This is the title of a post that Laurel invited the Board of EGST to read as the new year begins.

She wrote: It speaks to what both Edwin and I know that Elm Grove Trust was called to express through our action as a charity. I believe that we lived the truth being expressed in her article.

It is written by Dr Ilia Delio, the founder of the Center for Christogenesis, based in Washington but with outreach around the world through the internet. Ilia is a Franciscan Sister and an American theologian specialising in the area of science and religion, with interests in evolution, physics, and neuroscience and the import of these for theology. She is a world authority on the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin. Brian Swimme wrote of her:

With both passion of the heart and brilliance of the mind, Ilia presents a vision that combines science and spirituality. Her work is rare and precious achievement. She is one of the planetary leaders of our time. The more extensive the reach of her work, the better chance the Earth Community has for a beautiful future.

Her most recent book is The Not-Yet God: Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Relational Whole.

In this post, The Work of Love, Ilia is responding to the shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent on January 7th in Minneapolis, news of which went around the world, and which prompted mass protests on the streets. For Ilia, these protests were manifestations of the nature and bonds of our shared humanity. She quoted the physicist David Bohm.

As human beings and societies we seem separate, but in our roots, we are part of an indivisible whole and share in the same cosmic process.

We are fundamentally interconnected, and ‘it took the current political administration to inadvertently catalyse our finest impulses toward solidarity and justice’. ‘What promise resides in our collective dissent’.

But how do we go further than the recurring dynamic that usually accompanies such manifestations, when we go on the streets and give expression to our human solidarity and dignity, demanding justice; and a few months later life is back to what it was. How can such manifestations grasp a vision that brings about a real transformation in who we are and how we live? ‘Without substantive transformation we are living on borrowed time’.

For Ilia, ‘Old religion is not the answer to our problems and indeed may be a source of the great disconnect’. It fights new science while at the same time embracing mechanistic science through new technology. This is all part of why ‘our systems have ceased functioning effectively’. We are trapped in a mechanistic world when we need to grasp the vision of a living world which seeks to understand the whole. We are increasingly disconnected from the natural world in which we have evolved. It is mass movements, such as happened with Renee Good and George Floyd that ‘attract’ a more spontaneous religious feel and expression, which is not about old religious doctrine and dogma but deep concern for what is just and true and is ‘animated by love’. It is interreligous, intercultural, and interracial. ‘Genuine religion …. represents ’the depth dimension – the state of being grasped by ultimate concern that relativizes all lesser concerns. The religious person lives with a passion for life’, something Teilhard de Chardin and others have understood. ‘God constitutes the presence of love-energy creatively united with evolving reality. God is the name of Being, the dynamic, energetic essence of existence itself’.

This is the new religious sensibility emerging in our time, defined by wholistic values and a vision of the whole. It is both contemplative and actively engaging. It is a vision that believes in transformation that does not magically protect from suffering but rather enables suffering to be transfigured into meaning, resistance and renewal, morally and spiritually but also socially and systemically. This is life and energy that emerges ‘from below, self-organising around the call to love’.

This is the call; this is the vision – ‘one honouring contemplative tradition’s depths while demanding radical engagement with injustice, recognising spiritual transformation’s cosmic scope while insisting on concrete acts of love, trusting divine power while acknowledging human agency as essential to divine realisation’.

I hope I have said enough here to interest you in reading the whole of Ilio’s article. You may not agree with everything she says, but you will meet with someone who embraces a sense of wholistic religion that in turn embraces a sense of wholistic science and our One modern world in which we all now live. Nothing is more important at this time when the world is fracturing into segments overruled by essentially lawless men who discount science when it suits them, and claim and use old forms of religion, when it suits them, that no longer have the transforming power to sustain us and hold us all together. Good and true religion is now about how we can live together as one human family on our one little planet, embracing the good, the beautiful and the true while knowing how to manage and mitigate the bad, the ugly and the false. Nothing could be more challenging in every sense. Are we up for it in our own small ways? Laurel and Edwin assure us it is the vision of the Elm Grove Trust.

Here is the link to the article.