I have just returned from a week at the Jersey shore and continue to reflect on my time there. Reflection allows my analytical left brain to slow down and see life from a wider perspective. Each morning, I walked down to the water’s edge, where the retreating tide had left the sand dark, firm, and glistening like a held breath. I stood there while the spent waves slid cold over my feet and pulled back again, over and back, as if the ocean were taking my measure. To stand at the edge of the sea is to stand at the edge of yourself. The horizon dissolves the seam between water and sky, and the mind, watching, begins to lose its own bounded seams too — between matter and spirit, body and soul, the self and everything that is not the self. The boundaries we assume are fixed hide the deeper truth, that life is porous. Wholeness, not partition, is our reality. After a while I no longer felt that I was looking at the ocean. Rather, I was like a small, thinking eddy within it—one more current in a single restless membrane of salt and light that wraps the whole earth, joining continents I will never see.
A seagull stood a little way off, oddly in line with my feet, as though the two of us had been arranged by some patient hand. For a moment there was such harmony, unsummoned order and beauty, that I forgot to think at all. Water, waves, the birds of the air, the seagull and myself on the wet sand—all of it caught in one vast, breathing network of life, while the tide kept up its liturgy, the water acting as high priest, processing and returning, in and out.
While the gull looked entirely content, my mind did not know how to be. It paced the beach behind my eyes, worrying at a single question: does nature need us at all?
Everything before me was working beautifully without the least help from me. The tide did not consult me; the gull did not require my approval to be a gull. And I had the clear, humbling realization that this whole choreography would go on—ebbing, flooding, glittering—long after my death. The ocean does not mourn its swimmers.
Yet here is the honest reality. I am not a seagull. I belong to the one species that cannot simply be on the shore. We are the animals who look at the ocean and then look at our own looking, who take the wave into the mind and hand it back as a sonnet, a nocturne, a canvas smeared with the exact grey green of a swell before it breaks. We bless the ocean, and we poison it, we ride the wave, and we split the atom. We are the creature in whom nature has begun to overhear itself. Rudolf Otto called the holy mysterium tremendum et fascinans—the mystery that makes us tremble even as it draws us in. Standing there, ankle-deep in the cold ocean mud, I thought–that is what we are too, in miniature, human and divine at once. Awesome and hidden, terrified and enthralled — little gods with wet feet.
Nature is not a placid machine humming along in equilibrium. It is far stranger and more stubborn than that. Every cataclysm it endures—the fire that guts the forest, the ice that grinds the valley, the drowned coast, the asteroid winter—becomes, in time, testimony to a single scandalous fact: life refuses to be entirely snuffed out. Grass pressing through cracked asphalt; lichen colonizing bare rock; the improbable riot of a reef built on the skeletons of its own dead. Nature does not merely persist. It insists. It keeps opening a door where there was only cold wall and dead wood, spending the dying energies of the old form to underwrite some new and vibrant activity. It is as if all of life—every embodied form of it, ourselves included—were leaning forward, yearning toward something it does not yet possess. Saint Paul perceived this two thousand years ago and reached for the language of a woman in labor: the whole of creation, he wrote, is “groaning” as in the pains of childbirth (Rom 8:22). Not the groan of dying but the groan of bearing—of a world straining to deliver something still hidden in the dark of the womb. Nature rebels like a recalcitrant adolescent, obeying the second law of thermodynamics and breaking for the exits all the while, slipping entropy’s grip to chase after novel possibilities. All of nature totters a hair’s breadth above the abyss of nothingness and turns its own unraveling into the thread of something radically new.
We rarely feel this wonder about our own flesh, because we have been taught to picture the body as a kind of clockwork—gears of bone, pistons of muscle, wiring of nerve. In his luminous 2010 essay “The Unbearable Wholeness of Beings,” Steve Talbott gently dismantles that picture and shows us something far closer to the ocean. Consider a single living cell he writes. It is three-quarters water, and its chief business is not the grinding of parts but flow. Even the scaffolding we were trained to imagine as fixed—the delicate filaments of the cytoskeleton that lend the cell its shape—turns out to be nothing of the kind: a restless architecture whose proteins are in ceaseless flux, assembled and dismantled from moment to moment. The rigidity is real, but it is the rigidity of a fountain, not a statue. Form here is not the cause of the movement; it is the movement’s momentary signature.
Talbott’s most beautiful example, borrowed from his colleague Craig Holdrege, is the heart of an unborn child. Before the fetal heart has raised the walls that will one day divide its four chambers, the blood is already coursing through it in two distinct streams that spiral past each other and never mix, like two currents braiding through a single river. And precisely where those currents leave a “still-water zone” between them, the dividing wall quietly rises. The flow does not fill a chamber already built; the flow decides where the chamber will be. The moving blood draws the blueprint even as the deepening chamber bends the blood. Structure and stream call each other into being.
