The Hymn of the Universe

Some thoughts on Telhard de Chardin's thoughts on God...

“GOD IS IN EVERYTHING.”

In The Hymn of the Universe, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin writes about this as if it is an almost heretical revelation, too easily confused with pantheism—the idea that God is everything. But these two concepts are as easily distinguishable as a window is from the object you can see through it.

For me, in childhood, it all started with leaves: The song of leaves in the wind; the simple profound curve of its many forms; its veins, which so perfectly match the branching lines of a river cutting through the desert; the way it dies by taking flight, and how even in its death, it remains beautiful, sometimes even more beautiful that it was in life. All of these opened my heart to see through them to the greater Reality living just beyond their material existence—and there, of course, I saw the face of God.

I say “of course,” because to me that revelation seemed imminently logical. Why should it be strange for the Artist to be revealed through His work? Only with God, it isn’t just a hint of the Artist that lives in His work, but He Himself. Thus, David saw it when he realized he could never get away from God’s presence. Thus, Paul saw it when he taught about the inevitable summing up of all things in Christ, and how it is in Him we live and move and have our being.

The whole universe lives in a single leaf. The whole of creation is contained within its every manifestation—from the smallest quantum particle to the largest structures in the universe—and when you look through any of them to glimpse what lies within them and beyond them, you see the face of Christ looking back at you, most often grinning, sometimes laughing, sometimes fierce and terrifying, but always in love with you.

How could it be otherwise? Christ is, after all, the Word that made it all, and that continually sustains it.

So, once I saw Him in the leaves, I saw Him in everything—in dirt and water and air and clouds and rocks and animals and stars and in the face of every person I ever met. I marveled when people said they couldn’t sense the presence of God, because to me that was like saying you couldn’t sense the air even as you’re taking a breath to say it. God was, and is, obvious in this way, clearly manifested, as obvious as the nose on your face, and the only reason you might not see Him is because you’ve trained yourself not to.

In his book, Teilhard de Chardin points out that because God can be found in every created thing, that all those things are, in a sense, the same thing, all an expression of a singular unified presence—in the same way that all the individual apples on a tree are each an expression (a fruit, if you will) of the one tree. So it is with God and creation.

Everything that has been created lived first in the mind of God, as a thought of God, in much the same way that your thoughts are a part of you, yet are also distinct from you—that is, you have thoughts, but you are far more than your thoughts. We began our existence as a thought in the mind of God, and even there I suspect we had a kind of consciousness, a kind of awareness, perhaps even a self-awareness that we have now forgotten. All things began in this way—as branches of thought all born of the same Root, which is the mind of God. In this pre-material state, we were all part of one another—a unified tapestry of Divine imagination.

I believe we still hold this memory within our essence, and that this is the reason why we have this persistent sense that everything in the universe is connected, and is somehow part of One Thing. That’s where we began—in God, together, and in a way, we are still, all of us together, connected in Him.

We became material when God spoke us into the physical realm. And the Word he spoke, the Language of God, is Christ. You see? That’s why we say Christ is begotten of God, rather than created by God. The essence of God is God. The Word of God is God. The breath of God that carries the Word is also God. Through the Breath and the Word it contained, we were scattered out of the mind of God and into the material universe, suddenly separate and distinct from one another, each now given agency and function according to its purpose.

And what was that purpose? To reveal God in and through and to His creations, and out of them to fashion and woo a lover for Himself. Really, He could not have done otherwise. For it is the nature of Love to share love in ever-expanding circles of belonging.

With all this foundational to the story of creation, it should come as no surprise, when we look deeply into any created thing, that we should find the face of God there, looking back at us. Likewise, it should be no surprise to find that though all things are now created separate and distinct, we still remain connected in Him, as it is from Him we all emerged and in Him now are being continually sustained. Why do you think He made us with the need to breathe? That we may be continually reminded of our essential connection to and dependance on God—how it is His breath, His Spirit, that keeps us alive from one moment to the next.

It is through Him we are also connected not just to one another but to all creation itself. This is what Teilhard de Chardin calls the “Noosphere”: the (so far) semi-conscious interconnected awareness of all living things. I would add to this nonliving things as well, or things we think of as nonliving, such as stone and earth and stardust and everything they make and are made of, for it seems clear to me that these things have a kind of life and even an intelligence of their own as well. I feel the life of the earth, and of the other planets, and of the sun, and of the universe, and I sense somehow it all senses the life that is in us too. The same goes for all living things, and especially other people. I feel them all, outside me, yet inside me, as if we are all connected by unbreakable gossamer threads of Divine love. This, too, I say, is Christ.

Teilhard de Chardin is, of course, right about the Noosphere (I even like the name), and we are all trying to manifest it in more tangible ways—through the internet, or meditation, or religious practices, or science—though our deepest motivations for this are semi-conscious at best. We came from One, and in some primal instinctive way, we long to return to that oneness.

Isn’t this what Jesus prayed for us all on the eve of his death (John 17)? Isn’t this the ultimate purpose of the Church—to bring all creation together in the oneness of Christ and from that oneness become the lover God seeks?

“With all wisdom and understanding, he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment — to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ.” — Ephesians 1:8b-10