IN THE ANTHROPOCENE AGE, whose unprecedented surge in human activity has inflicted inconceivable damage on the Earth, there is a need to articulate a mystagogy to supplement and complement scientific and ethical narratives. Amidst the damage, there can also be a surge of hope as we stand beneath the night sky, filled with awe and gratitude, and praising God’s gratuitous gift, staring deep into infinite space. The NASA New Horizons mission has already ventured into the furthest reaches of our solar system, flying past Pluto and the trans-Neptunian Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69, also known as Ultima Thule—a deep-space asteroid that scientists believe is possibly as old as our solar system. Projects such as this bring a realisation that there must be life ‘out there’ in the cosmos. We are not alone in God’s expansive creation. In this mystical moment, there is an awakening awareness that each finite human is being constituted and sustained by the power of the Spirit of God, ruach Elohim in the Old Testament creation narrative, indwelling in creation over the last fourteen billion years.¹ Each human being placed on this Earth is the self-reflectivity of the vast cosmos.

This awareness spurs the human imagination to contemplate the cosmic web of universe-interdependent life in creation, and generates an emerging discourse on the cosmic common good, which attends to the intrinsic and instrumental goodness of creatures to each other, of the cosmos as a whole and of creation as whole, for the glorification of God.² Such a creational perspective calls for the articulation of a cosmic spirituality: cosmicism.³ Cosmicism lends hope to the concerted attempt to translate the cosmic common good into care for the sustainable future of our common home after Laudato si’. It shares an affinity with the ‘contemplative ecology’ proposed by John McCarthy:

Our technical, and indeed, legal narrative needs to be accompanied by a symbolic-laden discourse that speaks to our fullest experience of the natural world. This symbolic language is best articulated using a religious, spiritual, or sacred discourse if we are to muster the needed social energy to engage the ecological age.⁴

The Rationale for Cosmicism

Indigenous Everyday Mysticism

What I have called cosmicism emerges out of more than a decade of sustained reflection on the lived experience of indigenous peoples’ everyday mysticism. This mysticism sees the natural world as sacred, owing to the indwelling presence of the Creator and of the ancestral and nature spirits. As Adelson A. dos Santos writes: ‘Indigenous spirituality is strongly marked by cosmological mysticism …. Cosmos, nature, community and the sense of interdependence with all beings are fundamental characteristics of these traditions’.⁵ They enable shamans and healers to be intimate with the Creator and with nature.

When we discerningly correlate this indigenous belief with ruach Elohim indwelling in all created beings and life on Earth, it is safe to conclude that the life-sustaining ancestral and nature spirits participate in the power of God’s Spirit. This participation is the pneumatic basis for the mystical-sapiential conviction of respected elders in indigenous communities that the natural world is sacred and enspirited. Cosmicism is premised on this conviction, as affirmed by Genesis 1:2 (‘ruach Elohim … meraphehet ‘al’: ‘a wind from God swept over the face of the waters’), which explains how ruach Elohim powers forth-forward and sustains God’s creation.

Sacred Encounter

The foundational rationale of cosmicism is to facilitate the sacred encounter of believers with ruach Elohim, whose Spirit power transforms them into co-creators with the triune God, in a manner most insightfully expressed by Teilhard de Chardin:

In action I adhere to the creative power of God; I coincide with it; I become not only its instrument but its living extension. And as there is nothing more personal in a being that his will, I merge myself, in a sense, through my heart, with the very heart of God.⁶

Second, cosmicism facilitates the blossoming of an ontic yearning, through the promptings of ruach Elohim, so that the heart is able to plummet more profoundly into the mystery of the cosmos and rest in God’s cosmic Divine Presence—a pining, with a drawing to be in God, with God, with God-in-the-poor and God-indwelling-the-Earth. Third, cosmicism enables the stardust that humans are to experience more fully communion with the cosmic whole, in the way that Gary Snyder propounds: ‘all is one and at the same time, one is all’, since ‘the self is both the individual and the whole’.⁷

