MATTER MATTERS This past week I had the privilege of having lunch with and listening to Philip Newell, one of the foremost scholars and teachers of Celtic Spirituality. To be honest, I know very little about the subject and have never been all that interested in it. My spiritual life was formed around Jesuit spirituality because Jesuit priests were my spiritual directors in seminary. The fact that the seminary had German roots only enforced that disciplined life the Jesuits taught and I imbibed. My classmates used to kid me about how organized I was, meaning, I suspect, that what I was taught took, perhaps more than it should. Yet, as I listened to Philip speak about Celtic Spirituality, the fact that at the heart of it is the belief that matter matters, I came to realize that I must have been a closet Celtic all along. In his talk Philip spoke about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a radical Jesuit theologian and scholar whom I read while in seminary, whose writing were somewhat obtuse, but who, I now realize, influenced my spiritual directors who influenced me. Teilhard’s basic theology was that God is at the heart of all matter. Matter matters because God is at the heart of all matter. All of creation is of God. God is present in all matter. God is present in each one of us because God created each one of us. This is not pantheism as some might claim, meaning that everything is God/god. In a way it is what some scholars are calling panentheism, God present in everything. I think that is what this combination of Celtic-Teilhardian Sprituality is all about. It is a way of seeing how sacred everything and everyone is because everything and everyone is of God, is godly. We know that, do we not? It is basic Christianity. Newell’s message is that we have lost that understanding of the importance of matter. We have not gotten to the point where nothing matters. That’s nihilism. But we have lost a respect for and the sense of the sacredness of all matter, including ourselves. For when we do things that destroy our own bodies, when we allow the wasting and misuse of the world’s resources, when we do not use our own gifts and talents as we should, we are approaching nihilism. The antidote is of what Newell and Teilhard speak: living a life in which we see God at the heart of all matter, of everything, and that everything and everyone matters. Nothing and no one is unimportant. My mother tells about her mother, my grandmother whom I never knew, who, after every meal would gather the crumbs from the table in her hands and give thanks for them. Even the crumbs mattered because they were of God. My grandmother taught my mother and my mother taught me. My spiritual directors, I now realize, reinforced that childhood lesson about the sacredness of all matter, of everything. I wish I could say I am always mindful of that lesson. I wish I could say that I do not waste, that I respect all of creation and treat it all with respect and reverence, that I see God in me and all around me; but I cannot because I do not, not always. What I can do is remember what my teachers taught me and then make every effort to revitalize in my own life their message that all matter matters because God is at the heart of it all, of us all. WJP