We would win, I thought steadily, if not in human
guise then in another, for love was something that life in
its infinite prodigality could afford. It was the failures who had
always won, but by the time they won they had come to be called successes.
This is the final paradox, which men call evolution.
—Loren Eiseley, “The Inner Galaxy”^[1]

When I visited my ancestor’s grave in Blije, Netherlands, many years before my encounter with a new cosmic story, I did as we all tend to do. The first impulse is to look into our human past, searching for a direct line to the famous, the spectacular, and the noble, wanting to claim a pedigree of accomplishment or beauty or power. We all want to feel special. We want to know where we come from. But far beyond our human ancestry, we already have a direct line to a spectacular ancestry, one with a magnificent pedigree. It has the specialness of an incredible story, one of feats and adventures way beyond quests and rescues and the slaying of dragons. It has riveting tales of crisis and creativity, dramatic reversals, leaps forward, and harrowing escapes. And all human beings share in that story.

Feats such as the invention of photosynthesis by unicellular organisms who learned to snare photons from the sun as food. Plants burst out across Earth and changed everything. With each meal and contemplation of a flower, I can remember those ancestors.

Feats such as the invention of respiration which started when a cyanobacteria, about two billion years into the story of life on Earth, began to produce oxygen in copious amounts, feeding off the limitless energy of the sun. Oxygen was toxic to life at the time; nevertheless, one of our bacterial ancestors evolved into the mitochondria which processes oxygen in the cells. This was an enormous new source of energy, and it would evolve into aerobic breathing that would drive the advance of multicellular life. With each draw of breath into my lungs, I can remember those ancestors.

Feats like the human hand, a marvel that can shape and nurture as well as destroy. I gaze at my hand and contemplate how it came to be that such a masterpiece exists. This hand can cultivate the future by sowing native plants in my little plot of Earth that will sustain pollinators and a host of other life. The same hand can move words onto the page that might live beyond the limits of a lifetime. Or this hand can hold another’s in comfort and solidarity in life, or companionship in death. It can strike and destroy, or heal and build. When our ancestors stood on two legs, the hand was freed to become more than a means of locomotion. It could grasp, gesture, communicate, create, and feel the world in ways that would evolve into speech and supercharge human evolution.

And feats like the furnace of stars that forged the elements, then went supernova and sallied forth into blood, bone, flesh, and eventually self-organized into mind and consciousness. Those stars burn brightly in our consciousness, for those very stars became the early churning planet Earth, and the seas, the rock, the atmosphere, then the rudimentary consciousness that grew into a species that is the universe reflecting on its very existence. This is our amazing pedigree, a lineage to the stars themselves, also our ancestors.

So, as time passed, as I began to think of what I have been bequeathed from this evolutionary story, I have begun to consider not so much who my human ancestors were, but what kind of ancestor am I? How will I continue this lineage? What will I leave for future generations? Can I forge the care and compassion that will shape a future that builds on the “journeywork of stars,” to use Walt Whitman’s apt phrase?

One of the key reasons I changed my name from Smith to de Boer was that I sought a connection to the land. What could I as a Boer, a farmer, cultivate in the inner landscape? What could I help build through a love of and attention to the present? The self we cultivate and the actions that live beyond us are the pedigree that surpasses mere physical heredity. What we pass on to the future is no longer simply genetic but a trans-genetic legacy, that which, as ancestors to the future, we safeguard and generate.

In reverse-time, the twig of a human life pulls into branch; branch pulls into trunk, back to sapling, down into root, seed, soil, rain, mineral, humus, Earth, star; and we realize that this is a constellation of the self, our deeper identity. Clues to our identity may not lay solely in the past, but as much in the present, in awareness of the infinite spaces within. All of this constitutes a self. All of time and all of the ancestors are there.

Whose ancestor am I right now in this moment of awareness? What issues forth from me like the elements from a star? What is my unique constellation of the adventure of the elements, of argon and carbon and helium and iron?

Not long ago, my niece, Ember, asked me to take de Boer for her artistic name. She does compelling sculpture in the area of arts and ecology, work that celebrates the ancestors in its own way, using the ancient to hold the contemporary up to scrutiny. Her self, her unique constellation, is still rising within the matrix of that work. But she is already an ancestor at the ripe old age of twenty-something, cultivating the present for the future.

