Brandon: If you only see through one lens, you’re going to have a distorted view
of the world. You’re not going to know the world in its full meaning, in its full
depth, its full beauty.
Welcome to The Leader’s Way at Yale, the podcast at the intersection of spiritual
leadership, innovation, and transformation from Berkeley Divinity School at Yale.
I’m your host, Brandon Nappi.
I am both amazed at the implications that AI brings to our world and
simultaneously incredibly concerned. I can’t imagine a better person to help us sift
through all of the complexities and to help us navigate many challenging issues
surrounding AI than Sister Ilia Delio. Sister Ilia is a Franciscan sister. Her
background is both in theology and in science. She’s a doctorate in pharmacology
from Rutgers University. Her area of specialization was neurotoxicology and spent
many years working on Lou Gehrig’s disease. She went on to teach at Washington
Theological Union at Georgetown, and she’s currently professor of theology at
Villanova University. She’s the author of 20 books. Her latest book, Re-enchanting
the Earth: Why AI Needs Religion, I found to be really, really helpful at beginning
to reflect on the implications of AI and the church and the world and the evolution
of culture. I’m so thankful for this conversation. I hope you enjoy it.
Brandon: Sister Ilia Delio, welcome to The Leader’s Way podcast. It’s so great to
have you with us.
Sister Ilia Delio: Thank you, Brandon. It’s nice to be here.
Brandon: It’s such an important time to talk about AI because of the ways AI is
changing life on our planet. Before we start catastrophizing, I thought it would be
really helpful to step back and reflect a little bit. Before we dive into AI, I’d love to
hear your vocation story. How did you become a sister and what led you to teach
and to study and to research at the intersection of science and religion?
Sister Ilia Delio: I am a cultural Catholic from New Jersey, so brought up in an
Italian-American neighborhood. Going to church on Sunday was the thing to do,
but I went to Catholic school, grammar school, and I think since the time I was
knee-high, I was lured by the Franciscan sisters that we had as our teachers. I
always felt this draw to religious life. Even going to mass, there was something
mystical about it, and I loved the consecration at the time of the Eucharist and all
that kind of stuff. I always had this God center from the time I could walk. My
mother had a sister actually who had become a sister, and it didn’t last. It was like
eight years, and I always had heard the bad stories, had she had to leave at the back
door, and she married this divorced man who was Protestant, and then she divorced
him. It was just like a downward trend all the way. I said, “Oh, dear.” I better not
tell her what I’m actually thinking.
I always loved science. I majored in biology, was pre-med, wanted to go to
medical school, and got as far as the interview, but froze at the interview stage. It
was so competitive in those days that I kind of wanted to go, but then maybe not. I
was never as driven as I see some of my students today. I wound up going to
graduate school and got a master’s, and then a doctorate in neurobiology, and then
pharmacology. My area was actually spinal cord research. I was working on
models of Lou Gehrig’s disease. I was an electrophysiologist, so I was interested in
the electrical component of the nervous system. Then my work was aligned with
similar pathologies in Alzheimer’s disease, and I landed a post doc at Johns
Hopkins in neurology and neuropathology. But prior to doing that, I came across
the life of Thomas Merton, and I had never heard of Merton. I was really
fascinated by this figure. I really identified with him. He was a very worldly
person, a literary person, very engaged in people and politics and thought, and then
left it all to go to this cloister to live entirely for God in the silence of the desert. I
thought, “That’s exactly what I want to do.”
I finished my PhD, interviewed at Hopkins. It all went well. Then I kind of never
showed up, quite honestly. I went to the Holy Land on a cheap flight. I wrote
everyone a postcard telling them I was having a great time. They all thought I
eloped with someone. It was kind of funny. I was like, “Well, kind of.” I wound up
entering a very traditional Byzantine, discalced, Carmelite cloister. I was a cloister
nun for four years in the Byzantine Rite. I went to a Ukrainian Rite high school, so
it wasn’t too unusual. It was somewhat unusual.
