Ever Ancient, Ever New
Rediscovering God in an Unfolding Universe, by Robert Nicastro, PhD
Note: This piece originally appeared in the Winter 2025 Issue of our Erie Benedictine’s Mount Magazine
The God many of us learned about in childhood, a distant deity dwelling somewhere “up there,” occasionally intervening in human affairs from beyond the clouds, is dying. Perhaps this is part of our lament today. We feel unmoored, sensing that the old certainties no longer speak to what we experience in our depths or witness in the vast, evolving cosmos science reveals. Yet this death might be the very doorway to hope, for what is dying is not God, but a limited image that could no longer contain the mystery.
Alfred North Whitehead warned that “religions commit suicide when they find their inspiration in dogmas.” We see this suicide happening slowly around us, not in the death of faith as such, but in the exodus of people who know there must be more than rigid formulas can express. These are not people abandoning the sacred; they are people whose souls have outgrown containers too small for their expanding experience of the divine. The question before us is not whether God exists, but whether we can find language adequate to the God we are actually encountering: in the depths of our own consciousness, in the intricate emergence of life through billions of years, in the mysterious ground that holds all existence. As Whitehead insisted: “Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science.” This is not a call to abandon tradition, but to allow tradition to become alive again, as dynamic as the universe. What might such a living tradition look like? What language can we use that honors both our ancient wisdom and our contemporary experience?
Where Whitehead pointed to the need for a religion open to change, Paul Tillich pressed this further with his startling claim that “God does not exist.” He did not mean there is no divine reality, but that God is not a particular thing existing alongside other things. God is not the “big guy in the sky.” Rather, God is the depth dimension of existence, the ground from which the cosmos unfolds and to which all life converges. When we speak of God as “ground,” we point toward something more intimate than any external deity could ever be: a divine presence not separate from the world but woven through its very fabric.
This theological insight finds its lived expression in Benedictine spirituality. When Benedict spoke of finding God in all things, of treating every person as Christ, of seeing the sacred in the mundane work of daily life, he was pointing toward this same truth: the divine is not elsewhere, waiting for us to escape this world, but here, now, in the depths of matter itself. The monastery is not an escape from the world but a place to learn that the world is the primary monastery, suffused with divine presence.
The Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin brought this Benedictine vision to revolutionary proportions. He recognized that God is not found in opposition to matter but through matter, emerging from “the heart of matter” and, indeed, as the very heart of matter. The divine is rising up through evolution, becoming more fully conscious in human consciousness, drawing all creation toward greater complexity, greater unity, greater love. We are not separate from this process. We are the universe becoming aware of itself, the means by which God comes to fuller self-realization.
This vision of divine immanence—God in the sinews of existence—echoes across the great mystical traditions. As Meister Eckhart proclaimed: “God’s ground is my ground and my ground is God’s ground.” The Sufi mystic Mansur al-Hallaj experienced this same truth: “I saw my God with the eye of my heart. God said, ‘Who are you?’ I said, ‘I am You.’” These voices remind us that divine intimacy transcends religious boundaries, offering a shared horizon of meaning. The great mystics across all traditions have discovered that we are entangled with the divine in such intimate mutuality that God participates in our becoming even as we participate in the divine life, neither complete without the other. This is not pantheism in the simplistic sense of “everything is God.” Rather, it is the recognition that nothing exists independent of the divine, that the sacred interpenetrates all reality as fundamentally as quantum fields undergird matter.
This vision addresses both our lament and our hope. We lament because we sense that dogmatic religion, frozen in categories forged centuries ago, cannot speak to our experience. We lament because the world seems increasingly fragmented, violent, disconnected from its dynamic and unifying center. But here is the hope: if what we lament is the death of an inadequate image, then perhaps what we are living through is an invitation into a more expansive experience of the divine. One that embraces evolution, values the Earth, honors materiality in all its forms, celebrates diversity, and recognizes the sacred in all things.
Yet this raises a concern: if God is not a person “out there,” have we lost something essential? Tillich insisted that the personal symbol of God remains vital, not because God is literally a person, but because “only a person can heal a person.” We need to experience the divine ground as personal, as loving, as beckoning us toward fuller life. This is not contradiction; it is paradox. God is both the cosmic depth sustaining all that is, the personal presence that calls each of us home, and the future drawing all matter toward greater love and wholeness.
This moment of theological renewal, this invitation to reimagine how we speak of not so much the transcendent but transcendence, is precisely what the notion of jubilee signifies. If what we lament is the death of an inadequate image, then jubilee is the freedom to discover God anew—not merely a year marked on a calendar, but a threshold moment when we are released from old bondages and invited into new freedom. This Jubilee Year calls us to freedom: freedom from images of God that diminish our capacity as bearers of the divine, freedom to embrace the God we are actually experiencing, freedom to name what we know in our depths. We live in a universe ablaze with divine presence. Matter at its core is holy. Evolution is both how God creates and how God becomes. Consciousness emerging from stardust is a miracle beyond comprehension.
The Benedictine vision, the discoveries of evolutionary science, the wisdom of mystics across traditions—all converge on this liberating truth: we do not need to flee the world to find God. We need only to wake up to the sacred depth already present in everything, including ourselves. This is not a small God but an infinite God, not a distant God but an intimate God, not a static God but a God ever ancient and ever new, drawing all creation toward the fullness of love.
AUTHOR
Robert Nicastro, Ph.D., is a theologian, teacher, and writer whose research explores the convergence of religion, science, and technology. His work specifically focuses on how emerging technologies are reshaping human identity, planetary consciousness, and the future of religious thought. He also serves as Executive Director of the Center for Christogenesis, where he advances an integrated vision of science and spirituality rooted in the thought of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
WOW - what an incredible summary of what I have discovered through reading and listening to the Christian mystics. This is so on point that I want to read more of his writing and also read more about and from Benedict. Thank you so much for sharing this piece!
Describes beautifully the way I have come to think of God. Thank you for using your gift to so plainly put it into accessible words. Grace and peace to you.