This is truly a growth in the cosmic sense that opens the self to the whole of creation and to others.⁸ As Elizabeth Liebert writes, ‘One person can change a system, which in turn changes other systems, forming a network of cascading changes unimaginable from the point of the first contemplative action’.⁹ Co-creative participation in the creative actions of ruach Elohim led Chardin to marvel, ‘We shall be astonished at the extent and the intimacy of our relationship with the universe’.¹⁰ ‘Under the influence of faith’, Chardin later adds, ‘the universe is capable, without outwardly changing its characteristics, of becoming more supple, more fully animate—of being “sur-animated”’.¹¹

Experience of the Sacred

Cosmicism is a mystagogy that encourages an existential experience of the sacred among us in order to tap into its imaginative energy, which can be translated into social energy to help reverse the ecological damage of the present age. For what is experienced as sacred is given due reverence; as the poet and essayist Wendell Berry affirms, the sacred is ‘the language of familiarity, reverence, and affection by which things of value ultimately are protected’. ‘People … defend what they love. To defend what we love, we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.’ ¹²
The pathway of future sustainability involves the Spirit power of ruach Elohim bringing about an ecological conversion which, in Celia Deane-Drummond’s postulation, further enables its awakened subjects to acknowledge ‘the Giver and gift of the fragile Earth on which humanity and all other creatures are placed’.¹³ In a similar vein, Pedro Walpole believes that ecological conversion generates ‘an interior impulse’ that will ‘inspire a shift in how we view, and act in, reality’. This has the potential to reverse the ecological crisis and move life on Earth forward toward ‘the eschatological goal of sublime communion between all creatures to which human and ecological society is ultimately orientated’.¹⁴

Responding to the Call of the Times

Cosmicism is a response to the clarion call of Pope Francis for a ‘a sound ethics, a culture and spirituality genuinely capable of setting limits and teaching clear-minded self-restraint’ through ecological conversion:

Here, I would like to offer … an ecological spirituality grounded in
the convictions of our faith …. A commitment this lofty cannot be
sustained by doctrine alone, without a spirituality capable of inspiring
us, without an ‘interior impulse which encourages, motivates, nourishes
and gives meaning to our individual and communal activity’.¹⁵

Cosmicism hopes to motivate those ‘transformed’ with an everyday commitment to an ‘awe-filled contemplation of creation’ that will offer them ‘ample motivation to care for nature and for the most vulnerable of their brothers and sisters’.¹⁶

This contemplation will result in the deepening of a daily mindfulness of humanity’s cosmic identity, as expressed by David Toolan: ‘the human is that being in whom the universe comes to itself in a special mode of conscious reflection’.¹⁷ For Teilhard de Chardin this identity is homo spiritus or human-as-spirit: ‘the phenomenon of spirit …. We are coincidental with it. We feel it from within … we are itself and it is for us everything.’ ¹⁸ Such contemplation will also increase the ‘properly cosmological sensibility’ described by Robert Barron, ‘whereby the human being and her projects are in vibrant, integrated relation with the world that surrounds her’.¹⁹

The pneumatic foundation of cosmicism is premised on the prevailing presence of ruach Elohim in creation, facilitating the experience of the ‘God-who-is-Spirit’ in the natural and the human worlds. Contemplation encourages those ‘transformed’ by ruach Elohim to engage in the diverse activities by which ruach Elohim sensitises more humans to be co-creators in ‘the mighty involvement of God in earthly affairs (Isaiah 63:10–14; Job 26:12–13)’.²⁰ This may involve participation in creative, communal, ritual celebrations aimed at suffusing, sustaining, sacralising and sensitising creation.

Such celebrations enable the individual to translate his or her experience of the sacred, as Celia Deane-Drummond envisages, ‘in a way that inspires a deeper sense of responsibility’ through embodying the ethic of alterity.²¹ This ethic motivates the ‘transformed’ to become what Mary-Ann Crumplin calls ‘respons-able’ agents, for whom each call for justice is evaluated in terms of ensuring a sustainable future for vulnerable human beings, for all other life forms and, most significantly, for planet Earth.²²

The Mystical Traditions

Cosmicism emanates from the mystical traditions. The mystics have embodied and lived a mystagogy which foregrounds the sapiential conviction that intimacy with the cosmos and the Earth involves the self being consumed, purged and transformed by God in sacred moments of encounter. These intimate encounters make it possible for ruach Elohim to intensify, in the words of Swati Samantary, ‘the experience of the Divine immanence, the isness of the omnipresent, eternal spirit in all things, and all things in it’.²³ Such spiritual attainment, embodied in the lives of the mystics, is subsequently translated through cosmicism into a practice of life for the promotion of the cosmic common good, especially of marginal communities and of the Earth itself.²⁴

Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179)

Hildegard’s mystagogy is inseparable from the pneumatic experiences borne of her particular place and time in Bingen, Germany.