My classmates from New Jersey Medical School really could not understand what
happened to me, either too many drugs in the laboratory or something happened
along the way, but she was mentally not right. Fact is, I was always allured by this
complete dedication to a godly life and this living for God. I was a very traditional
Catholic. Vatican II was not on my radar. I wore the full floor length habit with the
quaffinol. That lasted, I always say, once the drugs were off, I began to wake up. I
said, “Oh, what am I doing here?” It was a beautiful life in some ways. The
cloistered life is a very rhythmic life, very ecological, very tied to the earth. We did
a lot of farming, planting. We grew all our own food. Today, the same monastery
has a whole animal farm and stuff like this.
I really love the life in many parts. I could not reconcile it with the incarnation.
God entered into the midst of a busy, messy world, and I couldn’t understand
leaving the busy, messy world to find God. I asked to take a leave and I was sent to
live with German Franciscan sisters. I thought, “Well, because I actually went back
to Rutgers to do a postdoc in neurotoxicology.” In the lab, I worked on issues of
methylmercury poisoning in sensory nerves. Then, in my life, I was living with
these lovely German Franciscan women. I thought, “Well, they are more fun. They
actually drink beer on Sunday, and they drive cars. This must be the place for me.”
I entered them and had to redo the novitiate and basically have gone through boot
camp a few times over. Still very traditionally, wore the full habit, very regulated
herbarium up at four, our private silent prayer and the mass and all that kind of
stuff.
I ran my postdoc at Rutgers and realized my heart wasn’t in research at that point.
One day I was in the lab with a full habit on and this guy came in and said, “I’m
looking for Dr. Delio.” I’m like, “Well, that would be me.” It was too weird. I was
in the novitiate. I was driving the novice director a little crazy because I asked a lot
of questions and had a lot of ideas about things. She was going through some kind
of midlife crisis, and they called me in and said, “Well, we’d like to send you to
school to study maybe spirituality or theology.” I said, “Well, I don’t know much
about either, but theology just sounds better. Spirituality just sounds kind of
fluffy.” I had actually no idea. I just thought, “Theology, read some books and
write some papers. I can’t be that difficult.” After going through medical school
courses, it all seemed pretty lightweight, but of course, that wasn’t true. I had to go
to Catholic school. I wound up going to Fordham University with a car that had
been in four accidents. They sent me to the Bronx in this really beat up car, and I
lived with the Ursuline sisters.
But to make a long story short, once I got into theology, I was like a fish who
found water. I did not realize I was living on dry land. I loved theology. It was its
own science for me. I thought like a scientist, but I was actually really delving into,
and I loved the patristic fathers. I loved the great fathers of the church and wrote
my master’s thesis on an aspect of Augustine’s rule and then my doctoral
dissertation on Bonaventure’s mysticism of the crucified Christ. Yeah, very
traditional. Love the church, love the traditions, but I never lost sight of science,
quite honestly. I was always a scientist, and I think I still am.
Brandon: Thank you for sharing your story, Sister Ilya. I was just smiling and
thinking. Another life blown up by Thomas Merton and Francis of Assisi. For
those who may be listening and aren’t familiar with Théard, what can you say
about him? Can you share a bit about his life and how he’s foundational for the
work that you’re doing right now in AI?
Sister Ilia Delio: So Théard Desjardins, Pierre Théard Desjardins, was a French
Jesuit born in 1881 and died in 1955. He was a paleontologist, so he was a scientist
by training. His specialty was the Eocene era, about 54 million years ago of human
evolution. He is one of the discoverers of the picking man, which kind of gave him
the claim to fame. He was known in his day as an excellent scientist. He kept very
detailed records of his archaeological findings, and he was a careful observer of
nature. But he was a Jesuit. He was really deeply devoted to actually the sacred
heart of Christ. Deep devotion to the divine love poured out into this incredible
creation.
