What is the future of religious/spiritual understanding? The evolution of human understanding & knowledge has been progressing at an ever increasing rate since prehistoric times. Scientific learning began to grow at an exponential rate once enough freethinkers moved past superstition; myth, dogma and primitive belief systems to a willingness to honestly explore the world and the cosmos with curiosity & openmindedness. I think the future of religion & our understanding of spirituality almost certainly holds the same kind of rapid breakthroughs as enough humans move past the ancient (& more modern) belief systems that claim to be the One True Faith. What would happen if all the priests, preachers, rabbis, imans and televangelists stopped talking for a year or a month or a day? What if people gathered in nature or in stadiums or parks or their homes and just listened. Quietly. What would they hear? Do we reality need people like Frank Paden or Pat Roberson or Rick Santorum or Jerry Falwell or Anita Bakery or Michele Bachmann or Ann Coulter or Fred Phelps or Ted Haggard or Joel Osteen or Ayatollahs or the leaders of the Catholic or Mormon ot JehovahWitnesses, et.al. tell us what the One True Faith is? I dont think we do I think we need people who are willing to explore & learn - not people who stubbornly cling to the notion that their religion not only has a monopoly on Gods Holy Truth but worse yet that people who dont believe like they do will suffer eternal suffering in dear Jehovahs fiery furnace of damnation. I think we need more brave honest open minded explorers & researchers like Teilhard de Chardin... .... interreligiousinsight.org/April%202005/April05King.html .... Fifty years after his death the visionary and evolutionary perspective of Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) seems more relevant than ever. This article is a contribution to the discussions, held in New York in 2005, commemorating Teilhard’s death in 1955 and marking the appreciation of his work, especially The Phenomenon of Man, first published in the same year. It is based on earlier research by the author, published in Towards a New Mysticism: Teilhard de Chardin and Eastern religions ((London: Collins, 1980) and especially The Spirit of One Earth: Reflections on Teilhard de Chardin and Global Spirituality (New York: Paragon House, 1989). The anniversary celebrations will begin with a symposium at the United Nations on 7 th April, inaugurating a conference in New York and Washington, followed by others in different parts of North America and Europe. INTRODUCTION Throughout his life, Teilhard de Chardin was a wanderer between different worlds, especially the worlds of science, religion and mysticism, and the geographical worlds of West and East. His life and thought are interwoven like the parts of an immense symphony with ever new variations on a basic theme. This theme is the supreme adventure of humanitys ascent to the spirit, and the continuous breakthrough of Gods presence in the world of matter and flesh. Teilhards vision, like that of other seers before him, was one of consuming fire, kindled by the radiant powers of love. It was a mystical vision, deeply Christian in origin and orientation; yet it broke through traditional boundaries and grew into a vision global in intent. From his youth he was attracted to the East. He first went to China in 1923 and worked there as a geologist and palaeontologist until 1946, travelling all over the world and visiting many other eastern countries such as India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Indonesia and Japan. In the growth and expansion of his vision, the experience of the East, its peoples, cultures and religions, played an indispensable part. As he himself admitted, the invitation to come to China proved to be “the decisive event of his destiny”, for until then he had felt the attraction of the earth without really understanding the greatness of its phenomena.[i] It was in China that many of his central ideas grew to their full maturity – whether the idea of the noosphere as an immense layer of human thought and action a rising out of the biosphere and covering the entire globe, or the rise of the divine milieu as an intimate presence and power of the divine spirit surrounding us, or the rise of the human phenomenon within the cosmic history of life, or the human responsibility for the future and the coming convergence of diverse human groups and different religions. His vision of convergence, of the complementary religious insights of East and West, and of the need for a new understanding of Christianity, first emerged in full in China; it impressed itself upon his mind with even fuller force and urgency on his return to the West in 1946. Today, the attraction of Indian religions to many Westerners is greater still than it was during Teilhards life time. The questions which he asked then are even more important now although they may have to be asked in a different way. But in spite of differences in detail, the basic orientation of his search and the open-endedness of his quest, particularly in later years, may well point beyond Christianity as we know it. From the 1920s onwards, during a time when few Western contemporaries were aware of and alive to the problems of modern spirituality, Teilhard was already seeking insights in the East and stressing the central importance of mysticism for religion today. It is certain that, without the experience of the East, his thought would not have developed in the way it did. It would never have reached the same perspectives of unity, universality, and convergence, searching for a spirit of one earth which ultimately transcends both East and West. WORLD CONGRESS OF FAITHS It is not generally known that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, after his return from China, was associated with the activities of the French branch of the World Congress of Faiths, for which he wrote several talks and lectures. The World Congress of Faiths was founded in England in 1936 at the initiative of Sir Francis Younghusband and is one of the original global movements promoting interreligious encounter and dialogue today. From the beginning, certain Frenchmen – particularly the well-known scholar of lslamic studies, Louis Massignon, and the orientalist, Jacques Bacot – showed great interest in this interreligious movement, which aims to break down the barrier of exclusivism and to build bridges between faiths.[ii]
Posted on: Thu, 03 Apr 2014 23:54:39 +0000
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