It happened that, in the eleven hundred and forty-first year of the
Incarnation of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, when I was forty-two
years and seven months old, Heaven was opened and a fiery light
of exceeding brilliance came and permeated my whole brain, and
inflamed my whole heart and my whole breast not like a burning
but like a warming flame, as the sun warms anything in its touch ….
I sensed in myself wonderfully the power and mystery of secret
admirable visions from my childhood—that is, from the age of five—
up to that time, as I do now.²⁵

For Hildegard, ruach Elohim was the Spirit power for a prophetic mission inspired by pentecost, when ‘the Holy Spirit came openly in tongues of fire’ to the apostles, removing their fear and enabling them to speak ‘in many tongues’ of what ‘they remembered with perfect understanding’ that Christ has taught them. And when they preached, ‘the whole world was shaken by their voices .… And the Holy Spirit took their human fear from them, so that no dread was in them.’²⁶

Hildegard had a mystagogical visionary experience of a timebound, egg-shaped universe, ‘small at the top, large in the middle and narrowed at the bottom’, with ‘bright fire’ at the circumference and ‘a shadowy zone’ beneath.²⁷ Though its imagery is specific to her own context, Hildegard’s vision displays some intriguing parallels with modern scientific ways of understanding the cosmos: the first years after the Big Bang, when the universe was ‘a hot but cooling soup of fundamental particles’, whose residual glow is now known as the Cosmic Microwave Background; black holes; dark energy; and, in the later evolutionary period of the cosmos, supernovas.²⁸

And in the fire, there was a globe of sparkling flame, so great that the whole instrument was illuminated by it … over which three little torches were arranged in such a way that by their fire they held up the globe lest it fall .… And that globe at times raised itself up, so that much fire flew to it and therefore its flames lasted longer …. But from the fire that surrounded the instrument issued a blast with whirlwinds, and from the zone beneath it rushed forth another blast with its own whirlwinds …. In that zone, too, there is a dark fire of such horror that I could not look at it … full of thunder, tempest and exceedingly sharp stones, both large and small. And while it made its thunders heard, the bright fire and the winds and the air were all in commotion ….

But beneath that zone is purest ether … and in it I saw a globe of white fire and great magnitude …. In that ether were scattered many bright spheres, into which the white globe from time to time poured itself and emitted its brightness, and then moved back under the globe of red fire.²⁹

Hildegard’s mystical experiences also demonstrate a certain telos in the creativity of ruach Elohim: the coming of a New Creation. This telos is captured in her twelfth vision, entitled the ‘New Heaven and New Earth’: ‘And suddenly from the East a great brilliance shone forth, and there, in a cloud, I saw the Son of Man, with the same appearance He had in the world and with His wounds still open, coming with the angelic choirs’.³⁰ This eschaton is gloriously portrayed in vision thirteen, ‘Symphony of the Blessed’: ‘Then I saw the lucent sky, in which I heard different kinds of music, marvelously embodying all the meanings I had heard before’.³¹

St Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556)

Drawn by ruach Elohim, a Basque mystic of the sixteenth century known as St Ignatius of Loyola has given to the Church a contemplative mystagogy, inscribed in his legacy, the Spiritual Exercises, that invites us to participate in God’s labour in the world. Ignatius’ mystagogical experiences of the cosmos convinced him that ‘the meaning of human life and its supernatural goal is connected with the existential exercise of reaching the love present in all created things’.³²

Ignatius had profound mystagogical experiences of the cosmos and nature throughout his life. In his Autobiography, Ignatius recounts how his heart was flooded with consolation when he gazed at the sky and the stars.³³ But his most profound experience of nature was at Manresa, when he sat down in contemplative mindfulness by the river Cardoner.³⁴ His practice of travelling long distances on foot through the countryside of Europe brought him closer to God the Creator and the Creative Spirit of God present and at work in all things in the cosmos and in nature. ‘In Rome he would be in tears when he prayed at night from his balcony looking up at the stars.’³⁵