He never really claimed to be a theologian. He didn’t say, “I’m a scientist who
wants to be a theologian.” He said, “I’m writing as a scientist.” And so people
often, they judge him harshly. He’s been criticized on so many levels by
theologians when I’m like, “He actually wasn’t trying to be a theologian.” So I
think we’ve got to give the guy some credit here. He realized there’s a wholeness in
nature. No matter how far back we go, there’s a wholeness that cannot be reduced
to anything other than its own wholeness. And so he begins with this idea of
wholeness in nature, even fragments of bones. There’s a wholeness to them. And so
just a little aside here, I always say that Jesuits are Franciscan wannabes. You
know, that they kind of, for whatever, don’t like to wear brown robes or something.
Both of these wonderful charisms have a deep sense of incarnation. And by that,
we mean that materiality is not mere matter. There’s a sacredness. There’s a
godliness at the heart of matter itself. For Francis, it was the goodness of things,
you know, this incredible beauty of trees and leaves.
And Teilhard spoke about an ineffable, a hiddenness at the heart of matter itself.
Matter really mattered for him. You know, it wasn’t just stuff that we build or use.
It was the place to find God. And so he brings these things together. His faith in
Christ and then his scientific knowledge. And he begins to try to construct a way of
understanding how do these things work together. And I think one of the things
that really drove Teilhard and drives his vision is evolution. It’s not just a random
event or survival of the species or just natural adaptation or selection of genes. You
know, he wasn’t Darwinian. He was very much influenced by Henri Bergson. And
Bergson had this idea that there’s a vital impulse in nature. There’s something that’s
hidden. It’s ineffable. But there’s something driving nature. Now, quantum physics
today might have some explanation there.
But for Teilhard, he follows that idea of an Elan-Bital. There’s a vital impulse in
nature. And he then begins to associate that with what he called the Omega
Principle. A principle of centriety. A principle that holds the whole together
without being reduced to any fragment, without being destroyed by any of the
forces of nature. It’s the force that keeps on guiding nature. And of course, he
begins to associate that principle of Omega with God. So he speaks about God
Omega in evolution. And then he begins to really try to understand, well, evolution
itself. There’s a becomingness. There seems to be a universe that’s not finished. It’s
unfinished. There’s a dynamism in nature here. It’s moving towards something.
And so he began to put these things together with some of the Pauline ratings that
the whole creation is groaning. The Spirit groans the creation as it yearns for that
new birth. We make up in our bodies what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ. So
he has this idea that we’re growing into something. And therefore, he puts together
evolution and Christianity. And says several things.
One, he says, Christianity is a religion of evolution. In other words, it’s bringing
together divinity and materiality or sarks. And it’s uniting these things. And it’s
giving rise to something new, new life. We might call that the risen Christ. But
something new is taking place. And it is the one religion that posits that divinity is
fully immersed in materiality. We’re not Gnostics. We’re not docetic. God just
doesn’t appear in matter. We either claim that God is really mattered or not. You
can have sort of a little bit of this and a little bit of that. I think we still grapple with
this, even doctrinally. We still have Calcitan, which was, in my view, kind of the
political, sort of like Democrat, Republican thing, like the Antiochians and the
Alexandrians. Let’s get them together and they stop fighting with one another. And
so we have kind of a political formula. But I don’t think we’ve ever really fully
embraced incarnation as the full kenosis of divine love.
But this is what God is. And Teilhard gets that in his own way. And therefore, he
speaks about something he said is taking place in evolution. And that’s the
incredible thing here. And of course, no scientist is going to agree with that.
They’re like, no, dude, there’s nothing taking place. This is just science. Just
physical laws happening. But this is where actually technology will, I think, play a
role. There’s something taking place here. And our question is, what is it? We
haven’t always been human Homo sapiens. There have been a number of species
before us, right? Different hominid and hominid type of species. And we’re not
going to be always Homo sapiens in the future, around the cusp of being something
new. So newness is the name of the game for Teilhard. And basically, it’s novelty,
creativity, and future.
Those are the three pillars that he builds on. He was kind of forced out of his native
country. And he spent decades in China and Africa. At the end of his life, I think
he suffered quite a bit, actually. Not just physically. He did have a heart condition.
