The Hours of the Universe

Ilia Delio is a Franciscan Sister of Washington, D.C. and teaches at Villanova University. Having founded the Center for Christogenesis, it signals that she has been greatly influenced by the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose works I have struggled with over the years. Ilia has cleared up much of de Chardin’s theories for me, primarily in the bringing together the concept of evolution and religious thought.

Ilia being Roman Catholic, she has organized her book around the ‘hours’, a recitation of the Liturgy of the Hours in monasterys, because she considers the universe to be the new monastery where God can be found. She also calls the religious community to task for rejecting or ignoring evolution and scientific inquiry. “We have an urgent need to construct a new religious story today; theology can no longer be content to roam around the Patristic and Middle Ages while importing ancient ideas into the twenty-first century. We have confused history with a living God. A theology that does not begin with evolution and the story of the universe is a useless fabrication.” The point is made toward the end of the book that religion is problematic for paying attention to the climate crisis and care for the earth in general.

God is love. God is in all things, grounded in the creation. “Love, therefore, is an absolute fundamental force of attraction in the universe that overcomes all inertia, entropy, breakdown, and dissipation….We must learn to love over and over again if we are to evolve into a unified planet, a wholeness of being, an earth community of compassion and peace.”

Love is a theme throughout Ilia’s writing, because it is the essence of the living God. She writes: “Whether or not sin ever existed, Christ would have come, because Christ is first in God’s intention to love. And in order for Christ to come there must be humans, and for humans to exist there must be a creation; hence, Christ is first in God’s will to love and thus to create. The reason for Jesus Christ is not sin but the fullness of love.”

I am also including recommendation to get recent issue of the magazine, YES, spring of 2021 that is dedicated to the environment, and includes an article of Hemp farming by Winona LaDuke, well known by many in these parts.