Ignatius’ mystical expression reaches its peak in the Contemplation to Attain Love in the Fourth Week of the Spiritual Exercises (Exx 230–237), where the divine glory and splendour of God break forth in creation. In the second point, Ignatius invites those on the sacred journey to bask in the Divine who ‘dwells in creatures; in the elements, giving them existence; in the plants, giving them life; in the animals, giving them sensation; in human beings, giving them intelligence…’ (Exx 235).³⁶ In the third point, Ignatius invites these sojourners to consider ‘how God labours and works for me in all the creatures on the face of the earth’, to become mindful of how God,

… acts in the manner of one who is labouring. For example, God is working in the heavens, elements, plants,???? fruits, cattle, and all the rest—giving them their existence, conserving them, concurring with their vegetative and sensitive activities, and so forth (Exx 236).

Finally, in the fourth point, Ignatius enjoins us to consider how everything that is good emanates from God in an integrated manner, ‘… as the rays come down from the sun, or the rains from their source’ (Exx 237). What becomes clear is that humans are inseparable from creation and the Creator; in these three points ruach Elohim is the creative power that suffuses, sustains and sacralises God’s creation and all things created in our common home.

This intimacy of this relationship with their Creator evokes within humans a gratitude that dispose them to participate in God’s labour, as what Philip Hefner calls ‘created co-creators’.³⁷ We have a destiny towards which ruach Elohim is drawing us, to participate in ruach Elohim’s Spirit power and creative process, transforming the cosmos into a New Creation. This pneumatic mystagogy invites us as co-creators to use the power of imagination to realise in the Contemplation to Attain Love ‘the spirituality of finding and loving God in all things which is the lasting outcome of the Exercises’.³⁸ Hence the Ignatian contemplative mystagogy offers co-creators, as mystics, the graces of being ‘rooted unambiguously in creation’ so that ‘their fascination with the Holy One happens within the enveloping mystery of creation itself ’.³⁹ For ‘mysticism is about immersion in God’s world at the service of God’s creativity and liberation’.⁴⁰

Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955)

As a Jesuit steeped in the Spiritual Exercises, the French philosopher and palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin exemplified a lived pneumatic cosmicism in his mystical communion with the cosmos and all created things. His biographer Ursula King writes:

His inner attraction to the great forces of nature, so deeply rooted in earlier childhood experiences, became so immensely strong that it awakened in him a vibrant cosmic consciousness … when surrendering himself ‘to the embrace of the visible and tangible universe’ ‘as though in ecstasy, that through all of nature I was immersed in God’… a strong nature mysticism was to remain with him all his life.⁴¹

The intensity of the perceptibly lived cosmic mysticism of Teilhard de Chardin resonates with the emerging mystagogy of cosmicism; this is aptly demonstrated in his ‘Hymn to Matter’:

Blessed be you, universal matter, immeasurable time, boundless ether, triple abyss of stars and atoms and generations: you who by overflowing and dissolving our narrow standards of measurement reveal to us the dimensions of God.

I acclaim you as the divine milieu, charged with creative power, as the ocean stirred by the Spirit, as the clay molded and infused with life by the Incarnate Word.

Raise me up then, matter, to those heights, through struggle and separation and death; raise me up until, at long last, it becomes possible for me in perfect chastity to embrace the universe.⁴²

In contemplating the mystery of the cosmos, Chardin had a profound mystical experience as he fathomed the creative-unifying presence of God in the dynamic evolution of creation, albeit from the eschatological end point but ‘not apart from the physical world, but rather through matter and in a certain sense in union with it’.⁴³ God ‘creates to unite’ all things through a cosmic process of spiritualisation-unification (‘the one’) of multiplicities (‘the many’).⁴⁴ For Chardin, God is all in all: there is a total suffusion of God in creation with a final summation of all things in God. For him, the stuff of the universe—a ‘matter–spirit’ that is constitutive of all life on Earth—is characterized by sacramentality.⁴⁵ The ‘barren soil, stubborn rock’, ‘violent sea’, ‘brute forces’ and even ‘base appetites’ of matter are also the ‘melodious fountain of water whence spring the souls of men’; the ‘boundless ethers, triple abyss of stars and atoms, universe in creation’ exude the sacred sustaining presence of ruach Elohim.⁴⁶ To Chardin, this sacramentality of creation is ‘an expression of God’s love for the world’ which God creates, suffuses, sustains and unifies through the creative Spirit power of ruach Elohim.⁴⁷

