An Expanding Theology: Preface

The theological enterprise of a faith seeking understanding has been presented as faith making new connections. No doubt the variety and depth of such connections can be indefinitely extended. A new collaboration of faith with science, and with many other forms of human learning, is in the making. For instance, apart from its fragmentary familiarity with burgeoning areas of modern science, an obvious limitation of this present treatment is its scant reference to the inter-faith context of today's global search for meaning. To that degree, these chapters are little more than a prelude.^[1] On the other hand, because it suggests the planetary and cosmic dimensions of the focal mysteries of Christian faith, it is a good point of departure. There are no essential limits to learning in the faith, hope and love we have attempted to express in the foregoing pages.

Our spiral of connections took us first of all to consider theology as the expression of a connective faith. In the process, we noted both the connective mission of the Church, and the implicit inclusiveness of Christian experience. There were great basic simplicities from which to begin, even if the complexities were daunting.

Secondly, we took in a variety of contexts in which the implications were being invited to become explicit. The ‘whole story', the search for a new wisdom through a new paradigm, in a new age, the different models of ecological interaction, each provoked a re-examination of the Christian experience of God's love, as it kept on being love in the context of connections.

Thirdly, the spiral of our reflections connected within the universal meaning of the Word Incarnate. Here the question emerged as, how to ‘word' or express the mystery of the Incarnation as the great poem of universal transformation. Then followed, as a fourth circle, the connection of all existence within the mystery of creation, freshly experienced in the wonders that science discloses. Intimately related to the mystery of creation was the focus of a fifth arc in the spiral of connections, creation conscious of itself in human existence. There is an outreach and relationality in human consciousness. The dynamic integrity of the human occurs within the universal process, not outside it. Our existence is earthed in the well-being of the planet.

For its part, the trinitarian mystery suggested a range of ultimate connections. The universal process is grounded in the processive vitality of the divine. Created reality is relational as an emerging image of the originative reality of trinitarian love. Thus, the sixth circle of connections.

The seventh earths the experience of faith in its most intense sacramental expression, as an intimation of a eucharistic universe. Against such a background, an ecological commitment is a moral necessity.

A concluding section deals with the two dimensions of death and love. The spiral eddies, first of all, in the question of death. Is our whole emerging existence bent on self-extinction, or a movement into further transformation? We conclude the grain of wheat does fall into fertile ground.

With sexual love, old mysteries and new problems are present. Here, too, a depth of the sacramental is found, and a connection with great unitive eros of creation. Yet, in the strained ecology of our planetary existence, we are called to a fresh moral re-appraisal of the ‘natural' meaning of the sexual connection.

In a very real way, Teilhard de Chardin provides the conclusion to which all these reflections were headed. In his famous meditation in The Divine Milieu,^[2] he communicates a mood familiar to most of us today as Christian faith tries to get new bearings for the long way ahead. As he descends from ‘the zone of everyday occupations and relationships where everything seems clear', into that ‘inmost self', to ‘that deep abyss whence I feel my power of action emanates', he reports a profound vertigo. He feels he is losing contact with the self of routine relationships, to the point that,

At each step of the descent, a new person was disclosed within me of whose name I was no longer sure, and who no longer obeyed me. And when I had to stop my exploration because the path faded from beneath my steps, I found a bottomless abyss at my feet, and out of it came, arising from I know not where, the current I dare call my life.^[3]

We have been reflecting on how the uncanny occurrence of life and existence is coming home to human consciousness in new and often overwhelming ways. The settled identities structured for us in the history and geography, the culture and the philosophy, the religion and science of former days are being dismantled. We are becoming vulnerable to mystery again, and awakening to the necessity of finding a new place within what both transcends and enfolds us. It is an unsettling experience to find oneself on the brink of the unfathomable. So much so that Teilhard confesses

I then wanted to return to the light of day and to forget the disturbing enigma in the comforting surroundings of familiar things – to begin living again at the surface without imprudently plumbing the depths of the abyss.^[4]

But neither looking for solace in the old connections, nor throwing oneself with greater energy into daily work, nor clinging simply to the old certitudes protects us for long. We cannot hide:

But then beneath this very spectacle of the turmoil of life, there re-appeared before my new-opened eyes, the unknown that I wanted to escape. This time it was not hiding in the bottom of the abyss; it disguised its presence in the innumerable strands which form the web of chance, the very stuff of which the universe and my own small individuality are woven. Yet it was the same mystery without a doubt: I recognised it.^[5]

The mystery hidden in the depths of our experience emerges in the length and breadth of the history that has brought us forth. We live in a world of connections. Our existence is woven into the fabric of a vast, chancy co-existence. The sense of such intimate dependence on a totality, of being at the mercy of such an intricate network of improbabilities brings its own dizziness:

Our mind is disturbed when we try to plumb the depth of the world beneath us. But it reels still more when we try to number the favourable chances which must coincide at every moment if the least of living things is to survive and to succeed in its enterprises. After the consciousness of being something other and something greater than myself -- a second thing made me dizzy: namely the supreme improbability, the tremendous unlikelihood of finding myself existing in the heart of the world which has survived and succeeded in being a world.^[6]

The fifteen billion years of cosmic emergence, the miracle of life that has occurred on this tiny planet, have given each of us, as a supreme improbability, to ourselves; and to one another. Our existence becomes a calling, to relate to mystery which has given us into being, and to make connections of care with everyone and everything that is already part of our identity. There is a kind of distress evident in such belonging. Yet a bewildered consciousness can find a healing, and grow to hope, in the presence of the mystery which has given itself into the heart of the universe:

At that moment, as anyone will find who cares to make this same interior experiment, I felt the distress characteristic of a particle adrift in the universe, the distress which makes human wills founder daily under the crushing number of living things and of stars. And if something saved me, it was hearing the voice of the Gospel, guaranteed by divine successes, speaking to me from the depths of the night, ‘It is I. Be not afraid'.^[7]