But I think he suffered mentally, sort of a dark night of the soul. Not being
understood, not being accepted, and then rejected by his own Jesuit confreres. So
he kind of knew his end was coming, about 1950, asked to return to France, and
the Jesuits declined his application to return to his native France, and he was sent
to a community, the Jesuit community, in New York City, on 83rd Street. He was
there just a few years, working at the Renegrin Foundation. And he suffered a
massive heart attack, I think, and died.
Very, very simply, you know, in Hastings on the Hudson, in what is now today the
Culinary Institute of America, very simple grave, just a few rocks on it. I don’t
know if he ever thought that what he did would ever see the light of day, quite
honestly. Because he was not allowed to publish a single thing of his spiritual
writings or theological musings during his lifetime. The lesson here, if you want
something to live on, give it to your best friend, who’s a woman.
I just want to throw that in there. Because his secretary, she must have known that
there was something special here. And she preserved his writings and made sure
that they were circulated among the friends of Teilhard, and then they were copied,
etc. I don’t know if he died thinking that anything he ever thought would ever come
to any kind of fruition. And so here we are, almost 70 years later. Yeah, he died in
1955, so 68 years later.
Brandon: Teilhard’s notion of this evolutionary dynamism, this newness, this
emergence, leads us to AI. And I’m wondering if you could tell us the story of how
this book came to be. What made you want to dig into AI?
Sister Ilia Delio: Well, I have been fascinated, actually, by computer technology
since my initial readings of Teilhard on the future of man and his notion of the new
sphere and the ultra-human. These are terms that he coined to speak of what could
possibly emerge with what he called like minds that are linked together
electronically. I have been teaching a course on technology and the human person
on the undergraduate level at Villanova University. My first book was actually, my
first course was actually at Georgetown on Facebook and Jesus, you know, or what
would Jesus tweet type thing. It has morphed into technology and human person.
And then a few years ago, I did a doctoral seminar with one of my colleagues at
Villanova, George Teener, on transhumanism, posthumanism, and the new
materialisms. So I became involved in the philosophy of artificial intelligence and
then the philosophy of mind and really what’s been going on since. Quite honestly,
this is not all that new.
Brandon: So in your book, Reenchanting the Earth, Why AI Needs Religion, you
remind us of Carl Jasper’s work and his insight that religion developed in the axial
period. I wonder if you can describe this period for those of us who maybe don’t
know about this history, or maybe it’s been a long time since our undergraduate
class when we encountered this topic. And then the second part, you describe our
own age as a second axial period. So maybe you can build the bridge and help us
understand what might be happening now based on your sense of what was
happening back then in the axial period.
Sister Ilia Delio: Yeah, the axial period is the term that Carl Jasper’s coined around
1949. You know, not everyone accepts that because I don’t want to box in history
like this is exactly it, but it’s a heuristic, right? To kind of understand these broad
movements that took place. And I think simply to find the axial period is that
period in all major parts of the world where there was sort of a breakthrough in
consciousness and a recognition of the human person as person. That is, as one
who is endowed with freedom and a sense of transcendence, etc.
One way to appreciate the axial period is to understand pre-axial period. So by
axial, I take that primarily to refer to levels of consciousness. So pre-axial
consciousness or the pre-axial period was having a sense of or an awareness of
spiritual unity in nature, human community, you know, what we call today
indigenous spiritualities or primal spiritualities, which are very beautiful in their
own way. Primal in the sense, not that there’s something old about them, it’s an
awareness. What does it mean to belong to the whole? Maybe that’s just one way to
put it. And for pre-axial spiritualities, it’s this sense of spiritual unity. That which
runs through the course of the trees is the blood that runs through my vein is the
spirit that runs through the sky.
Axial period actually emerges, I think, with the discovery of moving from a flat
earth cosmology to a 3D cosmology, you know, as the Greeks began to observe it.