The body, Talbott says, is “a formed stream.” Its seemingly solid landmarks are less like monuments than like “standing waves”—shapes that hold their form only because something pours ceaselessly through them. A standing wave in a river looks fixed, yet every drop composing it is already gone downstream; the shape stays while the substance streams through. So it is with us. An undividing neuron may replace nearly all its own material a thousand times before it dies and remain, throughout, unmistakably itself. A mitochondrion, likewise, is not so much a thing as a truce among moving parts: it roams the cell toward wherever energy is needed, breaks into fragments, and fuses back into strands. Nudge the surrounding chemistry slightly toward acid and the whole population dissolves into loose beads—then, the instant the balance is restored, the beads draw back together into mitochondria, reassembling themselves as though they had never forgotten the form. And no such form stands alone. The neuron holds its shape only within the flow of the whole cell; the cell within the body; the body within the living skin of the earth. To be a stable form, it turns out, is already to be caught up in something larger — a pattern within patterns, all the way up.
Teilhard de Chardin felt the pulse of this wholeness half a century before molecular biology could measure it. For him, as his translator Sara Appleton-Weber puts it, there are finally no isolated things anywhere in the world—only elements of a single whole in process, threads of one weave. And this yields two ways of using the eyes. Those who truly see catch the whole shimmering in the part; those who do not see never get past the multiple, and so live in a world that has come apart in their hands—fragmented, disconnected, and at last absurd.
This is why Teilhard’s great imperative was not a moral rule but an act of attention. To be more is to be more united, he said, and union deepens only where seeing deepens with it, where consciousness keeps pace with the growing complexity of things. His whole vast cosmology contracts to two words: See or perish. Not “behave or perish.” To see rightly is already to begin to love, to prioritize unitive relationships over all else; to refuse to see is to consent, slowly, to a fragmented world. Without the vision that binds mind to heart and spirit to matter, the human being drifts as “an erratic object in a disconnected world”—and I would only add that such a creature hovers always between life and extinction and cannot tell which way it is falling. The human phenomenon, as Teilhard understood it, is not one story among many unfolding on the earth, but a strand of the earth’s own becoming—its past, present, and future bound up with the very formation and transformation of the planet itself.
If life is irresistibly reaching toward wholeness, then the fullness we long for cannot be sitting quietly behind us or beneath us. Here Teilhard breaks with the oldest instinct of Western metaphysics. We have always looked for the real in what underlies and precedes—a ground of being that holds the world up from below, a foundation already laid. Teilhard turns the picture on its end: the deepest reality is not a floor beneath us but a horizon ahead of us, not a ground laid down in eternity but a lure that calls from up ahead—the light that draws the shoot up out of the dark, not the push from behind but the pull from in front.
Teilhard dared to reverse the old metaphysics: being is not fully itself at the beginning but at the end which led him to say, the universe “is organically resting on the future as its sole support.” Imagine that—a cosmos held up not from below but from ahead, leaning on tomorrow the way a runner leans into a stride that has not yet landed. And what is that future, finally, if not the unconditional, the full flowering of a freedom we can taste but not yet hold? Life is one long liberation into more life—unless we panic, and try to freeze it, to reduce the living reach of things to mechanism and formula and master a destiny whose whole glory is that it cannot be mastered.
Paul Tillich heard the same promise sounding in the depths of nature. Nature, at its root, he thought, is not brute fact but promise, and our peculiar ache, the estrangement we feel even in our own skin, is the ache of beings who are not yet what they truly are. God, in this vision, is not a fact behind us but the name of ultimate being up ahead, the fulfillment toward which the whole world strains. And here is the vertiginous part: we are not spectators of that fulfillment. We are ingredients in it. We are part of what the future becomes, because we are part of God’s own becoming.
To exist, then, is not merely to keep the lamp of the present lit; it is to help create a cosmos—a whole—more precisely a cosmotheandric whole, in which world and God and the human are braided into one indivisible current. Teilhard put it this way: “We are now beginning to see that creation can have only one object: a universe; that creation can be effected only by an evolutive process (of personalizing synthesis); and that it can come into action only once, when absolute multiple is reduced, nothing is left to be united either in God or outside God” (Christianity and Evolution, 179). Sin, seen from this perspective, is not first the breaking of a rule. It is the refusal to be more. It is the flinch backward from the future—the choice, made a thousand quiet times a day, for the frozen and the finished, over the living and the not-yet.
