Ilia Delio on Exploring the Cosmos [with video]

Excerpted from Ilia Delio’s Saturday morning lecture on April 30

One day, I was sitting in my little apartment in Washington DC, and I knew myself to be loved by God, and in that love, I felt myself really free. And so I didn’t have to look a certain way, or be a certain way. It was in that love of God that I found a freedom to explore what it means to be a child of God.

And that was actually something that Thomas Merton wrote about. He said at one point, it is not so much that we strive to love, it is knowing that we are loved. And I do think that love is the heart of life itself. Which leads me to where I want to take us this morning in this exploration of things.

Last evening we were talking about this losing of mind, this kind of dualism in certain ways with our technologies. It’s because we are not yet unified with this cosmos, this place we call home.

Nancy Abrams and Joel Primack wrote in their book, “There is a gaping hole in modern thinking: we have no meaningful sense of how we and our fellow humans fit into the big picture… Without a big picture we are very small people.” And I think that is a little bit of our challenge, how to find ourselves again in the big picture, even as we ask questions on the global crisis of world problems, that’s still the level of the people, and we need to explore the level of the cosmos.

Want to hear more from Ilia Delio? You may purchase access to the live recording of her Friday, April 29 lecture: Have We Lost Our Minds (Literally): Ecology in an Age of Technology.