What is Emerging?
Posted on October 1, 2022, by Mary Ellen McElroy SL
Recently I came across a copy of the “Occasional Papers,” a publication of LCWR (Leadership Conference of Women Religious), summer 2012. The theme of this issue, mystery unfolding, raised my curiosity. The first article, an interview with Ilia Delio OSF, made me even more curious. The following is the result of some of my pondering of Ilia’s wisdom that I share with all of you curious readers!
Ilia reminds us that we are living in an expanding universe and suggests that humanity needs to make a new turn which she calls “the turn to the cosmos.” She tells us that our thinking about everything — God, grace, life, death, creation, happiness, violence, peace, suffering and so on — needs to be done within a cosmological framework because life unfolds in this wider context.
You can look at dying as a participation in this unfolding evolutionary story and see that your life and your works have always been part of a larger whole. Every aspect of life has moments of death and resurrection …. We are dying all along the way and every death is the beginning of new life. A community may be dying but something new is being born.
We need to shift our focus to the new births that are taking place all around us in quiet, hidden and perhaps, non-traditional, ways …. Death is not an end … it is participation in something larger than ourselves …. We can get weighed down by what seems to be aging and dying but I am encouraging us to stretch our vision because we are living in an expanding universe — and it is quite exciting.*
Please join us in pondering Ilia’s wisdom. The following questions may be helpful. How have my life and my works been part of a larger whole? Have I been able to be aware of the new births that are taking place in myself and in Loretto as the old dies out? What still needs to die in me/in Loretto, for us to move freely into the future? (Further reflections on this article will be continued in the Nov. 2022 Interchange.)
*LCWR “Occasional Papers,” summer 2012; Ilia Delio OSF quotes used with permission
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