Reflection
Christianity has become simply whatever we want it to be—a consumer product designed to meet our psychological needs, rather than a religious transformative encounter with ultimate reality. Therapeutic Christianity continues to treat the natural world as a backdrop for human drama rather than as a sacred community, of which humans are called to be conscious participants. It reduces salvation to a personal rescue mission from a fallen world rather than participation in the world’s transformation…The path forward requires nothing less than a complete reimagining of Christianity—not as a rescue operation from the world but as conscious participation in the world’s transformation. This evolutionary Christianity will recognize that the Christ event is not a supernatural intervention in natural history but the emergence of a new level of consciousness that reveals the divine nature of reality itself. It will understand salvation not as escape from matter but as the divinization of matter, the awakening of the cosmos to its own sacred nature. Such a Christianity will be simultaneously mystical and prophetic, deeply rooted in the contemplative tradition yet boldly engaged with the ecological and social crises of our time. It will offer not therapeutic comfort but transformative challenge, calling us to become conscious participants in the ongoing creation of a more complex, conscious, and compassionate world.
Ilia Delio
Prayer
Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
John 8:32
Action
Reflect on the above reading and compare it with your experience of the present situation. Does it stimulate your thinking? Do you agree or not? What is your perception and how does it guide your actions?
Suggested Reading
And He said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation.”
Mark 16:15
There is a burning question in our hearts, a need for truth that we cannot ignore, which leads us to ask ourselves: what is true happiness? What is the true meaning of life? What can free us from being trapped in meaninglessness, boredom and mediocrity?
Pope Leo XIV
Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge – the only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution and so contemplate, measure and fulfil them.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Orthodoxy is idolatry if it means holding the ‘correct opinions about God’ – ‘fundamentalism’ is the most extreme and salient example of such idolatry – but not if it means holding faith in the right way, that is, not holding it at all but being held by God, in love and service. Theology is idolatry if it means what we say about God instead of letting ourselves be addressed by what God has to say to us. Faith is idolatrousif it is rigidly self-certain but not if it is softened in the waters of ‘doubt.
John D. Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?: The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church
Christianity is a lifestyle, a way of being in the world that is simple, nonviolent, shared and loving. However, we made it into an established religion and avoided the lifestyle change itself. One could be warlike, greedy, racist, selfish and vain in most of Christian history and still believe that Jesus is one’s “personal Lord and Savior”…The world has no time for such silliness anymore. The earth’s suffering is too great.
Richard Rohr
We forgive ourselves our disinterest in the questions of our age on the grounds that those things have nothing to do with being Christian. Only the laws and the customs have something to do with being Christian, we argue, not the gospel.
Joan Chittister
The Christian understanding of incarnation is not just about a coming of God in the flesh of humanity, but also about the transformation of our biological condition into one more transparent to the power of the spirit.
Barbara Fiand