A Personal Practice of Prayer

Cosmicism is a mystagogy with a pneumatic way of praying that disposes the one who prays to the promptings of ruach Elohim. This is a unique yet cumulative experience of plumbing the depths of the cosmos. I feel like a stardust sojourner, taking the next small steps in a sacred pilgrimage which I began three years ago, like a neophyte under the illuminating teaching of ruach Elohim.

What is unique in the prayer that follows is a new shift in my experience of being tutored, so as to understand in small measure about the ‘trinitization’ that enhances the communion of the countless stardust particles in the cosmos. In trinitization, an idea formulated by Teilhard de Chardin, ‘our world assumes the completing function of an extrinsic Other, in which the three divine Persons may jointly express their triune relations and their unity’.⁴⁸ At the same time, I have gained further insight by thinking about the close relation between pneumatization, the infusion of Spirit, and neutrinos.

Neutrinos are abundant subatomic ‘ghost’ particles that suffuse and pass through anything and everything, only very rarely interacting with matter. ‘About 100 trillion neutrinos pass through our bodies every second.’ ⁴⁹ Believing that ruach Elohim indwells in neutrinos, as in all created things, the awakened subject may seek to pneumatize by intentionalising these countless particles passing through the human body, investing them with Spirit to carry out specific purposes made possible by ruach Elohim.

I repeat my prayer as a mantra in the course of the day, so that it acquires a deeper felt-sense over time, and I grow in a deeper knowledge of the meaningfulness of the mantra that I embody and offer.

24 October 2019, 1.20–2.30 a.m. I visualise myself as a stardust sojourner in the centre of the cosmos, seated in a lotus position, with palms opened and the fingers pointing downwards, afloat in deep space as a cosmic sacred spirit. I become mindful that as a stardust sojourner I am the self-reflexivity of the sacred, conscious cosmos-Earth. Once again, I witness the cosmic expansionary process of flaring forth in space and time, awe-inspired by its incessant moments of ontological newness. As a stardust sojourner, I become intuitively aware and grateful for the process of ‘trinitization’ of innumerable neutrinos, as they bond with each other with a shared purpose of emanating a new cosmos, pneumatizing them to accomplish the intentions of ruach Elohim, bringing forth the New Creation, New Heaven and Earth in the cosmos. In this liminal presence and communion, the chanting of the mantra echoes like a symphonic hymn of praise that reverberates throughout the cosmos, as if all created beings and myriad of life-forms were chanting in unison, each one with all, and all with each one, praising the Creator, moved by ruach Elohim.⁵⁰

An era in need of repair and reconciliation in the interdependent interrelations of the human and natural worlds calls for a contemplative mystique of gratitude for the gratuitous gift of the triune God, who is present and active in the Earth and cosmos through the paschal mystery. Cosmicism, an emerging pneumatic mystagogy, is a proposed response in an era yearning for sustainable life with dignity and equity for all through the promotion of the cosmic common good, particularly with and for the poor and the fragile Earth. Cosmicism has been experienced and embodied by mystics such as Hildegard of Bingen, Ignatius of Loyola and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Cosmicism is akin to a ‘school of intuitive learning’ under the guidance of ruach Elohim, God’s Creative Spirit, who beckons the awakened stardust sojourners to collaborate with the triune God in bringing about the New Creation, New Heaven and New Earth in the Cosmos and on Earth so that God will be all in all.

