Recovering the Sacred: Teilhard, Newell & the Celtic Tradition By Matthew Fox October 5, 2024

Celtic Spirituality, Philip Newell, Teilhard de Chardin, The Sacred

I ended my Daily Meditation yesterday with the all-important practical question:  What other ways are there for recovering a sense of the sacred?  Meaning, besides Lakota teacher buck Ghosthorse's practice of going without water to recover the sacredness of water.

And Thomas Berry's teaching that bringing back the experience of awe and wonder that the "numinous" universe gives us.  (And, let me add, what the Webb telescope makes available daily to us.)

I am reminded of Teilhard de Chardin's observation on the death knell of religion in the West.  Because it is not sufficiently moved by a truly human compassion, because it is not exalted by a sufficiently passionate admiration of the universe, our religion is becoming enfeebled.

These words were translated into English in the year 1968, the spring I sat in class with Pere Chenu and he named the creation spirituality tradition for me the first time.  Chenu had great respect for Teilhard.

Teilhard elaborates in another place.  I give the name of cosmic sense to the more or less confused affinity that binds us psychologically to the All which envelops us.  In order that the sense of humanity might emerge, it was necessary for civilization to begin to encircle the Earth.  

The experience of awe and wonder at our home, the universe and the cosmic sense, Thomas Berry equates with our moving from a human-centered and narcissistic relationship to nature to a sense of the sacred.  Teilhard again:  The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as humanity found itself facing the frost, the sea and the stars.  And since then we find evidence of it in all our experience of the great and unbounded:  in art, in poetry, and in religion.  

We find the awareness of the sacred well named by Celtic scholar Philip Newell in our time.  "The Celtic tradition has been saying all along, "he reminds, "that we cannot contain the sacred.  Rather, we are to look for it everywhere, and we are to observe it and be liberators of it in one another and in the earth."

And he reminds us that there is work ahead.  "The labor pains of a new birthing will be mighty.  there is no going back to the small God."  Anthropocentrism and human narcissism is in no way the future--of religion or politics or a viable path for humanity.  

What I call "deep ecumenism" in my book on the Cosmic Christ is born of this renewed sense of the whole.  As Newell puts it:  We now know too much about the interrelatedness of all life to pretend that well-being can be sought for one part alone and not for the whole, for only one religion, one nation, one species.

There is no returning to the limited notion of sacredness as if it were somehow the preserver of one particular people over another, of one race gender, or sexual orientation.  Sacredness is the birthright of all that is.  It is the grace that comes with existence."