The Gardener sees that we are talking not merely of something symbolic but of a real presence – someone desiring to be united with us and continue to live in us – constituting the Universal Element of the Cosmos.
(from:www.freegreatimages.com
On this day of the Solemnity of Corpus Christi in 2014, the Gardener recalls that, according to quantum field theorists, all natural things – whether they are automobiles, human bodies, or peso bills – all things material are made up of atoms.[1]
These atoms are in turn made up of subatomic particles which, in turn, are fluctuations of energy and information in a huge void of energy and information.
Quantum theorists thus say that “the raw material of the world is nonmaterial; the essential stuff of the universe is nonstuff; the basic unit of matter, the atom, is not a solid entity, not at all, but a dancing hierarchy of states of energy and information in a void of all possible states of energy and in formation.”[2]
However, living in a “common sense” world makes one forget, easily, that the solid material reality around us is NOT…solid “inanimate matter” but, rather, “thinking nonstuff,” as they are really fluctuations of information (thus “thinking”), fluctuations of energy.
Behind the visible garment of the universe, beyond the mirage of molecules, beyond and beneath the illusion of physicality is an invisible seamless matrix made up of nothingness.[3]
But to a Jesuit cosmologist universally famous the past many decades after his death for his unorthodox but well-thought-out views, this nothingness “in quo vivimus et sumus (in which we live and are) is whom we term “God” (St. Paul’s), “Be-ing,” or, more accurately, “Love” (St. John’s).
Everywhere present and constituting the true food of our lives, “omne delectamentum in se habentem,” love is the only stable principle of natures and powers.
At the realm of be-ing, love (God) unfolds us and penetrates us by creating and preserving us. This preservation of us by our Source is the gift of participated being. It is also the essential desire in us to be one with Source, to make us one and the same complex thing with him. It is the desire of unitive transformation. Our hearts are restless until they rest in Source.
Out of pure love, Source made itself visible matter, – meat, flesh, body – the Body of Christ (Corpus Christi), the enfleshed (“incarnate”) Word. When all is said and done what binds all – meaning ALL – together is this Word Incarnate, the Christ. This event of the Incarnation is the single event developing in the world, realized in each individual through the Eucharist. This is quite an insight by Teilhard, namely, that the Incarnation is an on-going event. The Source orMaker of the Cosmos has done it a in a way that the result is more a Cosmogenesis and not yet a finished Cosmos – a unique on-going Event.
This is what happens at Mass and Communion (“This is my body…Do this in remembrance of me…”). As a re-membrance it is really the continuity of a unique act that is both fixed, and, at the same time, split up now in spacetime for our experience. The words fall directly on the bread and directly transform it enabling us to experience anew what happened 2,000 years ago or since.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin from: www.the-savoisien.com
For Teilhard, the Christ is not a passive point of convergence but an active center – – of radiation for the energies which lead the universe back to Source through his humanity, with his organic energies “in unitate Corporis Christi…in the unity of Christ’s body.”
Our humanity assimilates the material world, the Host assimilates our humanity, and “step by step irresistibly invades the Universe: as the fire that sweeps over the heath, or the stroke that vibrates through the bronze.”
To him the unity of the world was pointing to spirit. God’s presence is everywhere. He just felt the world reverberating with divine life.
“I can feel God, touch Him, ‘live’ Him in the deep biological current that runs through my soul and carries it with it. God is at work within life. He helps it, raises it up, and gives it the impulse that drives it along, the appetite that attracts it, the growth that transforms it. To live the cosmic life is to live dominated by the consciousness that one is an atom in body of the mystical and cosmic Christ. There is a Communion with God, and a Communion with Earth, and a Communion with God through Earth.”
The sacramental species (bread and wine) “are formed by the totality of the world.
It took billions of years for its consecration. It took that long to reveal the Universal Element, viz. the Christ. This Christ reveals himself in each reality around us, shines like an alternative determinant, like a center, like a Universal element.”
Here then was Teilhard’s Eucharistic prayer:
“Grant, O Lord…that I may discern the infinite perspectives hidden beneath the smallness and the nearness of the Host in which You are concealed.
I have already accustomed myself to seeing, beneath the stillness of that piece of bread that you give me to eat, a devouring power which, in the words of the greatest doctors of your Church, far from being consumed by me, consumes me.
In a true sense, the arms and heart which you open to me are nothing less than all the united powers of the world which, penetrated and permeated to their depths by your will…converge upon my being to form it, nourish it, and bear it along towards the Centre of your fire.
In the Host, it is my life you are offering me, Jesus!
What can I do to gather up and answer that universal and enveloping embrace? Quomodo comprehendam ut comprehensus sim? ….
My life must now become, as a result of the sacrament, an unlimited and endless contact with you – that life which seemed, a few moments ago, like a baptism with you in the waters of the world now reveals itself to me as communion with you through the world.
It is the sacrament of life, the sacrament of my life received, of my life lived, of my life surrendered.
Because you have ascended into heaven after having descended into hell, you have so filled the Universe in every direction, Jesus… quo ibo a spiritu tuo, et quo a facie tua fugiam (where will I go from your spirit, where will I flee from your face) – it is impossible for us to escape you.
Now I know that for certain,
Neither life, whose advance increases your hold upon me;
Nor death, which throws me into your hands;
Nor the good or evil spiritual powers, which are your living instruments;
Nor the energies of matter Into which you have plunged;
Nor the irreversible stream of duration, whose rhythm and flow you control without appeal;
Nor the unfathomable abysses of space, which are the measure of your greatness;
None of these things will be able to separate me from your love, because they are all only the veil, the “species”, under which you take hold of me in order that I may take hold of you.
Once again, Lord, I ask which is the most precious of these beatitudes:
that all things for me should be a contact with you?
Or that you should be so “universal” that I can undergo you and grasp you in every creature?
Sometimes people think that they can increase your attraction by stressing almost exclusively the charm and goodness of your life in the past.
But, truly, Lord, if I wanted to cherish only a man, the I would surely turn to those whom you have given me in the allurement of their present flowering. Are there not, with our mothers, brothers, sisters, friends, enough irresistibly lovable people around us? Why should we turn to Judaea two thousand years ago?
No, what I cry out for, like every being, with my whole life and all earthly passion is something very different from an equal to cherish: it is a God to adore.
To adore: to lose oneself in the unfathomable, to plunge into the inexhaustible, to find peace in the incorruptible, to be absorbed in defined immensity, to offer oneself to the fire and the transparency, to annihilate myself as I become more deliberately conscious of myself, to give of my deepest to that whose depth has no end…..
Disperse, O Jesus, the clouds with your lightning!…
Come to us, clothed in the glory of the world, O Pantocrator-Mighty, Radiant. [4] FINIS
[1] Deepak Chopra, passim
[2] Same
[3] Same
[4] The Divine Milieu