Looking out at the postmodern day landscape, we may be tempted toward hopelessness and despair, and very often we fall directly into the mire of confusion and nihilism that seems to be determined and final. The conflagration of world and national politics, ideologies of colonial domination and marginalization, war, famine, and environmental terrors blaze all around us. The disturbing spiking of suicide, drug addiction, and intentional killing are horrific indicators of how hierarchies of dominion across class, gender and race move in destructive patterns of force that dehumanize perpetrators and victims with insidious asymmetry. The allure of globalism found in media technology somehow fails to adequately deliver the interpersonal connection that it promises.

Inasmuch as some may agree to the necessity of revealing the bias of social, religious and cultural value systems, there is an aching feeling of identity loss and haplessness captured in the masses. If one cannot abide the questions that arise and the groundlessness that accompanies this dangerously open air, the option can be to breathe in any of the ideologies that are abundant supply around every corner. Every –ism is a harlot that turns a trick for pleasure seeking or numbing illusion.

Where do we dig up hope?

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In this paralyzing scenario, dare we speak of hope? Is there room for hope or optimism in the future? And more than that, where do we find the passion or zest to move toward any possible hope?

“Whatever disorder we are confronted by, the first thing we must say to ourselves is that we shall not perish. This is not a mortal sickness: it is a crisis of growth. It well may be that the evil has never seemed so deep-rooted nor the symptoms so grave; but, in one sense, is that not precisely one more reason for hope? The height of a peak is a measure of the depths of the abysses it overtops.”[i]  

This bold statement comes from the French paleontologist and mystic, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, written in 1939, at a time when the world was entering into yet another “world” war. Such a bold proclamation can sound quite naïve; however, this radical optimism and hope in the future comes from a man whose vision of evolutionary consciousness was birthed during his time on the front lines in World War where he personally witnessed and engaged in the ravages of war as a stretcher-bearer. Dare we dream with him with such audacious tenacity?

Teilhard’s love of rocks and the earth, from his early childhood and on into his adult life, contributed quite literally to a so to speak ‘excavating’ hope. But, more than that, not simply what we may call ‘hope,’ but an impassioned and energetic “pull toward being.” He defined “Zest for living” in an essay he wrote for a lecture in 1950 as “that spiritual disposition, at once intellectual and affective, in virtue of which life, the world, and action seem to us, on the whole, luminous – interesting – appetizing.”[ii] Teilhard’s time of excavation and research in the Gobi desert produced so much more than fossils marking the evolutionary past of our planet and species. Indeed, his excavated vision was an earthen/spiritual wellspring of affective and indomitable zest toward the future! He characterized it as essentially constructive, dynamic and adventurous.[iii]

Teilhard was drawn into the earth. It shined forth and called out to him from its luminous depths into his. As the psalmist says ‘deep unto deep’ (Psalm 42). He was also drawn toward the divine. His innate conviction that we are moving, evolving, growing, always toward more complexity and more consciousness allowed him to not merely see the whole, but more importantly to see from the Whole! This diaphanous perspective drew him in and thrusted him out all at the same time – convergence and radiance!

This zest for life that Teilhard speaks of is an energy that is not simply received, but an energy that we have the responsibility to nourish and grow. It is somehow the inner psychical force of evolution itself and being as such it is not something that we need to create, but rather that from which we can create. The inner magnetic nature of the Divine accompanies us even as it draws us forward always into the future. The zest for life is the movement from simply survival and the will to live toward what he would call the will to ‘super-live.’[iv] And it is here that Teilhard places religion’s source and role not solely within the realm of the human species but more specifically in its role in universal evolution:

“In a world that has become conscious of its own self and provides its own motive force, what is most vitally necessary to the thinking is a faith – and a great faith – and ever more faith.
To know that we are not prisoners.
To know that there is a way out, that there is air, and light, and love, somewhere, beyond the reach of all death.
To know this, to know that it is neither an illusion nor a fairy story.
— That, if ware not to perish smothered in the stuff of our being, is what we must at all costs secure.
And it is there that we find what I may well be so bold as to call the evolutionary role of religion.”[v]

Teilhard is speaking about religion – not religions – as an energy force that must be increased in our world as the ‘reserves of faith.’ This ‘faith’ is not simply or solely the religious traditions but the religion of the earth, the religion of evolution’s unstoppable and irreversible trek toward future. Teilhard seems to say that only an increase in the energies of religion can grant the necessary enthusiasm for growth (evolution), and what he will call ‘zest for the world.’[vi] It is the earth itself that has religious needs.

In the essay, Teilhard goes on to characterize how a static image of God that is “too insignificant to nourish in us this concern to survive and super-live” is what is actually being rejected by those who are referred to as atheists. Teilhard therefore proposes that instead of atheism, we should describe this as ‘unsatisfied theism.’ [vii] The excavating of hope is religious in nature – a universal dynamic. It is deep and broad. Inner and forward. Yet how do we embrace it as something luminous, adventurous and appetizing?

Teilhard claims that what is ultimately needed for the zest for living to take hold in humanity as the edge of evolution is the idea of a more “real and more magnet God” that can bind or align us so that we enter “directly into receptive communication with the very source of all interior drive.[viii] For Teilhard, the zest for living is not simply a human task. It is a communion of the earth – an evolutionary process that we have the responsibility and energy to activate and engage. [ix]

So, how relevant is this Zest for Living in our world today? How far off is ‘unsatisfied theism’ from the malaise that we see in our world today, not simply in atheism, but in traditional and fundamental religious and social structures? And even if we resonate with Teilhard’s dynamic vision of the evolutionary process of complexification and consciousness, what would this look like in our world? How would we begin to engage in this responsibility?

Can we conceive of religion as an agent of alignment with the dynamic movement of complexity and consciousness in the universe? How can we cultivate not simply hope for the future but a zest for communion oriented towards future? How are we being drawn together? How are we radiating outward toward the future? Are we going deep and broad enough? How can we not be prisoners? How can we see a way out, that there is air, and light, and love, somewhere, beyond the reach of all death?

This may be too many questions. Yet it occurs to me that we are already attempting in many ways to live out possible answers. Zest for life, falling in love over and over again with life creating more life – as Franciscan Theologian, Ilia Delio, described it at the recent Love at the Heart of the Cosmos conference in Philadelphia – is happening all over the world

Only to name a few…earthen tectonics that release life vibrations to the surface, creative interactions between persons who intentionally seek to uncover and address racial, gender and sexual biases, embodied practices of authentic communion, fires of purification preparing the fallow preceding new growth, radical liturgies of lamentation and hospice, wherever persons seek more being for all persons, whenever prayer irrupts intentionally and compassionately, animals loving and being loved, healing touch, sustainable food, a simple smile.  Shall we create more!  Somehow I am convinced that this religion of Zest is a contagious communion.  

[i] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “The Moment of Choice” in Activation of Energy (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: 1971), 14

[ii] “The Zest For Living” in Activation of Energy, 231.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Ibid, 234

[v] Ibid, 238.

[vi] Ibid., 239.

[vii] Ibid, 239-240

[viii] Ibid, 242.

[ix] Ibid., 235.