Rememberance IX

In the first conversation my parents ever had they confessed their love of Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man.

I like that I might owe my presence here to a young couple being enthralled with their awareness that each rise of complexity in the great arc of evolution has brought forth a rise in consciousness.

No one of their generation took the work of Teilhard further to heart and deeper into the analysis of cultural history than Thomas Berry, who died this morning at 94, "full of days".

Fr. Berry, a Passionist priest, alive to the Life which held his living, spent his days attuning his love to the Love which holds us all. Critical of religion's complicities in our long devaluation of nature, he admonished us that our reverence will either be total, affecting our every function, active and passive, or we risk depotentiating even the chance of human reverence.

At a bio-regional conference, I heard him say that, "Wonder World is making Waste World", one of the succinct distillations of his broad studies. The "wonder" of that Wonder World, a world of novel convenience for the short-lived few, was seen to be a by-product of the suppression of our capacity for true wonder, of the ability to be infused with awe at the grandeur and glory of Creation, and to be ready students of our context.

For Fr. Berry the so-called growth of "growth" addicted economies was known to be a cosmic immaturity, the greeds of a rude guest oblivious to stewardship, and ignorant of the host. Ignorant of how the guest is also the host.

That very obliviousness was witnessed as seeding eddies of oblivion in the greater flowing fields of immaculate immensity and precious particularity.

Meanwhile, he arose, prayed, celebrated Mass, taught, wrote and spoke giving voice to what makes us possible, and imploring us to make all this no less probable from here on.