From inside this vision of a world still being born, Teilhard glimpsed something almost no one in his generation could: that technology might be the next chapter of evolution rather than its betrayal. Evolution, he saw, had not stopped when it produced us; it had changed levels. For four billion years, life had complexified outward, toward more organs, more limbs, more kinds of new forms, etching the tree of life with its endless branching. But with the arrival of thought, the growing edge turned inward and upward, from body to mind. And now, he argued, the same convergent pressure that once folded molecules into cells, and cells into creatures, is folding mind into mind. Every cable strung across an ocean floor, every signal leaping between satellites, is drawing the scattered filaments of human consciousness into a single tissue—weaving us, whether we consent or not, toward the next level of evolutionary life he called the ultrahuman.
We have reached a hinge in the story, Teilhard thought. The long expanding age—the age of diversity, of spreading out and branching apart—is closing, and a contracting age of unification has begun, the great in-gathering he named “planetization.” Here his account bends away from Darwin’s. In this new stage of evolution, our fate will not be settled simply by the survival of the fittest, by tooth and claw and the grinding of the strong over the weak. It will depend increasingly on something blind natural selection could never accomplish by itself: our capacity to converge, to unify without annihilating, to become one without ceasing to be many. Until the emergence of reflective consciousness, natural selection largely steered the making of forms; with the human, evolution becomes capable of taking itself in hand through invention, choice, and conscious association. And this is precisely the danger and the promise together: if the life of mind loses its rootedness in the life of the body, if noogenesis cuts its cord to biogenesis, then evolution loses its direction and the human becomes an erratic object in a disjointed world. That danger now looms before us precisely because we have lost sight of the larger evolutionary story of which we are a part.
He gave a name to this emerging tissue of thought: the noosphere, a sphere of shared consciousness sheathing the planet, a living membrane of mind that gathers up and passes on everything precious and active and unfinished in all the ages of evolution behind it. It is not evolution’s tombstone but its flowering, an organic whole, more than the sum of its wired and waking parts, straining toward a still higher union.
And Teilhard, who was not naïve to the dark side of evolution, saw the shadow the moment he saw the light. In The Future of Man, he wrote of an explosive surge of technology and research, a raw new mastery of cosmic energy, a rapid climb in what he called the “psychic temperature” of the species—the fever-heat of a true ultra-human coming to birth. But heat is not the same as warmth. A higher consciousness diffused through the ultra-technified, ultra-socialized, ultra-cerebralized layers of humanity will need something the wires cannot supply: a Center of Reflection, a focal point of personal love strong enough to bind the whole without crushing it—a love fiercer than every private egotism and appetite. Evolution cannot proceed outward unless it is deepening within. Without such a center of interiority, Teilhard asked, how could the noosphere ever hold its shape? A world converging on the impersonal offers no warmth to draw the heart and no promise of permanence to quiet its fear; into that cold, the old egotism comes roaring back and rebels. Connection is not communion. A billion linked screens can as easily incubate a billion lonely people as gather them into a single love.
Ronald Cole-Turner presses exactly on this point. Our technologies of the self, he observes, tend to be self-asserting rather than self-transforming: they swell the ego instead of surrendering it to something larger. The seduction of technology, he writes, is “the illusion of a managed grace”—the fantasy that the self can be fixed up and upgraded without ever being changed, that we can be saved while remaining, blessedly, in charge. Technology is not out of control because it is a runaway power, he writes; it is out of control because we cannot govern the one thing that is supposed to govern it—namely ourselves. Which means the deepest problem of our technological age is not the machine and not the code. The problem is the human, and more precisely the atrophy in us of that inner, religious depth without which evolution has neither compass nor heart.
I want to be careful here, because I know how the next thought can be heard. When I say that the loudest cries of our moment—halt the machines, freeze the research, throw a wall around the dignity of the human person—strike me as misguided, I do not say it lightly, and I do not say it coldly. The fear underneath those cries is not foolish. It is the fear of parents watching a power they cannot fathom reach toward their children; the fear of workers whose jobs are dissolving beneath them; the fear, older than any of us, of making a thing we cannot unmake. That fear is holy, and it should be honored. My quarrel is not with the fear but with the cure.
For the cure being reached for is almost always the same: control. Hold the line, freeze the frame, protect the human person as though the human person were a finished artifact to be kept under glass. Religious institutions, my own tradition among them, feel this instinct most keenly and most nobly—they are trying to guard something genuinely sacred. But you can only guard a thing that is done being made. And that, I have come to believe, is the quiet error at the root of it: the assumption that the human is complete. Inside a static metaphysics, where being is a possession to be defended, “safeguarding” is the highest wisdom offered. Inside a metaphysics of the future, where being is a gift still being given, the same reflex becomes a slow suffocation—an effort to control what cannot be controlled precisely because it is not yet finished.