And that kind of length with height and depth, you know, that belong to the
Ptolemaic cosmos, eventually described by Ptolema, really gave a sense of
awareness of distinction, you know, of the human person. And now the human
person now was related to creation, but also could conceive of oneself as distinct,
one who was not finding an identity in nature, but related to nature. So we have the
rise of the world religions during this period. So including the ancient traditions of
Jainism and Hinduism, and then Judaism, Christianity, Islam. What’s interesting is
the person as person emerges, and then religiously, it’s the sense of divine
transcendence, that there’s a divinity beyond us, there’s something beyond the
visible world. Also a sense of the monk or the solitary one. So the Plutonian, you
know, flight of the alone to the alone idea.
Then our own age, which we can mark with the discovery of relativity in 1905, you
know, that early, early 20th century with Einstein and others, and the discovery of
a Big Bang universe, really kind of began to usher in a new consciousness, which
today we can speak of a shift in consciousness from transcendence to imminence
from solitary to community, from otherworldly to ecological. So we are what we
might call a second axial consciousness. It’s a breakthrough in all parts of the
world. And this second axial consciousness has definitely been deepened or
expanded by the internet. You know, we have today what we call global
consciousness, which would have been really unheard of in 1950, a time when air
travel itself was like, wow, you know, that was like amazing.
So cell phones, all the stuff that we are now so used to and embedded with in our
daily lives, these did not exist. And now they do exist. And everything about us has
radically changed our whole new awareness. And that means not only our sense of
the world has changed, our sense of ourselves has changed the human person. And
I think this is hard to rest our heads around, but we are. Evolution, not just that
we’re in evolution, we are evolution now on the level of consciousness. Something
about us is radically changing. It’s radically shifting.
Brandon: You quote Alfred North Whitehead when he said religion will not
regain its power until it can face change in the same spirit as it does science. And
so I’m wondering if you could share what led you to source Whitehead in that way.
What sorts of shifts in transformation does religion need to undergo if it is to
support us as we move into the second axial period?
Sister Ilia Delio: Kind of a P.S. there in the axial period, I think we are quickly
approaching the third axial age. You know, a lot of our lives has lived in the
rearview mirror. So we’re just still in the first axial period. We’re quickly going
through the second axial period. I see the third axial period on the horizon with
space travel and exploration of extraterrestrial life. So I just want to put that out
there.
Alfred North Whitehead was contemporary of Teilhard, two process thinkers,
right? There’s no indication that they had any direct correspondence or anything,
but they were both grappling with the fact that science and religion are like a pair
of eyeglasses, two lenses of knowing the one world. And if you only see through
one lens, you’re going to have a distorted view of the world. You’re not going to
know the world in its full meaning, in its full depth, its full beauty. And so
Whitehead, like Teilhard, thought that religion has to be open to the same kind of
paradigm shifts that science has undergone.
And, you know, I’ve heard this argument that, oh, well, science always changes,
but religion, you know, is divinely intended and never meant to change. Well, that
quite honestly, that’s just silly, you know, just never always been this way. And
God is quite at home with change, quite honestly. And so I think both Whitehead
and Teilhard really sought to develop what we’re calling today an open theism. It’s
not the classical theistic relationship of a static God world relationship based on the
kind of philosophical idea that God is immutable, ubiquitous, omniscient, you
know, et cetera, et cetera, but that God is the dynamism of love or the dynamism of
the wholeness of life who is truly related and in deep relationship with all that God
creates.
And so what both of them realize is quite honestly, we can’t even talk about God
from conscious material life. Like without conscious life, we can’t say whether or
not God exists. You know, you can’t even form that argument. It takes a level of
consciousness to know, even to utter the word God, whether or not you accept or
reject God. So I just want to put that out there that, you know, theology does have
to by nature begin with human existence and not some kind of divine revelation
that there’s something up there that precedes us and comes before us and whatever.
However, we concoct these things.
They both realize these things that science and religion, what does it mean for
religion to shift science? We understand can shift, right? Okay, so we have the big
bang universe, not that we understand it at all, nor do we shape our daily lives by it
because we’re still living pretty much in a Newtonian universe on many levels. Our
systems, I think our political systems, our educational systems, are very Newtonian
still. And it’s why we’re not really fit for the world that’s quickly evolving. But
religion itself has developed a deep inner fear to change. There’s a deep resistance.