Perhaps one day “ancestor” will become a verb: to ancestor, meaning “to cultivate the ground of the self for the future.” The eternal ancestor of the present, always generating. What we receive from the past we can give to the future. And yet, what we give to the future we are also giving back. Reciprocity is a re-creation of our origins, an act wherein you have to acknowledge that you are both back there and that you are here, creating the future with every action.

~~~

The tornado that swept through my family’s life took a wrecking ball to my childhood faith, as formative and reassuring as it had been. The citadel of faith in a certain kind of God crashed down. My heart broke, my world fell apart, and my family and I entered a dark spiritual night that was characterized by the search for a new community and a groping toward a new faith. But on a cultural level, the religion of my youth had left me bereft in spirit because it had severed itself from our planetary home and the universe. In fact, it was generally antagonistic to the body, nature, the Earth, except perhaps as a reason to praise the Creator God. God was a deity above and Spirit was separate from matter and nature, which were seen as degraded forms of existence.

In spite of this cataclysmic breakdown in values and belief, I still carried within me the seeds of faith. Having known faith as a child, I set out on a search to find some semblance of it again as a young man. That seed of faith was looking for more fertile ground. Although I was unaware of it at the time, it was the pivot point where I began the process of finding true faith, a more mature faith, the fire of a new faith. Teilhard and the new cosmology that has come out of his lineage from various thinkers helped me form this new faith in the human. Combined with my love of nature, deep empathy for plants and animals, and an inborn zest for the community of life, I did find more fertile ground. Without the initial loss, I may have never availed myself of the creativity of the universe in so transformative a fashion. But without the discovery of a scientific cosmology that supported that creative reconfiguration in my life, I may have stagnated or regressed or fallen into addiction. The temptation to fall into addiction was always there, just over my shoulder.

Three concepts from Teilhard began to generate the psychic energy within me to deal with the “crisis moment” of my family trauma and the larger crisis of my society, which Berry has described as “a radical discontinuity between the Earth and the human.”

First, is the interiority of all things. The psychic “enfolding” of the universe as complementary to its actual physical unfolding is key to Teilhard’s thought. This interiority bound me to the world in a way that a dualistic Cartesian cosmology did not.

The interiority that is present from the very beginning in the universe didn’t simply give rise to my own; it is co-existent with my own.

The second concept is the capacity of the human for seeing more deeply and the power of reflexive consciousness. We only have to see more deeply the remarkable emergence around us to understand that the same powers that brought this into being exist within and around us, supporting us. As a basis for faith, it is both tangible and mysterious. We can reach out and touch the rough trunk of an oak with a sense of wonder. We can feel an affinity and love for the tree and wonder at the mystery behind that capacity, that it should exist within us at all. That the self-organizing dynamics of the universe could bring this power of contemplation into existence is a source of amazement in itself.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that faith is impossible without awe.

“Awe precedes faith; it is at the root of faith. We must grow in awe in order to reach faith. We must be guided by awe to be worthy of faith.”

This is more than mere belief because is comes not out of concepts but from a sensual experience and feeling of amazement at the world. Beliefs can keep us tethered to fear because what we believe in is ultimately transient and thus subject to loss. Faith is also beyond simple hope for a better future, what some call “hopium;” it is an internal state born from a connection to the dynamics of the universe. Hope keeps us tethered to longing and what is not yet. We are drawn into an idealized future, and thus pulled out of the eternal present. Optimism is similarly bound to an ideal. Faith goes deeper than optimism because it forms the basis for valid action in the world. Optimism can make us feel absolved of taking action when it assumes that things will somehow right themselves.

Faith, on the other hand, awakens us to the time-developmental process of the universe. We begin to see that evolution complexifies over time and through that process makes the divine more and more explicit. Faith is permeated by a sense of a focal point in the future that draws us energetically forward but is also intensely present. This focal point in the future is what Teilhard referred to as the Omega Center. Omega is both a focal point of convergence toward which the evolution of consciousness moves, but it also “already exists and is at work right here and now in the deepest part of the thinking mass…”^[2]

The third concept is the omni-presence of love-in-action, the “amorization” that personalizes everything in the universe. I came to see how this permeating love enriched my own creativity. My own creative energies couldn’t be separated from a universe that is fundamentally creative. Fuller being is closer union. That which binds me to all makes me more deeply who I am.

LOVE-IN-ACTION

Driven by forces of love, the fragments of the world
are seeking one another so the world may come to be.
This is no metaphor—and far more than poetry.^[3]
—Teilhard de Chardin

Every living thing, but one, is fluent
