolation: they are influenced and effected by the wash of energy which pervades the universe. Atoms are unified by the strong and weak atomic forces, complex atoms by the fusion of simple atoms by gravity, atoms evolve into molecules under the play of chemical forces.
These energies are manifold, and different types of energy come into play at different rungs of complexity. For example, gravity was unable to influence evolution until particles acquired mass. This effect precipitated the gravitational compaction of Helium and Hydrogen atoms into stars which in turn effected complex atoms which in turn enabled molecules. The forces of chemistry were mute until the arrival of molecules. And the forces of love could not play their unifying role until the entities of evolution became conscious. Love, seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, is therefore the latest manifestation of this energy: the one which effects human ‘complexification’.
Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, the increasing complexity of living things results in the phenomenon of consciousness. This subjects entities to the influence of energies so subtle as to be immeasurable yet so powerful as to energize the ascent of complexity to a level which is ‘consciousness aware of itself’.
John Haught provides a very succinct insight into this phenomenon.
“Running silently through the heart of matter, a series of events that would flower into ‘subjectivity’ (the human person) has been part of the universe from the start. So hidden is this interior side of the cosmos from public examination that scientists and philosophers with materialist leanings usually claim it has no real existence.”
The Action of Love
Teilhard addresses how this new manifestation of cosmic energy plays out in human relationships.
In a nutshell, he saw that our personal evolution, our personal growth, is the manifestation of the continuation of ‘complexification’ in the human species. Teilhard sees this complexification as occurring in two basic recursive steps as we engage in the process of ‘becoming persons’.
He refers to the first step as ‘ex-centration’, in which we become more aware of our environment, and of other persons, and begin to lose the self-centeredness that framed our infancy. As we become more adept at this, we become more open to others, and are more able to allow our relationships to mature.
We saw three weeks ago how Carl Rogers observes the evolving characteristics of maturation in therapy. Rogers echoes Teilhard’s ‘ontological’ insight into love when he states that
“Change appears to come about through experience in a relationship”.
As our relationships deepen, we can become aware of the regard which others hold for us, which in turn offers us a clearer, more objective, and more holistic vision of ourselves.
This results in the second step of ‘centration’, in which we become more ‘the person that we are’, and less ‘the person that we thought we were’. And as we saw with the clinical observations of Dr. Rogers, we can become the more authentic and less centered person that we are capable of becoming. As we become more adept at self-management, we are more able to engage in deep, personal relationships. Thus, the cycle continues in a convergent spiral, increasingly focused on deeper maturity through closer relationships by which we enable deeper maturity.
Teilhard sees this convergent spiral acting within us as
“Fuller being from closer union. Closer union from fuller being.”
This spiral of ex-centration and centration has another effect as well. Even as we are changed in a love relationship, this same evolving union changes those who we love even as it is changing us. Each cycle has the potential of raising the ‘abundance of life’ (as described by Rogers) of the individuals involved.
Thus love, understood now as more ontological than emotional, is indeed a powerful force for our continued evolution. As we grow, we become more able to love and thus more complete as persons. As we become more complete, we are able to love more deeply. As in the case of every step of evolution from the big bang to the present, we as entities unite to effect an entity which is more capable of uniting and in doing so thus becomes more ‘complex’.
Loving God
So, how does this approach to human love and evolution lead to a relationship with this universal force which is active in us? What does it mean to say that we ‘love’ the ‘ground of being’? How does Teilhard’s recursive dynamic of love play out in our relationship with God?
In the past few weeks, we have been exploring how our recognition of this inner agent of evolution is only the first step. To flourish and grow, to evolve, we must learn not only to be aware of it but how to cooperate with it. We must learn to trust it.
If we take Teilhard’s two-step process as basic to the activation of the energy of love, the answer is simple. As Rogers points out, and nearly all religions teach, all personal growth requires a loss of ego, the ‘false self’. It is always necessary for us to understand what beliefs, practices, and fears are part of the scaffolding, the shell, that we have erected in ourselves to protect us. The act of trusting that we can survive the disassembly of this scaffolding requires our belief that the person who will emerge will not need them.
This inner trust is not something that another person can give us, it can only be accepted, and then only if we can acknowledge that it is innate, granted to us as our birthright, unearned and inextinguishable. This inner realization is our connection with ourselves. It can only be described as our love for ourselves, and hence is a love for the source of ourselves. Such love isn’t necessarily an emotional state, but is more the recognition, the confident belief that the energy of the universe flows through us, trustworthy, gratuitous, and ever-present, combined with the decision to trust and cooperate with it. It is the energy of the universe made manifest in human life, patiently awaiting our participation.
To love God therefore is to love ourselves, not in the vernacular of western culture as a superficial emotional or sentimental state, but to recognize, value and eventually learn to trust the principle of life as it is allowed to change our lives.
Seen thusly, God isn’t engaged as a supernatural person who requires our adoration, but rather in the recognition of the action of a universal force in each of us as clearly expressed by Teilhard as he tells of
“…hearing the voice of the Gospel, guaranteed by divine success, speaking to me from the depth of the night:
“It is I, be not afraid.”
Even more to his point, he tells of what can happen such recognition arrives within us:
”..I doubt that whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him.”
The Next Post
Having seen over the past few weeks how God can be understood, even recognized, even ‘loved’, as the sum total of all the forces of the universe brought to bear on that which effects our beings which are conscious of our consciousness, we can go on to see at how such an understanding of God can be found in a reinterpreted version of the most basic precepts of the Western systems of science and religion.