The historian Margaret MacMillan has warned, in a recent essay, that a new world order is arriving and we are not ready for it—that we are stumbling into the future blindfolded and unbound from one another. I fear she is right, and I fear the consequence: a nature we have refused to see will find its own way to answer us. No new set of moral rules, however wise, will save a species that has forgotten how to look.
Teilhard hands us no blueprint—he was a prophet, not an engineer—but he traced, with uncanny clarity, the shape of a survivable future. It rests on what he perceived as a law written everywhere in nature: the law of recurrence, old patterns return but each time on a higher rung, complexity climbing complexity, like a vine climbing its own trellis. We have, so far, mostly said no to that ascent—no to nature, and no to the unconditional openness at the heart of things that the religions have called God. And the wages of that refusal is death. Here is where the danger lies: it will not be the machine that kills us, for the machine is itself a child of nature. If we die out, we will have done it to ourselves—an unforced, unnecessary, self-inflicted extinction, the only suicide in which the whole species holds the single blade.
But there is another road, and the ultrahuman is its name. It calls us not backward into a smaller, better-defended self, but forward through the ego and on to a new level of life, what Teilhard called the hyperpersonal. This is the subtlety both the fearful and the utopian miss or ignore. We are not asked to dissolve, to melt into some grey collective mass and lose our faces in the crowd. We are asked to open, to let the hard rind of the isolated self split like a seed casing, so that something larger can grow up through it, a new communal self. Minds laced into other minds, hearts connected to other hearts, so that something larger can grow up through this complexified collective self. I am not arguing against the ethics of AI, or against the laws and guardrails we plainly and urgently need; I am saying that they are scaffolding, not building. They can keep the thing from collapsing but they cannot see the way forward or envision what we may become. Too many of us stand before this future clenched with dread; too few can see in it the raw material of a wider love.
Philip Hefner once wrote that technology is, in the end, either utterly pointless or an expression of the self-transcending reality we name God—there is no comfortable middle. Teilhard would not have hesitated for a moment. The whole immense drama of evolution, for him, had always been one thing under many masks—Christogenesis—the slow birth of divine love into the flesh of the world. The future of the universe and the love-energy that drives it are not two things but one. Through convergence and complexity, through the very in-gathering of mind toward mind, God—who is the future of all living things—is being born from the inside out. And a birth like that asks something of its midwives. It asks for a wholly different way of meeting reality: not the grip of the hand that seizes, but the openness of the palm that receives.
Perhaps this is what salvation has meant all along. Not, as Jay McDaniel writes, an escape from the world, but a liberation from our compulsion to shrink the world down to “what can be grasped, explained, and controlled” (https://www.openhorizons.org/heideggers-critique-of-metaphysics-richard-wiltshire.html). A relearning of an almost-forgotten art: how to let beings simply be—to meet the real not as an object pinned beneath the knowing eye, but as a presence that can open of itself and show us more than we came to take. And it asks, too, the hardest surrender of all, to let ourselves be seized by the future—the unknown future, the unconditional future, the future that arrives as surprise and refuses to be booked in advance.
I began this reflection with my feet in the ocean; however, I want to end it on the boardwalk, where the salt air still reaches but the grandeur of the ocean does not. There, on a row of weathered wooden benches, a small community of homeless men and women had made their common home. They slept propped against one another for warmth, a tangle of dirty tee shirts and shoulders, each one both leaning and leaned upon, holding the others upright, the way tired swimmers tread water together. A thought moved through me, unbidden and ashamed of itself—that the ocean was right there and a person could wade out into it, drown one’s sorrows and not come back. But that thought had nothing to do with what was in front of me. What was in front of me was not despair. It was people at rest in one another’s keeping—faces slack and unguarded, hands loosely holding sleeves, an improbable peace among the discarded. And it struck me that this, too—perhaps this most of all—is what cruciform love looks like once everything decorative has fallen away: two bodies bent toward each other into the rough shape of a cross, selves spending themselves to keep each other from falling. They had almost nothing, yet they shared the bench, leaning their whole weight, without knowing the words for it, on the future—still believing, still somehow hoping, in the old childbirth promise that life will find a way to journey on. They were, all of them, resting on tomorrow as their only support.
And so, it turns out, is everything else. Creation is not finished; it is still being born, and it leans on a future that has not yet arrived. The sand leans there, and the ocean, and the gulls, and you, and I, all of us wet-footed and groaning, reaching toward a light we cannot yet name. Whether we reach with open hands or clenched fists is the one question no machine can answer for us. That reaching is ours to do—or to refuse. And the moment is now. See or perish.
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