Spirit in the World

Image at nytimes.com

I was really struck by this image on the NYT page tonight.

It ran in an article about three Twitter posts by Yoko Ono on the occasion of the 44th anniversary of her marriage to John Lennon. She posted  images of John’s bloodied glasses from the night he was shot with messages about the need to address gun violence in the United States. The image here captures the patterns and density of global sharing of the posts on Twitter. The article notes the particularly strong response in Mexico, plagued for so many years now by the gun violence driven by drug cartels.

Teilhard de Chardin, the French Priest, paleontologist and theologian who rooted his whole approach to God and meaning in evolutionary dynamics before most Christian thinkers had even begun to confront evolution as a theological problem, claimed that one day our evolving technology would make it possible for human beings to experience a new “layer” of global human consciousness, one so  pervasive, accessible and rich that it would enable  a great leap forward in our capacity for spiritual connection to one another, to God. He called this new moment in the cosmic drama of creation the “noosphere:” an all-enveloping context of interpersonal love and response.

I spend a lot of energy worrying about how we’re going to hold on to our humanity as our technology accelerates.

But when I saw this image of the entire world responding to the plea of an 80-year old woman, still willing to imagine a better world in honor of her her husband and his dream, it was like catching a fleeting glimpse of a shooting star, a bright light in the dark sky over what is, perhaps, still a very young planet.