Footnotes

¹ For more on ruach Elohim, see Jojo M. Fung, A Shamanic Pneumatology in a Mystical Age of Sacred Sustainability: The Spirit of the Sacred Earth (Cham: Springer, 2017), 114–115.
² See Daniel P. Scheid, ‘Conclusion’, in The Cosmic Common Ground: Religious Grounds for Ecological Ethics (Oxford: OUP, 2016), 60.
3 I first used this term in my book Creation Is Spirited and Sacred: An Asian Indigenous Mysticism of Sacred Sustainability (Manila: CCFI, JesCom and ISA, 2017), see x, 2, 7, 8, 22, 115–116, 118, 123.
⁴ John McCarthy and Nancy C. Tuchman, ‘How We Speak of Nature: A Plea for a Discourse of Depth’, Heythrop Journal, 59/6 (November 2018), 944–958, here 945.
⁵ Adelson A. dos Santos, ‘Amazonian Indigenous Spirituality and Care for the Common Home’, La Civiltà Cattolica (13 August 2019), 37–46, here 40.
⁶ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Le Divin Milieu: An Essay on the Interior Life, translated by Siôn Cowell (London: Collins, 1960), 34.
⁷ Gary Snyder, The Old Ways: Six Essays (San Francisco: City Lights, 1977), 9; see also David Landis Barnhill, ‘Great Earth Sangha: Gary Snyder’s View of Nature as Community’, in Buddhism and Ecology: the Interconnection of Dharma and Deeds, edited by Mary Evelyn Tucker and Duncan Ryuken Williams (Cambridge, Ma: Harvard, 1997), 187–217, at 190.
⁸ Pope Francis, during his visit to Mozambique, Mauritius and Madagascar, remarked: ‘Religious faith can never be relegated to the private sphere, oblivious to the world around it. It must be open to the whole of creation, and at all times looking to bring the Gospel to others, to evangelize.’ Quoted in The Tablet (14 September 2019), 5.
⁹ Elizabeth Liebert, Soul of Discernment: A Spiritual Practice for Communities and Institutions (Louisville:
Westminster John Knox, 2015), 30.
¹⁰ Chardin, Milieu Divin, 30.
¹¹ Chardin, Milieu Divin, 127. Chardin goes on to explain sur-animation as a transformation that is sometimes expressed in miracles, but more often ‘by the integration of unimportant or unfavorable events within a higher plane and with a higher providence’.
¹² Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay against Modern Superstition (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2000), 41, quoted in McCarthy and Tuchman, ‘How We Speak of Nature’, 953.
¹³ Celia Deane-Drummond, ‘Living Narratives: Defiant Earth or Integral Ecology in the Age of Humans’, Heythop Journal, 59/6 (November 2018), 914–928, here 921.
¹⁴ Pedro Walpole, ‘Do Not Be Afraid: Laudato si’ and Integral Ecology’, The Way, 54/4 (October 2015), 9–22, here 22; Deane-Drummond, ‘Living Narratives’, 923. See also Pope Francis, Laudato si’, nn.80, 221. Walpole believes that the exaltation of the human spirit makes optimism possible: ‘We now have a sense of spirituality and solidarity that is capable of inspiring us to nothing less than world conversion!’
¹⁵ Laudato si’, nn.105, 216.
¹⁶ Laudato si’, nn.125, 64.
¹⁷ David Toolan, At Home in the Cosmos (New York: Orbis, 2001), 177.
¹⁸ Teilhard de Chardin, ‘The Phenomenon of Spirituality’ (1937), in Human Energy, translated by J. M. Cohen (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 93.
¹⁹ Robert Barron, ‘Laudato Si’ and Romano Guardini’, Catholic News Agency (25 June 2015), at https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/column/laudato-si-and-romano-guardini-3245.
²⁰ Kirsteen Kim, The Holy Spirit in the World: A Global Conversation (New York: Orbis, 2007), 15.
²¹ Deane-Drummond, ‘Living Narratives’, 921.
²² Crumplin argues for a Levinasian approach, ‘inverting ontology and ethics’ so that ‘we can recognize our unique relationship with nature not simply such that I am a small and insignificant part of a greater Cosmos but instead that my identity as a human being is that of being the one who is uniquely responsable’. See ‘Retuning to Wonder’, Heythrop Journal, 60/4 (July 2019), 551–559, here 557.
²³ Swati Samantaray, ‘Cosmic Mysticism: Quest for the Absolute in the Works of Tagore and Sri Aurobindo’, International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature, 6/1 (January 2017), 298–304, here 298.