And phenomenology may be as far as we’re at. Wow, we can’t have an experience
of the world with us. They’re really terrific. But I think, you know, we have to go
more.
We’re going to have to grapple with the fact that our language of being is
conceptual. We can do better. That’s all we’re saying here. If we say science and
religion must work together, what we are saying is that science now informs us
about reality in a way we didn’t have this knowledge before. So it gives us new
insights. We either are going to accept those insights and then understand our
reality in a new way from a religious or theological perspective or not.
Brandon: So where does Jesus fit into this worldview? Obviously, as a Franciscan
sister, you care about Jesus. And Francis himself was such an embodied follower
of Jesus. Can you talk about how Jesus figures into all of this theologically? And
what is the impact of the incarnation in your thinking on evolution and AI?
Sister Ilia Delio: Yes. So I do have a new book coming out. It’s called The Not Yet
God on Carl Jung, Thayard Desjardins, and the Relational Whole. I think actually
Jesus figures quite large for me. I am actually a very committed Christian. And I
believe that Christianity has something really vital to offer to today’s world, but not
in a narrow sense, in the widest sense of bringing science and religion into a new
kind of wholeness. So I don’t think we’re triumphantly, you know, like, “Wait, look
at us, we’re the real deal.” Like, no, I don’t think so at all.
Okay, this is my radical, radical view. I don’t think even Jesus came to start a
church. I think actually it’s the end of institution. And it’s the beginning of a new
humanity. That’s what I see in Jesus, the beginning of the new human. And that
new human is one who pushes boundaries, who disrupts what is juridical and
legalistic, and really looks to engage the flesh of the human. The poor, the
disenfranchised, those who are marginalized, those who are left out. Today, Jesus
would be with the LGBTQ community. He would be with all those who feel
excluded by our cultures. And that’s what I think Jesus represents for us.
But as a symbol of what we are, I think what Jesus is about is what we’re supposed
to be about, you know? So it’s not just like putting it all on Jesus, like, “Yay for
Jesus.” Like, Jesus was a historical figure, you know, in whom God truly broke
through. And there was something deeply godly about his life that was recognized
as the Christ. But I think there’s something about us that we have to name as well
that is godly.
We have been too, too, too, too, too passive. And we keep throwing it all onto a
savior figure. And I think, you know, Jesus said, “Look, I got to go so the Spirit
can come, you know? The Spirit’s going to lead you to all things, to the truth. You
know, you’re not only going to do what I do, you’re going to do greater works than
me.” So, you know, according to John’s Gospel, Jesus, like, just don’t, like, follow
me. I’m going to build a big church and he could all come and pray to me. It’s more
like, “No, let me get out of the way so you can be following the way,” you know?
And honestly, I think Christianity is a great idea. I don’t think really, it’s been born
into its full meaning. We’re kind of Christian wannabes, you know?
Anyway, I do think that, and here’s what Teilhard, he wasn’t narrowly Christian.
He was, he was cosmically Christian in this way, that he saw the pattern of
evolution as moving towards something that is more personalized. And we can say
the same thing. The internet has personalized us, whether or not we can see it in
that way, because it has also tribalized us in some ways. We all have our little
tribes on Facebook and stuff like that. But we are more connected before than we
have ever been in the history of human evolution. And so there’s something going
on here, and that’s one thing that Teilhard recognized. And, you know, from a
Christian perspective, we can say, “This is the body of Christ in evolution,” but we
need values, you know? And that’s where his idea was technology is not to
supplant us, it’s to complement. We work with technology in deepening what we
are.
I mean, we can build technology for a more compassionate world, for a more just
world. We can wire ourselves for a world of shared resources. We can be
ecologically more resourceful with technology. Technology is not the problem,
we’re the problem, and it’s the values we either bring to technology or fail to bring
to technology, that we give that whoever writing that code free reign to kind of
decide our future, while we’re off in a church someplace, saying the Hail Mary or
our Father, hoping that God will bring us to heaven or something like this. And I’m
like, “I think God’s like, “What is wrong with those people down there?” You
know, they’re like, “Totally did not get it.” And so that’s it. You know, St. Teresa
said, “Christ has no body now on earth but yours.” Well, she prayed that, she didn’t
actually write it. But I think the sentiment is right.
