“And the darkness has not vanquished it…”

Becoming seed for the future

“You want it darker, we kill the light,” Leonard Cohen darkly intoned in what would prove to be his exit song from the human planet. So yes, let’s take it one notch darker. Suppose that far from simply putting itself on the fast track to self-extinction, our human species has by this point become so toxic to our entire planetary ecosystem—an invasive cancer in the body of our Mother Earth—that we are the ones now being done unto?

The analogy is unnervingly literal. Cancer cells are driven by one thing only, their own insatiable impulse to multiply, until in the blindly aggressive pursuit of that impulse, they wind up destroying their host. Tell me what part of this analogy does not fit. And are we so arrogant as to assume that Great Nature in all her evolutionary intelligence does not possess an innate skill for intelligent self-balancing? While Teilhardian tatonnement may be the usual evolutionary modus operandi, when things get too far out of balance, there is little other choice than to step in and take the situation radically in hand, even at the cost of her former “axis and arrow of evolution?”

What, you might wonder, can possibly be gained from taking the viewing lens this far out, to the place where all those individual details—human grief, human tenderness, art and beauty, conscience and coherence, all that has been ventured and gained here in twenty millennia of continuous human civilization—simply blur beyond recognition and vanish into a serenely impersonal evolutionary mechanism? Where are the tears? Where is God?

But no, I do not believe it is spiritual bypassing to consider the terror of the situation” from this Teilhardian scale. For me, it feels more like touching solid ground, finally finding that place from which, in the words of poet T.S. Eliot, “I rejoice, having to construct something upon which to rejoice.” For at this scale it becomes clear that our only real hope of a breakthrough will come when a critical mass of human beings begin to exercise their capacity to think planetarily—i.e., as a single species: rising above nationalist divisions, theological story-telling, sacred-cow histories, and ideological illusions to begin to work as whole greater than the sum of its parts breaking into totally new ground. There is nothing in our past—nothing—that will save us. To be truly unflappable we have to be prepared to let it all go. But in our present, it is already all here, waiting to receive us and refashion us if we can only break free of the heavy boots on our feet. Whether this will happen in “time” (whatever that is at this scale), I do not know. I only know that it is real.

When I truly open to the full Teilhardian landscape, I find that beneath the initial desolate space Teilhard is actually offering me a quiet reassurance if I am able to meet him on his own ground. For there are two things he affirms very strongly, two things whose absence might otherwise finally extinguish all hope. And in this quiet consolation he is simultaneously pointing us toward a way out of the tunnel, a way that is immediate and effective at every scale.

The first consolation is this: Teilhard’s evolutionary view does not end in ultimate tragedy; it is only oppositional when you apply it on too short a timescale, or are unwilling to bend on dogmas you consider to be immutable. Yes, the playing field may change dramatically—even, from our point of view, catastrophically. Over its 4.5-billion-year evolutionary history, our planet has shapeshifted continuously. Formerly arable lands become deserts (and vice versa), continents split apart then reconfigure; mountain ranges rise, oceans appear and then disappear. Asteroids periodically strike the planet, as they did as recently as 12,000 years ago some say, dramatically destabilizing both the atmosphere and geosphere. Entire continents disappear; entire species are wiped out. The biosphere is a relative newcomer, and its loss is not an unthinkable option—remember, ALL options are possible. A planet with no biosphere would be a different place for sure—not one that would be habitable by our present human species. But from deep within the geosphere there would still be that restless teleological spirit drawing it onward to manifest new forms and innovations, new species. And beyond even that, should the planet and stars themselves disappear, that resilient spark would still remain intact, for its source does not lie within the created order, but is rather at its headwater, in the eternal, ever-creative, inexhaustibly playful yet purposeful Origin.

And we belong to Origin as well. Right here and now. This pixel of consciousness I call “I”— infinitesimal though it is, a flash in the pan of eternity, ever shifting in its form—is nonetheless imperishable and unquenchable in its essence. Here and now I participate in the Omega point. It is the full of the moon out of which my finite life is woven.

And that in turn leads to another powerful Teilhardian affirmation. Throughout all these evolutionary upheavals, life forms are constantly disappearing, only to return again in stronger, more vigorous form. At the end of the Pliocene era, no evidence of human life is to be found anywhere. By the dawn of the next geological era, signs of prehominid life are ubiquitous. The curtain then closes for another several dozen millennia as the face of the earth again endures a massive resculpting; when the curtain reopens, the prehominid life forms have disappeared, replaced by the markedly more advanced neanderthals, who are now indisputably wielding tools, forming communities, and burying their dead. Like that biblical grain of wheat that falls into the ground and dies, the evolutionary seed apparently needs to go fallow periodically, returning to its womb in the geosphere. Yet on the other side of this incubation, nothing seems to be lost; things pick up exactly from the point where the highest benchmark has been established.

Not only do they pick up; they pick up with all the force of a spontaneous combustion. There is nothing hesitant or even linear about this new evolutionary transmission. It is a mutation pure and simple, a leap to a whole new level of capaciousness—and it is contagious! Teilhard remarks how, once the new evolutionary form springs forth, it seems to show up virtually simultaneously: in Africa, Asia, on the American continent. As he concludes movingly, speaking equally out of his own struggles to be heard against a Church intent on suppressing his voice, “Truth has only to appear once, in one single mind, for it to be impossible for anything ever to prevent it from spreading universally and setting everything ablaze” (The Heart of Matter, p. 102).

No matter how long the hiatus, evolution will resume directly from its former highwater mark. This is what our 4.5-billion-year Earth Story confirms to us again and again. If this is true, it tells me clearly where and how I am to live.

Right at that highwater mark, as best I can understand, as best as I can hold it.

Not for myself, but for the future. From the fullness, for the future.

No matter how devastating the short-range outcome, and for however long this next sleep may be, the one thing that is mine to contribute here and now to that “long arc of evolution” is the quality of that pixel of consciousness I am temporarily privileged to steward. Even in this tiny space I presently occupy I can strive with all my heart to seed into the future my highest understanding of what it means to “be made in the image and likeness of God”; to hold the highest note I can hold as a human being. I can quietly commit my life to the inner work of catalyzing within myself those higher spiritual substances through which this world is ultimately transformed—love, joy, forbearance, kindness, gentleness, self-control; “the fruit of the spirit,” as St Paul called them. These are not organic substances; they do not come naturally to the human animal; they are produced only through the conscious alchemy of the human heart. That is what we humans are called to bring to the continuing evolution of our planet. And with our next mutation, I believe we will finally be able to deliver it. And then, at last, things will change.

To that hope, and the work entailed to bring it into reality, I will gladly dedicate the remaining years of my human life. It is the one thing I can do, and my heart tells me that it will not go for naught.