Spirit of Chaos & Order

"These were no longer two things, but two states or two aspects of one and the same cosmic Stuff, according to whether it was looked (Matter) at or carried further in the direction in which it is becoming itself or in the direction in which it is disintegrating (Spirit). Matter is the Matrix of Spirit. Spirit is the higher state of Matter. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Life is energy. Energy is Spirit. The Spirit gives life. Within the soul lies a fire (eros), the energy that drives us. But there is more...The Spirit is the adhesive that holds us together, the principle of integration and individuation within us. The Spirit integrates the mind and the body and all their thoughts and cellular processes into a whole being. The Spirit not only enlivens us individually, but it makes us one with all of creation within which the Spirit lives.

There is a principle of order and chaos within the Spirit - a tendency to come together and also to dissipate (birth and death). The human soul is the same. The energy within us - our desire (eros), our longing for completion is constantly in creative tension with our incompletion. Chaos and order. Fire and water. We live in a constant flux of psychic unity and disorder and social unity and disorder, and global unity and disorder and cosmic unity and disorder. This is the nature of energy and matter and Spirit in flux.

Spirituality is about what we do with that incurable desire, the eros/passion unitive energy of the Spirit within us, who wants to move us to order, but whose intensity is constantly displaced by our (ego) choices to channel it outside of ourselves rather than learn to harness its unitive power within. It is this latter ability that truly raises our consciousness in Christ who IS the unitive Spirit of Life.

Love is the method. Love is the vehicle. Humans can be unconditionally loving - first loving themselves (for this is to Love God or the Spirit of Life within you) and secondly to love your neighbors as yourself (which is every other human creature on the planet). Each of us has the potential to Love unconditionally. It is work. It requires a great deal of humility and patience. But this is how the Spirit brings order to chaos. This is how humanity is united in Christ, who is ONLY LOVE.
 
As we enter into this beautiful time of renewal, this springtime of earthen Matter, take time to reflect on what revives the sleeping winter world. What is it that greens the grass and fattens the buds on trees? What pushes crocus and daffodils from their dark bed of soil toward the warm sunlight? What urges the birds to procreate and migrate? You are part of this.

If you are Christian, you are celebrating this in your Lenten journey. As you move through the chaos of darkness with Jesus in these last days, open yourself to the Spirit of order that is calling you forward, the Light of your higher consciousness - Christ - that cannot be extinguished. Let this Spirit, that is You, speak to you and unite you with the Spirit of God/Christ that is bringing into unity all that lives.
 
Namaste, Peggy

The beginnings of this blog are inspired by a book by Ronald Rolheiser, OMI, "The Holy Longing, the Search for a Christian Spirituality."

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (May 1, 1881 – April 10, 1955) was a French philosopher and Jesuit priest who trained as a paleontologist and geologist and took part in the discovery of Peking Man.


Below is a selection of scriptures that speak to our identity (our psychological being) in the Spirit. The creation story in Genesis would be a good place to find a poetic discussion of Spirit's uniting of energy and matter.
 
1 Corinthians 2:10....The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. 11 For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. 12 What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us.
 
13 This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. 14 The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. 15 The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments, 16 for, “Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?”
But we have the mind of Christ.


1 Corinthians 3:16, 21.
¹⁶ Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst?
All things are yours, ²² whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are yours, ²³ and you are of Christ, and Christ is of God.