You know, I think a lot of the Pauline literature points in this direction. Christ’s the
mystery hidden since the foundation of the world. As a Franciscan, I’m very
schotistic. I think that Christ is kind of the reason for the season, and not in the
narrow sense, but this universe has meaning and purpose in the love of God. We
have the capacity for a fullness in love. We have the capacity to become a truly
unified world. Will we do it? That it may take millions of years and a lot of better
technology to get us there. But that we’re capax day for sure. That we’re capax
infinity, yes. And that’s something actually that Silicon Valley knows without
being religious. That’s the problem.
We are too small, too narrow, and too fearful in our religious beliefs. If we really,
really believe in a God of incomprehensible love, then we have to live out from
that center. And we have to do daring things. We have to do big things. And that’s
not saying no to technology. We have to have a radical voice in technology to see
how we’re going to use this, how we’re going to be co-creative with technology for
a new future.
Brandon: And finally, can you share with us a concern and a hope? What keeps
you up at night? And what ultimately leads you to find hope amid all the turmoil
and challenge that you encounter in the world today?
Sister Ilia Delio: I do worry that because we are not fully on board with AI, and
we are so politically divided, it’s a volatile world. I am worried about the survival
of the fittest mentality, even in terms of consumerism. We saw that with the
COVID pandemic, you know, people just run and hoard things for themselves. So
we don’t have a sense of shared being. We don’t have a sense of a shared earth.
And one of my fears is a computer meltdown, actually a virus that would attack all
the computer grids. I think that would be really a wipeout for us. But I do live in
hope. I am not just a naive optimist. I guess people say, “Oh, you’re such an
optimist in the face of everything.” I have a great sense of God’s love within myself
and the sense that that love will, you know, fidelity to God’s love, fidelity to that
presence of God, allows us to see the light shining through the darkness. It allows
us to see the life butting through the charred trees. Where there’s God, there’s
future, you know, and where there’s God, there’s hope.
And we’re here after 13.8 billion years of cosmic life, cataclysmic life, violent life
in the cosmos, violent life here on earth, I mean, five major extinctions. We will
undergo some kind of extinction. I’m pretty sure that at some point in the future,
it’s just that is how life evolves, by the way. It’s not that we’re going to live forever.
We have to shift our mindsets, you know. It’s not just like God’s going to come and
whisk us away on some chariot. It’s that we’re part of something that’s so much
more than we can conceive or imagine. We’re part of a great cosmic drama, a
divine drama, a divine drama that’s taking place in this huge immense process of
life itself. And we have to let go of trying to control this life and engage in this
drama as an adventure. And that means to use our gifts, to take chances, to fall
down, to get up again, to think in new ways, think out of the box, you know, try
new things, try different things, because that’s how life actually evolves.
Life is a constant experiment on the biological level. It’s always seeking out new,
“Let’s try this.” It’s always playful, you know, play is a big thing. And we have to
learn to play again. We need to stop trying to control everything. It’s one of our
downfalls as homo sapiens. We’re always trying to control and manipulate. It’s
like, no, learn to be like a butterfly, like a tree leaf, you know, just kind of go with
the flow. And play jump rope and go play hopscotch someplace and just try
leaping over a large fence. You know, do the unthinkable and stretch your mind to
what seems absolutely ludicrous, because God will probably be there.
Brandon: Sister Ilya, thank you so much for this conversation. Thank you, too, for
all the work that you do for the world. You’re such a gift to the Church and to our
community. So thank you for everything that you’re doing, and we’re so looking
forward to the next book.
Sister Ilia Delio: Thank you, Brandon. Thanks. It was great to be with you.
Thank you for listening to The Leader’s Way at Yale podcast. Join us in our work
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