Making all Things New

Subtitled 'Catholicity, Cosmology, Consciousness', this impressive and erudite study is full of stimulating new ideas and connections between religion, spirituality and science. The author holds doctorates in pharmacology and historical theology, and is unusually well read. She defines catholicity as a conscious awareness of how everything forms one thing and has the power to reconnect the various dimensions of life as they reflect an underlying wholeness. Her overall vision is profoundly influenced by Teilhard de Chardin, which is also indicated in her subtitle. The word cosmos has been central in Western science and philosophy, and the meaning of catholicity has evolved both inside and outside the Church; the mediaeval synthesis of microcosm and macrocosm was overtaken by mechanistic lawfulness. 20th-century science, however, has introduced new understandings of wholeness and emergence, with what Teilhard called the complexification of consciousness; this wholeness is also relational.

The author then moves back to Jesus as a strange attractor and borrows some metaphors from quantum mechanics to describe baptism and Eucharist as forms of entanglement and the resurrection as a quantum phenomenon. Although I found this ingenious, I did not find it convincing as for her the resurrection seems to consist of living on in our relationships; this is poetic rather than factual language, as in the sentence that 'Jesus lives on in the heart of the universe in a new relatedness'. The idea of the Church as an open system, especially since Vatican II, is an interesting line of thought, and there is ample evidence that Pope Francis is moving in that direction. An open systems theology is an intriguing idea, and the author shows how Teilhard's main ideas embody this. She encourages the Church to see revelation as process, relatedness and patterns of organisation. In her conclusion, she calls for a new catholicity, a new religion of the world based on an integrated consciousness of the whole, a deep relationality and a deepening of inner and outer wholeness: in short, recognition of connectedness as a basic reality of our existence. It is hard to disagree with such an inspiring aspiration.