Not Franciscan Sister Ilia Delio. She says "The Franciscan way is the way of the concrete, seeing the love of God in the leper, among the flowers and birds, in the moon. Francis taught us a consciousness of God in the concrete."
For this tiny, dynamic religious woman, God speaks God's love in everything created, even in small and fearsome creatures like jellyfish or snakes. "In their natural habitat they have a beauty and a goodness. I call them 'little words of God.'"
Sr. Ilia's great gift is seeing the connection between science and faith. Before she sensed a vocation to religious life, she earned undergraduate and master's degrees in biology, followed by a doctorate in pharmacology, and a specialization in spinal cord physiology. A gifted researcher, she was offered a post-doctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine to study the pathology of Lou Gehrig's disease.
Then just months before she was to begin her new post. she read Thomas Merton's spiritual masterpiece "The Seven Storey Mountain." Suddenly a latent desire for a contemplative life was rekindled in her. In 1984 she entered the austere, cloistered life of the Carmelite Order. Here she believes that she really learned how to pray. And the Carmelites gave her her name: "Ilia" is the Greek feminine translation of Elijah, the prophet.
But cloistered life was not a good "fit" for her spiritual identity. After four years, she joined the Franciscans. They sent her to pursue graduate studies in religion at Fordham University in New York. At Fordham she discovered the works of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit paleontologist whose mystical writings on Christianity and the cosmos have inspired generations of Catholic theologians. As Sr. Ilia explains
"Science has opened up for us the cosmos in a new way. Now we know that the cosmos is much older than we could have ever imagined - 13.7 billion years old.... Science also reveals that the cosmos is dynamic. So if God is the creator of this cosmos, we're talking about a very dynamic God, not a static, boring God. This is a God who is engaged and relational, a God of dynamic love....
"The whole cosmos, from the Big Bang on, is that Word of God being spoken in the vast spaces of the universe. The whole universe is made for Christ. The whole thing is about love, from 14 billion years ago, to the emergence of the human person, to the incarnation in Jesus Christ. It's love being stressed all along, divine love all through cosmic history.
"Big Bang One is the cosmos; Big Bang Two is God exploding now in human history and giving an explicit direction to the whole course of human evolution in Jesus Christ.
"De Chardin believed that the whole of creation was progressing toward fulfillment in Christ. The goal of the universe, which he called the Omega Point, was full consciousness with God. He believed that love energy was at the heart of the Big Bang. As love emerges in evolution, there is a rise in consciousness."
Sr. Ilia says that if we believe that Jesus the Christ is the long-awaited fullness of God, then "Christ is the one who draws together, who unifies the new creation." And "what happened to Jesus must happen to us as well....Heaven takes place on earth when we begin to live in God's love in a new way, recognizing relationships, both to creation and to other human beings."
Which is where those snakes and jellyfish come in: recognizing our relationship in Christ the Unifier to all of creation. "Francis of Assisi was very focused on the humility of God, who is hidden in everyday, ordinary reality. What do you see when you see another person? When you see a rabbit? A tree? A sand dune? Do you see only sand? Or do you see something more? We tend to treat the earth sort of like a backdrop for our lives.... Everything bears the infinite love of God, each in its own way, which means that there's nothing earthly that doesn't have some divine dignity to it.
"The medieval Franciscan theologian St. Bonaventure said the whole world is exemplary of God because everything bears a relationship to God. God created the quark and the star, the bacteria, the snake. Everything reflects God in some way.
"Because every created thing has a relationship to God, I can't misuse, abuse, or control it. Cosmic christology calls us to be in relationship with created things as a sister or brother. We are all part of the one cosmic family."
Pope Francis took the name "Francis" in honor of St. Francis of Assisi, who deeply reverenced all creation as being created in and through Christ. Francis called every living creature a brother or a sister. Pope Francis asks the question: How do we reverence other people? How do we reverence creatures, those "little words of God"? How do we reverence the earth itself? Each of us is a unique creation of God, loved in a unique and personal way by God, so we must answer this question for ourselves, looking at the concrete reality of our own lives.
How do we grow in our relationship with all living things? Sr. Ilia would say that we must grow in prayer. "I don't just mean saying prayers, such as the Our Father or Hail Mary. I mean really praying to know yourself first of all. In our very busy world we need to take time to be with God. People say that they're not sure how to pray, but prayer is really just talking that leads to deep dialogue. Do you talk to yourself? That's part of prayer. Who are we talking to when we talk to ourselves? It's God, the source of life within us....
"The next step is looking at the life of Jesus, at his healing, mercy, and forgiveness. The humanity of Jesus is our humanity. What he did in his life is what we're capable of doing as well. We're capable of being compassionate, of being merciful, of forgiving others."
Sometimes it's hard to be compassionate to creatures. I still tend to kill ant scouts, which, now that Spring is here, are invading my house to nose around and leave a trail for the other little guys to follow them inside.
But when I take a walk, I can watch where I step so I don't kill an unwary bug. I can gently lift earthworms struggling on the sidewalk back into the warm earth. I can recognize the loving Face of God in everything from octopi to orcas. I can avoid the cringe of disgust at some creature - or man or woman. If I laugh, it can be be WITH that funny creature, not from an elevated position of superiority. Who knows who - or what - can be laughing at me?
Sr. Ilia, scientist and theologian, helps the 21st century re-discover God as the Creator of the cosmos through Big Bang 1 and Jesus Christ, whom she calls "Big Bang II" - in a fresh new approachable way. Science and faith should never be mutually exclusive. If God is Truth, then all truths need to be compatible, reflecting various aspects of concrete reality. God calls each of us to discover more of His truth every day, through approaching and reverencing all of God's created life, human beings and creatures, and celebrating them in their originality and delightfulness as Big or Little Words of God.