Today’s Post 

   Last week we looked a little deeper into finding and cooperating with the ‘Divine Spark’, and addressed how through history to the current day, there are sociological strands active in our societies which would not only deny it, but actively work against it.

We also took a first look at how recognition and cooperation with the Divine Spark can overcome these negative trends, and thus insure the continuation of the enterprise of human evolution.

This week we will move on to looking deeper into how cooperating with this ‘divine spark’ is not only essential to the continuation of the advance of evolution in the human species, but to our own personal evolution as well.

The Divine Spark As The Principle Of ‘Personness’

    Teilhard strongly asserts what happens when we realize the existence of the divine spark 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 the is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him.”

   Why should this be such a ‘decisive moment”?  In what way is it indeed ‘decisive’?

To answer we must consider what happens in the normal maturing process of the human person.  We begin as children at the center of our own universe, surrounded by attention and provision of our needs.  One of the first things that must happen as we grow toward adulthood is to become more aware of our environment, particularly in the form of other persons.  The complete human ‘gestation’ process is quite long compared to the ‘lower mammals’, but like them, it is initially more stimulated by the nurturing instincts of the mammalian ‘limbic’ brain. Unlike them, however, the development of intellectual maturity requires development of the skill of using the neocortex brain to modulate these emotional stimuli.  This modulation, the emergence of ‘objectivity’, is essential to ‘learning’ and inevitably incurs an increase in openness to the surrounding world, especially to other persons.

We have seen how, in Teilhard’s view of the world, love is also something that develops in the same way.  For love to be able to energize human growth (instead of just a lubricant to relationship), it must become more open to the other, whose reciprocation stimulates our own growth.  Teilhard refers to this recursive cycle of ‘humanization’ as excentrationfollowed by centration.

To Teilhard, love is the humanized manifestation of the energy of evolution.  It is the unique energy rising from the existence of the divine spark in each of us.  While not denying the limbic-tinged emotion that is undeniably present in human relationships, Teilhard’s grasp goes much deeper, seeing love as the essential energy by which we become what we can be, and how doing so contributes our small increment to the continuation of human evolution.

It is very common among all religions and most philosophies to value ‘selflessness’ over ‘egocentricity’, but in most cases it is valued for the social stability that it provides, or as a qualification for the rewards of the ‘next life’.  The recognition is very revolutionary indeed that when we undertake such an excentration-centration cycle in our life that we are cooperating with  ”a universal will to become and to be” that manifests itself in each of us and which is essential to continued human evolution.   Once realization of the existence of this Divine Spark begins to take place within us, our potential for the fullness of human becoming is increased.

The ‘Fruits’ Of The Divine Spark

How can we quantify such increase in potential?  What difference does it make that we awaken to such a possibility?

At the coarsest level, that of society, we have seen in quite a bit of detail of how human welfare has increased exponentially over the last two hundred fifty years.  In this same overview, we saw how the chronicler of such welfare attributed such explosive development to the rise in human freedom and improvement in human relationships.   We have also seen how the cornerstone of such freedom and relationships was based on Thomas Jefferson’s assertion of the basic ability of “the people themselves” as the “safe depository …of the ultimate powers of the society”.  And in the past few posts, we have seen how such an assertion is only possible if we assume the presence of the ‘Divine Spark’ in every human person.

Richard Rohr writes extensively on how one of the most important concepts of early Christianity, the idea of “God in Us”, has been superseded by Christianity’s rush to codify theology in Greek terms, and organize a structural hierarchy to insure its endurance.  Rohr refers to the many teachings of Jesus which refer to what was later understood as ‘The Christ’.  To be sure, these teachings are sprinkled among the many teachings which were understood as essential elements of the resultant theology and normative to church hierarchy, but Paul, the ‘great summarizer’ of Jesus’ teachings, stressed them.  It was Paul who highlighted Jesus’ teachings on Love, and on the ‘virtues’ (last week), but also Paul that first stressed not only the existence, but the universality of the Divine Spark:

“There is only Christ. He is everything and he is in everything” (Colossians 3:11)

  In spite of his insistence on this intimacy with God, not only the universal nature of the Divine Spark, but of its presence in each of us, came to be second to the more structural basis adopted by the church.  The church came to stress more a remote, judgmental God who required human sacrifice to reconcile himself to his creation than an intimate God of which John could say,

“God is Love, and he who abides in Love abides in God and God in him”.

And At The Personal Level?

But what about the human person ‘himself’?  Are humans just cogs in the machinery of evolution, whose relationships and freedoms are needed to insure the increase in human welfare?  Or is there some level of ‘payoff’ at the personal level?

The Next Post

This week we looked a little deeper into finding and cooperating with the ‘Divine Spark’, and it is active in each human person.

Next week we will move on looking into how acknowledging and cooperating with this ‘divine spark’ can make a difference in our individual lives.