²⁴ Such a praxis calls for an ethics of alterity that is beyond the scope of this article. For details, see Matthew Eaton, ‘An-Archy and Awakening: The Ethical and Political Temporalities of Christology and Pneumatology’, Heythrop Journal, 60/4 (July 2019), 624–633.
²⁵ ‘Declaration’, in Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, edited by Kevin A. Lynch and others, translated by Mother Columbia Hart and Jane Bishop (Mahwah: Paulist, 1990), 59.
²⁶ ‘Vision Seven’, in Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, 415.
²⁷ ‘Vision Three’, in Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, 93.
²⁸ ‘Epoch of Reionization’, at https://www.haystack.mit.edu/ast/science/epoch/, accessed 25 August 2019. And see Marcus Chown, Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You (London: Faber, 2006); Michael Dowd, Thank God for Evolution (San Francisco: Council Oak, 2009).
²⁹ ‘Vision Three’, in Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, 93.
³⁰ ‘Vision Twelve’, in Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, 515.
³¹ ‘Vision Thirteen’, in Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, 525.
³² Dos Santos, ‘Amazonian Indigenous Spirituality’, 45.
³³ Autobiography, n. 11.
³⁴ Autobiography, n. 20; also see Peter Saunders, ‘Laudato si’ and the Giving of the Spiritual Exercises’,
The Way, 54/4 (October 2015), 118–128; and Paul L. Younger, ‘Ignatian Spirituality and the Ecological Vision of Laudato si’ ’, The Way, 54/4 (October 2015), 57–67, at 61.
³⁵ Peter Saunders, ‘Laudato si’ and the Giving of the Spiritual Exercises’, 119–120; see Pedro de Ribadeneira, The Life of Ignatius Loyola, translated by Claude Pavur (St Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2014), 5.1.15; MHSJ FN 4, 746–748.
³⁶ See Younger, ‘Ignatian Spirituality and the Ecological Vision of Laudato si’ ’, 61.
³⁷ See Philip Hefner, ‘The Evolution of the Created Co-Creator’, in Cosmos as Creation: Theology and Science in Consonance, edited by Ted Peters (Nashville: Abingdon, 1989) 211–234, at 226–228; and Gem Yecla, ‘Co-creation Spirituality: Participating in God’s Ongoing Work of Creation through Spiritual Direction and the Spiritual Exercises’, The Way, 58/3 (July 2019), 7–18.
³⁸ Michael Ivens, Understanding the Spiritual Exercises (Leominster: Gracewing, 1998), 169.
³⁹ Diarmuid O’Murchu, The Transformation of Desire: How Desire Became Corrupted—And How We Can Reclaim It (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2007), 156; see Gem Yecla, ‘Cosmic Intimacy’, above, 29–45.
⁴⁰ O’Murchu, Transformation of Desire, 157.
⁴¹ Ursula King, Spirit of Fire: The Life and Vision of Teilhard de Chardin (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1996), 19– 20. And see Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe (London: Collins, 1965), 68–70.
⁴² Chardin, Hymn of the Universe, 70.
⁴³ Donald P. Gray, The One and the Many: Teilhard de Chardin’s Vision of Unity (London: Burns and Oates, 1969), 46, 34.
⁴⁴ See Gray, One and Many, chapter 1, ‘Creative Union’.
⁴⁵ See Gray, One and Many, 158.
⁴⁶ Chardin, Hymn of the Universe, 70–71.
⁴⁷ Gray, One and Many, 20.
⁴⁸ Maria Gratia Martin, The Spirituality of Teilhard de Chardin (Westminster, Md: Newman, 1968), 57–58. As Diarmuid O’Murchu writes, ‘all energy seems to flow in patterns (sometimes chaotic) toward a preferred sense of direction’ (In the Beginning Was the Spirit: Science, Religion, and Indigenous Spirituality [New York: Orbis, 2012], 73).
₄₉ Ann Finkbeiner, ‘Looking for Neutrinos, Nature’s Ghost Particles’, Smithsonian Magazine (November 2010), available at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/looking-for-neutrinos-natures-ghostparticles-64200742/, accessed 1 February 2020.
⁵⁰ I have printed the mantra itself in bold; the rest of the text consists in ‘felt-expressed’ sentiments inspired by it.

Main image: Shamans blessing Pope Francis before his visit to Peru in 2018 |Reuters/Guadalupe Pardo