in the language of the Great Heart.
 —Deena Metzger, Ruin and Beauty

Our interiority, the inwardness that makes us capable of contemplation and reflection, is rooted in our kinship with nature. This is not just some vague affinity for the beauty of the natural world or the grandeur of scenic vistas or inspiring landscapes. It goes to the heart of our desire for relationship, what I see as the “great enamorment,” something that pervades the universe throughout time and space. Teilhard writes in The Human Phenomenon: “If some internal propensity to unite did not exist, even in the molecule, in probably some incredibly rudimentary yet already nascent state, it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up, in ourselves, in the homonized state. Since we have observed its presence with certainty in ourselves, we have every reason to suppose that, at least inchoately, it is present in everything that exists.”^[4] (p. 188, Human Phenomenon)

Our culture has largely shut down “the language of the Great Heart,” as Deena Metzger writes in the epigraph in this section. The Great Heart is our unitive consciousness, the spiritual awareness where we feel a deep love and connection with all life on Earth, including each other. Relationship is the basis of the ecology of life on Earth, and is what drives the fitness of species. The notion of fitness in evolution has been misunderstood as simply competition, that nature is “red in tooth and claw” and only the strongest survive. But  “fitness is relational,” states Francis Heylighen, a Belgian cyberneticist known for his investigations into the emergence and evolution of intelligent organization. He explains that fitness is actually found in the capacity to form relationships. This is expressed best through the concept of synergy, meaning that “together you can do more than alone. Fitness is about minimizing conflict and friction and maximizing synergy.”^[5] Cooperation, in other words, is more of a driver of evolution than competition. In this light, Social Darwinism, the concept that only the fit will survive competition in a socio-economic setting, is not only pernicious, but wrong.

Our sensitivities to this relational nature, of our fundamental kinship with life, even with the most rudimentary particle in the universe, results in both an attitude of reverence (a feeling of respect for the divine inward nature of all life) but even more crucially, a sense of wonder. Wonder is energization of relationship. To feel amazement at the ground of our existence, the planet, the still unfolding evolutionary journey and our role in it, is to develop an unshakable faith. Not faith in “God,” but faith in the becomingness of the Universe. If God is the term we use, it is God as verb. Wonder opens our hearts and allows us to deeply see the magnificence around us, and that is in constant supply. We live in an ocean of beauty. A regular practice of spiritual ecology helps to reawaken that great enamorment, keeping it central to our actions.

Why fight to preserve the beauty and integrity of the Earth? Because to diminish it is to diminish the ground of our faith. Sometimes a natural wonder can bring us into awe; sometimes music or a work of art incites the imagination; sometimes the beauty and elegance of an idea energizes us. These are all ways to awe. But then, there is a point where we enter pure presence, when all of these images and ideas fall away and we enter a state of emptiness, of stillness, that contains all things, the whole universe. And then we have found the freedom to be the universe as our most profound and aspirational selves.

This is a state of deep trust. The friendliness or unfriendliness of the universe can be measured in the extent to which we feel at home in a place, the Earth, the universe. Do we feel loved by a place, by the universe, not only in the fullness of our lives, but even in death? In this sense, the universe is not only supporting of our actions, but based in love. Teilhard makes a remarkable statement: “A love that embraces the entire universe is not only something psychologically possible; it is also the only complete and final way in which we can love.”^[6] I would add that it is the only complete and final way we can be loved.

To understand his statement, you have to understand what he means by the inwardness of things, how the universe not only diverges and evolves outward, but converges on itself in deepening interiority, driving beings toward affinity for each other. This convergence is the love of the universe pressing in on us at all times. And this affinity for each other is what drives the universe forward, not only into deeper interiority, but into greater complexity. Or, in a word, beauty. “Love alone is capable of completing our beings in themselves as it unites them,” he writes, “for the good reason that love alone takes them and joins them by their very depths—this is a fact of daily experience. For actually is not the moment when two lovers say they are lost in each other the moment when they come into the most complete possession of themselves?”^[7]

Caring deeply for another is finding one’s own depths of meaning. We become fluent in the language of the Great Heart.

Reprinted from Sacred Earth Rising Within by K. Lauren de Boer, TerraVita Media, 2025, with permission of the author.

^[1] Loren Eiseley, The Unexpected Universe (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1964), 193.
^[2] Teilhard de Chardin, ibid, 195.
^[3] Teilhard de Chardin, ibid, 188.
^[4] ibid, 188.
^[5] Francis Heylighen, “The Third Story,” talk given at the Human Energy Project N2 Conference in Berkeley, November, 2023.
^[6] Teilhard de Chardin, The Human Phenomenon (Brighton: Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 1999), 190.
^[7] Teilhard de Chardin, ibid.,189.

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